Why Treat Russia as an Enemy? William Pfaff

Why Treat Russia as an Enemy?

William Pfaff

Paris, May 26, 2009 – The failure last week of Russian talks
with the European Union on the security of energy supplies to Europe
is one more occasion for Russian-Western tension. This has sent
Europeans on a search for more reliable energy sources, but these are
proving expensive and awkward.

Last week’s talks, provocatively held in the Russian Far East, in
Kahabarovsk near the Chinese frontier (no doubt to make a point about
Russia’s vast resources and wide choice of collaborators and
customers) took place at the same time that a rather pathetic NATO
exercise was being ended in Georgia. It was meant presumably as a
“warning” to Russia, but a warning of what?

The actual warning has been to NATO, which by violating its own
rules contributed to last August’s short war between Georgia and
Russia. NATO’s rules preclude membership for nations with unsettled
territorial disputes or unresolved ethnic national claims, of which
Georgia has both.

Under pressure from Americans apparently eager to humiliate
Russia, the NATO governments were persuaded to offer Georgia eventual
membership in the alliance, which Georgia’s reckless president
Mikheil Saakashvili took as authority to attack and try to seize
autonomous South Ossetia, provoking a short and sharp war with Russia
last August, which Saakashvili lost. (Ukraine, which also has a
profound internal division on cultural and historical lines, was at
the same time also offered eventual alliance membership, which has
already made trouble, and can be expected to make more in the future.)

Russian-American as well as Russia-NATO relations have been
chilly since, unsurprisingly. An excellent and clarifying brief
article on U.S. policy towards Russia appears in the current National
Interest bi-monthly, by the magazine’s publisher, Dimitri K. Simes,
and Gary Hart, the former senator and co-chairman (with Chuck Hagel)
of the Nixon Center and Harvard Kennedy School’s recent bi-partisan
commission on relations with Russia, whose report was recently
published.

The authors place part of the blame for existing Russian-U.S.
tensions with those in the United States who resent the fact that
post-Soviet Russia did not immediately remake itself on the model of
the United States, and petition to become an American protégé.

Instead, Russia today has a highly imperfect parliamentary and
presidential system with an unreliable legal system, media
suppression, and rigged elections. Its dual leadership, by the
seemingly interchangeable President Dmitri A. Medvedev and Prime
Minister and former President Vladimir Putin, seems to exercise
arbitrary power.

The authors ask if this is reason enough for the United States
to resist cooperation with Russia on matters that are of strong
mutual interest. Their answer clearly is “no.” You have to take
Russian governments as you find them, if you need to get along with
them.

Since Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council,
possesses nuclear weapons with competitive delivery systems, plus a
very great deal of oil and natural gas, and it does or could dominate
the ex-Soviet space in Central Asia as well as the Caucasus, and
borders the Caspian and Black seas, with access to Iran, it cannot be
ignored. Yet Washington has tended to behave towards it in an
antagonistic manner while demanding cooperation (which it has often
received) on matters of concern to the United States.

The authors ask a further question: “Are we holding the
Russians to a higher standard of performance than we do other nations
with whom we deal? And if so, why?” The answer is that we are --
notably by continuing to withhold trade benefits from it under the
Jackson-Vanik amendment (passed in American law many years ago to
force the Soviet Union to make democratic concessions, and to allow
Jewish emigration). The Jackson-Vanik restrictions are no longer
imposed on China or Vietnam, or Georgia or Ukraine. Why on Russia,
which is no more undemocratic than China or Vietnam?

Hart and Simes blame “the dangerous triumphalism that has
shaped U.S. international strategy since 1993.” This is a problem
among “a majority of America’s political leaders and its wider
foreign-policy elite” who hold “the arrogant yet naïve view that the
United States could shape the world order without the consent of the
other major powers and without creating a backlash against America
and American leadership.” They have treated Russia as a “defeated
country.”

An answer to this criticism has come from John R. Bolton, one
of the most belligerent of the Bush administration neo-conservatives
and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a body he
indicated would better be dismantled with NATO taking its place.

Bolton says that the U.S. under Barack Obama is anxious to give
away America’s strategic assets to the Russians, in a desire to
please its liberal friends and get a new Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty before Christmas, at the cost of imposing on the U.S. a
“dangerously low” level of nuclear warheads, and abandoning the
“defense system intended for Poland and the Czech Republic.” (It
formerly was described in the U.S. as a defense system intended for
Americans.)

The basic question is whether the United States wishes to treat
Russia as a permanent enemy, if it is not. The result of treating
states as enemies is that sooner or later they become one. One might
think the United States already has enough enemies.

© Copyright 2009 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights
Reserved.

This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com

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