The Overshadowed Issue: Russia

The Nation: Candidates Neglect Nation's Greatest Foreign Policy Concern

(The Nation)  This column was written by Stephen F. Cohen

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None of the remaining presidential candidates have seriously addressed, or even seem fully aware of, what should be our greatest foreign policy concern - Russia's singular capacity to endanger or enhance our national security. Overshadowed by the U.S. disaster in Iraq, Moscow's importance will continue long after that war ends.

Despite its diminished status following the Soviet breakup in 1991, Russia alone possesses weapons that can destroy the United States, a military-industrial complex nearly America's equal in exporting arms, vast quantities of questionably secured nuclear materials sought by terrorists and the planet's largest oil and natural gas reserves. It also remains the world's largest territorial country, pivotally situated in the West and the East, at the crossroads of colliding civilizations, with strategic capabilities from Europe, Iran and other Middle East nations to North Korea, China, India, Afghanistan and even Latin America. All things considered, our national security may depend more on Russia than Russia's does on us.

And yet U.S.-Russian relations are worse today than they have been in twenty years. The relationship includes almost as many serious conflicts as it did during the cold war - among them, Kosovo, Iran, the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, Venezuela, NATO expansion, missile defense, access to oil and the Kremlin's internal politics - and less actual cooperation, particularly in essential matters involving nuclear weapons. Indeed, a growing number of observers on both sides think the relationship is verging on a new cold war, including another arms race.

Even the current cold peace could be more dangerous than its predecessor, for three reasons: First, its front line is not in Berlin or the Third World but on Russia's own borders, where U.S. and NATO military power is increasingly ensconced. Second, lethal dangers inherent in Moscow's impaired controls over its vast stockpiles of materials of mass destruction and thousands of missiles on hair-trigger alert, a legacy of the state's disintegration in the 1990s, exceed any such threats in the past. And third, also unlike before, there is no effective domestic opposition to hawkish policies in Washington or Moscow, only influential proponents and cheerleaders.

How did it come to this? Less than twenty years ago, in 1989-90, the Soviet Russian and American leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, completing a process begun by Gorbachev and President Reagan, agreed to end the cold war, with "no winners and no losers," as even Condoleezza Rice once wrote, and begin a new era of "genuine cooperation." In the U.S. policy elite and media, the nearly unanimous answer is that Russian President Vladimir Putin's antidemocratic domestic policies and "neo-imperialism" destroyed that historic opportunity.

You don't have to be a Putin apologist to understand that this is not an adequate explanation. During the last eight years, Putin's foreign policies have been largely a reaction to Washington's winner-take-all approach to Moscow since the early 1990s, which resulted from a revised U.S. view of how the cold war ended [see Cohen, "The New American Cold War," July 10, 2006]. In that new triumphalist narrative, America "won" the forty-year conflict and post-Soviet Russia was a defeated nation analogous to post-World War II Germany and Japan - a nation without full sovereignty at home or autonomous national interests abroad.

The policy implication of that bipartisan triumphalism, which persists today, has been clear, certainly to Moscow. It meant that the United States had the right to oversee Russia's post-Communist political and economic development, as it tried to do directly in the 1990s, while demanding that Moscow yield to U.S. international interests. It meant Washington could break strategic promises to Moscow, as when the Clinton Administration began NATO's eastward expansion, and disregard extraordinary Kremlin overtures, as when the Bush Administration unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty and granted NATO membership to countries even closer to Russia - despite Putin's crucial assistance to the US war effort in Afghanistan after September 11. It even meant America was entitled to Russia's traditional sphere of security and energy supplies, from the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia and the Caspian.

Such U.S. behavior was bound to produce a Russian backlash. It came under Putin, but it would have been the reaction of any strong Kremlin leader, regardless of soaring world oil prices. And it can no longer be otherwise. Those U.S. policies - widely viewed in Moscow as an "encirclement" designed to keep Russia weak and to control its resources - have helped revive an assertive Russian nationalism, destroy the once strong pro-American lobby and inspire widespread charges that concessions to Washington are "appeasement," even "capitulationism." The Kremlin may have overreacted, but the cause and effect threatening a new cold war are clear.

Because the first steps in this direction were taken in Washington, so must be initiatives to reverse it. Three are essential and urgent: a U.S. diplomacy that treats Russia as a sovereign great power with commensurate national interests; an end to NATO expansion before it reaches Ukraine, which would risk something worse than cold war; and a full resumption of negotiations to sharply reduce and fully secure all nuclear stockpiles and to prevent the impending arms race, which requires ending or agreeing on U.S. plans for a missile defense system in Europe. My recent discussions with members of Moscow's policy elite suggest that there may still be time for such initiatives to elicit Kremlin responses that would enhance rather than further endanger our national security.

