"Great Powers need to radiate influence and where else can they radiate influence of not in their own neighborhood?" Source: wikimedia
In a period of uncertainty, with “a new global equilibrium emerging from the post-post-Cold War”, it is imperative that the U.S. accommodate Russia’s interests wherever they don’t conflict with its own. So argued Thomas Graham, until recently Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian Affairs, addressing a meeting on U.S.-Russia relations in Washington this week.
Relations with Russia should be driven by U.S. national interests and on the critical issues of nuclear proliferation, anti-terrorism and climate change, Russia’s engagement is “indispensable”, he argued. U.S.-Russian relations are being poisoned by events in the former Soviet space, an area which is the source of Russia’s geo-political weight and essential to its sense of security.
“Great Powers need to radiate influence and where else can they radiate influence of not in their own neighborhood?” Graham asked.
The ‘90s were “an aberration, not the rule” for Russia, as far as its new ruling elite is concerned, his fellow panelist Andrei Kortunov of the Moscow-based Eurasia Foundation argued. The assumption that Russia would inevitably evolve towards a Western-style liberal market democracy is no longer current. The financial crisis confirms the Kremlin’s orthodoxy that there are “alternative development trajectories” – a discourse familiar within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - and “alternative forms of social and political mobilization” to those of free markets and open societies.
“The weakening of the traditional democratic model of development has dealt a serious blow to the ideal of political democracy, which has suffered from the economic success of authoritarian nations,” argues Sergej Karaganov of Moscow’s State University Higher School of Economics. “Indeed, at least for the time being, the one and only shining path for humanity has been replaced by multiple paths.”
The Kremlin’s message after the invasion of Georgia is “take into account our interests or we’ll draw the line in blood,” said Fiona Hill, an analyst with the National Intelligence Council. Russia’s neighbors had learned two lessons: don’t antagonize Moscow and the West is unreliable.
Russia was low on the U.S. list of foreign policy priorities because, unlike U.S.-China relations, there is no economic base, suggested Andrei Zolotov of Russia Profile and Harvard University. In the absence of compelling economic interests, the relationship remains vulnerable to ideological considerations and third country interests. Moscow was understandably mistrustful of the West because of the “broken promises” of the ‘90s and the encroachments of NATO expansion.
Yet other observers are less ready to buy the Kremlin’s please of victimhood or defer to the imperatives of realpolitik. The Hudson Institute’s David Satter dismisses Moscow’s fears of Western encirclement. “Russians understand that NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine poses no military threat but are loath to give their real reason for opposition–which is that the example of democracy in former Soviet republics could inspire demands for democracy in Russia itself,” he notes.
Nor should the new U.S. president treat the Russian leader as a friend. Just as “the emphasis on Boris Yeltsin as the symbol of ‘democracy’ led the U.S. to ignore Russia’s complete criminalization–and to become complicit in it, in the eyes of Russians,” so “President Bush’s supposed friendship with Putin freed Putin to build an authoritarian regime and pursue a genocidal war in Chechnya without fear of U.S. political pressure or moral censure.”
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