US/Russian relations post 9/11 (fwd)

Some enlightening commentary by a US Sovietologist which sheds some light
on the course adopted by many large states in the erstwhile semiperiphery
in the none-too-distant past (though it seems to me that a parallel with
the World War One alliance of states such as Italy, Japan and Russia
with Britain and France is more to the point than the WWII analogy that
the author draws).

--

Monday, Oct. 15, 2001. Page 10 

A Turning Point in U.S.-Russian Relations?

By Peter Rutland  

Russians were horrified by the events of Sept. 11, a reaction that was
reflected in President Vladimir Putin's initial emotional response on the
day of the attack -- "Americans, we are with you."

As a people all too familiar with the trauma of foreign invasion, Russians
immediately grasped the symbolic and substantive impact of the attack on
"unbombed America." The United States had sat safely behind its ocean
defenses for two centuries, and had not seen foreign military action on its
homeland since 1812. That sense of invulnerability was rudely punctured on
Sept. 11. 

Putin's unprecedented cooperation in U.S. efforts to crack down on Islamic
terrorism may well be predicated on the assumption that the United States is
fundamentally weakened by the events of Sept. 11, and thus willing to forge
a new partnership with Russia on equal terms. Many Russians now see the
ruins of the World Trade Center as symbolizing the ruins of the United
States' self-image as the world's sole superpower. This is an erroneous
assumption, and could mean that Moscow is headed for profound
disillusionment in the not-too-distant future. 

Putin's initiatives drew criticism, some of it public, from conservatives in
the Russian military establishment. In particular, his willingness to accept
a U.S. military presence in Central Asia was a startling turnaround from
Russian policies of the previous decade (if not previous century), which had
been devoted to keeping foreign powers out of the region. Putin's actions
were greeted with enthusiasm among liberals and centrists in the foreign
policy elite, who see Sept. 11 as an opening to put Russia's relations with
the West back on a sound footing, a second chance to seize the missed
opportunities of 1988-92.

The Russian establishment (both liberals and conservatives) still resents
the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev's willingness to dismantle the Soviet empire
was not rewarded by the United States. Russia was denied debt relief and was
shut out from a leading role in international security institutions, a
rejection symbolized by the enlargement of NATO. Hence, the 1990s were what
former Security Council secretary Andrei Kokoshin has called a "wasted
decade" in U.S.-Russian relations, which reached their nadir with the
bombing of Belgrade in 1999.

These views were expressed in a conference on relations between Russia and
the West that took place in Moscow last weekend, sponsored by the Ebert
Foundation and the German Marshall Center, and which was addressed by State
Duma Deputy Speaker Vladimir Lukin and Duma defense committee chairman
Alexei Arbatov. The Russian participants in the conference concurred in the
belief that Sept. 11 was a turning point in world history, one that will
oblige the United States to abandon its unilateralist ways. Alexander
Konovalov, of the Institute for Strategic Analysis, argued that the
terrorists' ability to turn civilian airliners into weapons of mass
destruction showed the United States the futility of spending $300 billion a
year on conventional and nuclear weapons, and the irrelevance of the petty
maneuverings that have characterized U.S.-Russian relations over the past
decade. 

Having accepted Sept. 11 as a watershed, there is discussion in Moscow about
the concessions that Russia can expect from the United States as the price
for the new partnership. The shopping list includes: an end to criticism of
the war in Chechnya; cancellation of Soviet-era debts; abandonment of
national missile defense; an end to NATO expansion; lifting sanctions on
Iraq; U.S. help in the event of future terrorist attacks on Russia; and
more. (Fortunately, last weekend the Russian soccer team qualified for the
World Cup finals, or one suspects that also might have been on the list.)
If Russia really believes that the September bombings will lead the United
States to abandon unilateralism, it is headed for a rude awakening. The
attack has served to steel U.S. resolve, unifying the country behind the
president and legitimizing whatever action is deemed necessary to punish the
terrorists. Previously, U.S. military action overseas was based on ambiguous
and contested norms of humanitarian intervention. Now, it is rooted in the
more substantial grounds of self-defense and revenge. Domestic political
constraints were always the main factor limiting U.S. foreign policy
unilateralism, and they have now been eased. Rather than signaling the end
of a Cold War mentality of confrontation, the September bombings are likely
to forge a new posture of suspicion towards the outside world. One indicator
of this is the fact that the U.S. defense budget is to be boosted by $60
billion per year. Many Americans believe that the reason the United States
was targeted on Sept. 11 is precisely because it is the world's sole
superpower, a position it is not yet ready to yield.

Russian optimism also rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of the
anti-terrorist coalition. The United States has put together a temporary,
tactical alliance in order to facilitate military strikes against
Afghanistan. Its life span is likely to be measured in weeks rather than
years. Concessions made in the creation of this alliance are granted only in
order to pursue the task at hand. And some of the concessions made to other
participants (such as Pakistan) work directly against Russian interests.
Searching for historical analogies provides a useful perspective on the
present situation. The past century has included a number of events after
which people felt that the world would never be the same again. The initial
reaction in the United States was to talk about Sept. 11 as a second Pearl
Harbor. Some see an affinity with the Chernobyl accident in 1986 -- an event
which indelibly shifted the public's sense of security, in that case in the
context of nuclear power. Others draw still more disturbing parallels with
terrorist actions of the past that triggered major international upheavals
-- such as the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914,
or the burning of the Reichstag in 1934. 

Perhaps a more relevant historical analogy is the anti-Hitler coalition of
1941-45. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin went into the alliance with their
eyes wide open. They had no illusions that they had common goals for the
post-war order, but they needed each others' help to defeat Hitler. They
constantly bickered over the terms of the relationship, and the alliance
broke up very quickly after the defeat of the Axis powers. 

With only one month elapsed since the September bombings, it is simply too
soon to say whether it will really represent a watershed in international
relations, or merely the brutal illumination of the existing structure of
international power. 

Peter Rutland is a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and an
associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. He
contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.





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