American presidential campaigns are supposed to discuss such vital issues, but senators John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have not done so. Instead, in varying degrees, each has promised to be "tougher" on the Kremlin than George W. Bush has allegedly been and to continue the encirclement of Russia and the hectoring "democracy promotion" there, both of which have only undermined U.S. security and Russian democracy since the 1990s.

To be fair, no influential actors in American politics, including the media, have asked the candidates about any of these crucial issues. They should do so now before another chance is lost, in Washington and in Moscow.

[dewardbowles]

It is worth noting that the primary in NC and IN and ultimately the election hinge on a bet by two of the candidates that low information voters will believe their preposterous assertions that a "gas tax holiday" will help them pay their fuel bills this summer.
Anyone with a high school level education in economics will tell you a gas tax holiday will actually have the effect of raising gasoline prices. The consumer will simply never see a dime and the oil companies will make even higher profits. Not to mention the fact that it might put as many as 300.000 people out of work when the country is reeling from job losses or drive our debt even higher.

It is simply impossible to even suggest that such a measure could be introduced much less pass through congress before the end of the summer given nobody but McCain and Clinton support it in congress.

We are witnessing an epic and historic clash of old and new politics, one rooted in pander and deception of the past and one with the promise of truth and transparency.

My vote is for Senator Obama

[bluestardad]

TREAT RUSSIA WITH RESPECT AND THEY WILL DO LIKEWISE!

START WAR CRIMES TRIALS NOW!

AMERICA STAND UP OR SHUT UP!

[gkc99]

What''s the problem?

Didn''t Ronnie Raygun single handedly make Russia disappear?

Like getting rid of the Communists was something Ronnie Raygun also managed all by himself.

Can''t give the Russians any credit!

Why are American leaders such dolts? Do we deserve the brain dead Raygun and the dim bulb Bushit? Do we really?

[ranger1948]

Maybe when bush is out of office we can repair our relationship with Russia. They kept their part of the bargain, then we started changing the rules and not keeping our part as agreed. O

[ranger1948]

We blew the deal with the Russians but it is no surprise. We started this tradition when we arrived and befriended the Indians, then look how we ended up treating them.

[perceptions5]

"The Reason" why the gap continues to grow is because of all the poverty and despair in America''''s "deep blue one-party" cities. Cities that have been that way for Decades and Generations.

What happens to the innocent children that drop out of the K thru G12 public school system in Detriot which only sees 24% of their city children ever graduating from High School?

Detroit always has the highest crime rate in America. There is a link.

The case is the same for the deep blue one-party cities of:

Baltimore
Cleveland
New Orleans
Atlanta
Philadelphia
St. Louis
Oakland
Chicago
Washington DC
Los Angelos
............on and on and on and on ALL deep blue one-party cities where the graduation rates fall below 50%.

And what is the group that is 100% responsible for the Social Injustice, the Democrats, doing about it?

NOTHING........

My fellow Americans how can children grow up and "be able" to make a living for themselves if their not even getting a High School education?

And the historically corrupt "enablers" of the biggest Social Injustice in America today is our mostly corrupt liberal MSM wolfpack press that continues to "back" their close pals and fellow party members in censoring and ignoring this biggest issue of our times.

When liberal Democrats and the supporting corrupt liberal press are you FINALLY going to address this Social Injustice that YOUR responsible for?

[jon2012-2009]

"The Reason" why the gap continues to grow is because of all the poverty and despair in America''''''''s "deep blue one-party" cities. Cities that have been that way for Decades and Generations.
Posted by perceptions5 at 08:05 AM : May 04, 2008

Last time I checked, the ten poorest states in the union are overwhelmingly red. Republican.

[closethippy1]

This is why the Nation is the best opinion magazine in the US: They know how to keep things in perspective and not allow themselves be carried away by the hysteria against Iran or Chavez or whoever else the US media wants to crucify just to be in good terms with whomever is at the White House.
Second, they''re not afraid to criticize the presidential candidate they''ve endorse. In this case, Obama.
Third, they''ve always been timely at pointing out how pathetic the US media is behaving. During World War 2 the Nation was one of only two magazines that had the balls to criticize Germany for the Holocaust.
Even the New York Times didn''t do that, prefering to refer to the persecution of Jews during that war as "the Jewish problem".
But do you see why the US is disliked around the world? Instead of treating Russia as a partner after they went through so much trouble to dismantle the USSR, they treat them as criminals who gave up and now need to be punished.
The US has so much potential to do good, why does it keep going it alone and do as it pleases???