Russia is first to test the new president

WASHINGTON — If the new administration is thinking about relations with Russia, as it should be, a rare personal story of an American scholar’s recent talk with the Russian president offers some substantive insights.

Andrew Kuchins told a small group of us at the Center for Strategic and International Studies fall meeting about how President Dmitry Medvedev described his phone conversation with President Bush last summer during the nasty little war between Georgia and its former imperial power, Moscow.

Medvedev told the small group of scholars in the Valdai Discussion Club that Bush had asked him, “You are a young government — what do you need this war for?” And Medvedev told him, “George, you would have done the same thing, only more brutally. ... And, remember, if you continue your support of the Georgian regime, you do so at our own risk.”

Kuchins, a young Eurasian specialist at CSIS, then used this unusual opportunity of hearing what Russians really think to catapult to his deep concerns about American/Russian relations and Russian intentions today. “For years since the Cold War,” he said, “I have believed that the chance of war with Russia was close to zero. Today, that probability seems, while obviously difficult to quantify, between 2 and 3 percent — and rising. I never saw (Russian and American) narratives about the world so diametrically opposed.”

Then he recalled how President Medvedev also told them at the meeting, with unmistakable meaning, “We will not tolerate any more humiliation — and we are not joking!”

Now, I have covered the Soviet Union, and later the Russian Federation, regularly since 1967, and I can say that that one word, humiliation, plus the fear of it, are largely behind virtually all Russian actions and statements.

Searching for their soul

Gen. Brent Scowcroft, respected Russian specialist and co-author of the new book, “America and the World, Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy,” told us at the same CSIS meeting: “The Russians are still searching for their soul. Are they really Europeans, who didn’t enjoy the Enlightenment, or are they Asians? ... We’ve never had a strategy for dealing with the Russians after the Cold War ... (W)e left the impression that it didn’t matter.”

So, where are we now? Well, when Vice President-elect Joe Biden warned earlier this fall that the world would test the new president, the first to step up to the plate was Moscow. Within mere days of the election, that same Russian president had thrown out the first ball: With bristling words, he warned he would co-opt the Bush administration’s plan to put missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic by saying that Moscow would respond by placing short-range missiles on Russia’s Western border in Kaliningrad. These were all “forced measures,” he said, in place of the “positive cooperation that Russia wanted to combat common threats.”

Was this a “new Cold War” in the making, as many analysts have warned?

“There is no new Cold War,” Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-author of the book, said at that same CSIS meeting. But if there is no Cold War, there is surely a cooling-off period that will challenge the new president.

Until the present collapse of world economies, growth in Russia had been an impressive 6 percent. Per capita annual income has grown to between $12,000 and $14,000, with goals, by 2020, of per capita incomes of $30,000, close to America’s, and of Russia’s becoming the fifth largest economy in the world. Former President Vladimir Putin even outlined a group of plans called “The Concept 2007,” which would put his country in the lead in technological innovation and global energy infrastructure, as well as being a major international financial center.

Such changes rule out the old Russia of tanks crossing the borders of Western Europe while NATO stands ready to strike. Instead, Russia’s threats are subtle, modern, 21st-century, and NATO is increasingly confused by them. The attack on Georgia was less a classic invasion than a declaration that Russia was not giving up all of its former empire. New “weapons,” such as a kind of “passport stuffing” (modern ballot stuffing?), in which Moscow gives Russian passports to people in the Crimean parts of Ukraine and in pro-Russian parts of Georgia, are means of gradually bringing these regions back to Mother Russia politically without violence.

And so we circle ‘round and arrive back at the old-old problem, the Russian fear of humiliation, the need for pride, and the need for Mother Russia to be seen as a responsible and respected player on the world stage.

Sorrowful history

But, unfortunately, we missed the opening. After the Soviet Union collapsed — implicitly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and formally with the dissolution of the Soviet state in 1991 — the Clinton administration ignored the great opportunity to ease the Russians out of their sorrowful history. Very little was done, except to send thousands of American experts to tell the Russians what to do (exactly the wrong way to handle someone humiliated) and then leave. Then came real, palpable threats from the U.S., like the anti-missile system in Eastern Europe which, though ostensibly against Iran, is effectively useless against just about anybody and only serves to needlessly enrage the Russians.

Kuchins calls this “empathy deficit disorder,” i.e., not understanding the essential forces that move a historic nation like Russia. Understanding them does not mean either forgiving or condoning them, as Bush’s arrogant neocons always thought; it simply means knowing how to successfully manipulate them instead of driving them to new wars against us.

Universal Press Syndicate