Global Futures

Dmitri Trenin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509510948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, there has been much talk of a new Cold War between the West and Russia. Under Putin's authoritarian leadership, Moscow is widely seen as volatile, belligerent and bent on using military force to get its way. In this incisive analysis, top Russian foreign and security policy analyst Dmitri Trenin explains why the Cold War analogy is misleading. Relations between the West and Russia are certainly bad and dangerous but- he argues - they are bad and dangerous in new ways; crucial differences which make the current rivalry between Russia, the EU and the US all the more fluid and unpredictable. Unpacking the dynamics of this increasingly strained relationship, Trenin makes a compelling case for handling Russia with pragmatism and care rather than simply giving into fear.

1
Analysis of Fears

Fears of Russia in the West predate the Cold War (1947), the formation of the Red Army (1918) and the Bolshevik revolution (1917). A good summary of them could be found in an article by Frederick Engels in 1890, “The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism.”⁵ To Engels and his colleague Karl Marx, the principal source of fear was the expansionist nature of the Russian state, which, in its quest for hegemony in Europe and Asia, devoured some of its neighbors and subjugated others. Russia’s rampant expansionism was made even more repugnant by the authoritarian and repressive character of its domestic regime.

This view from the West has not changed much, despite the peaceful toppling of the communist system by the Russian people in August 1991 and the unprecedented voluntary dismantlement of the historical Soviet/Russian empire in 1989–91. This process was not only led by Moscow, which accepted that 25 million ethnic Russians would be left outside the Russian Federation, it also drastically reduced the country’s armed forces and scaled back the defense industry. Today, the Russian state often continues to be credited with an “essentially predatory nature,” with a clear “preference to squeezing foreign countries to patient construction at home.”⁶

Imperial revival

Just before Hillary Clinton stepped down as US secretary of state at the start of Barack Obama’s second term, she called Vladimir Putin’s project of a Eurasian Union an attempt to restore the Soviet Union. Beneath the veneer of “regional integration,” Putin’s goals, in her view, were “rebuilding a lost empire” and “re-Sovietizing” the Russian periphery; his method, like that of his predecessors, was “always testing, and pushing one’s boundaries.”⁷

Whether Putin was aiming at a new edition of the empire or at some loosely defined Moscow-led “power center in Eurasia,” one thing was clear. After a brief delusion in the early 1990s when Russia’s foreign minister confided in a former US president, who was stunned by the confession, that Russia did not have interests that differed from the common interests of the democratic West, Moscow has learned not only to define its own interests but also to assert them. The most vital of these interests have always been concentrated in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Russia’s break with its empire was not immediately considered as final. As far back as 1994 Henry Kissinger warned about the risk of the “reimperialization” of Russia.⁸ The very use of such an unwieldy term suggests that it was carefully chosen. The United States, with a long history of helping others – starting with the British – divest themselves of their colonial possessions, was clearly pursuing the same policy with regard to post-Soviet Russia. It was one thing for George H. W. Bush to fear the collapse of a nuclear superpower; once the division of the Soviet Union became official, and its nukes were secured, Washington became a supporter of the new states’ genuine independence from the Russian Federation. Moscow’s initial instinct to treat its ex-borderlands as something not-quite-foreign, captured in the phrase “near abroad,” immediately became suspicious and had to be resisted.

The new states themselves, for their part, sought to rely on US and, to a lesser degree, European support to protect their independence, which still looked too fragile. The West leaned hard on Moscow to make sure that the Russian forces left the Baltic States by 1994. By that year, the last remaining Russian garrisons had left Germany and Eastern Europe. Once their departure was completed, the Russian military presence in Europe, in geographical terms, reached its lowest ebb in three centuries. Moreover, almost immediately, the opposite tide began, as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic applied in the same year to join NATO. To many Russians, this was zero-sum at its starkest: even as Russia’s power was receding, it was being replaced by the expanding power of the West. No vacuum, no middle ground was allowed to exist. When Moscow began to protest against NATO’s eastern enlargement, however, these protests were interpreted by the West as imperial nostalgia, another cause for concern.

Meanwhile, other fears arose as some of the former Soviet republics experienced ethnic separatism. In newly independent Moldova and Georgia, separatist groups have come to rely on the military protection of the Russian army garrisons and political and economic support from Moscow. Even though ad hoc peacekeeping arrangements were reached soon after initial clashes, Russian forces in Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were regarded by Chisinau and Tbilisi as occupiers, impinging on their newborn sovereignty and threatening their independence. To those with long memories, the Russian Federation was clawing back the territories of the former Soviet Union, much like Soviet Russia in 1918–20 was “reintegrating” the former imperial borderlands, snuffing out their short-lived independence. Thus, the most serious fear of Russia is that of Russian imperialism.

Use of force

A major contributor to the fear factor is the Kremlin’s willingness to use military force, starting in the Russian North Caucasus in the 1990s and the early 2000s against local separatists turned extremists, which many in the West chose to see in terms of a colonial power fighting a national liberation movement. “The Kremlin has shown,” said the historian Norman Davies, “that it is quite prepared to use armed force; the West has shown that it is not.” Davies meant, not against Russia: US and other Western militaries had been consistently using force since the early 1990s. The problem, of course, was the practical impossibility of attacking a nuclear superpower. This, in Davies’s view, “creates an asymmetrical relationship with Russia, militarily weak but mentally decisive, which can expect to get almost anything it wants.”⁹ Although this is obviously an overstatement, it points to a key problem: for all its military superiority that it has been using elsewhere quite liberally, the United States lacks serious military options vis-à-vis Russia.

One thing Vladimir Putin has learned from the history of both Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s dealings with the West, is never to be weak, and never to appear weak. “The weak get beaten.” Even if the odds are against Russia, Putin is punching above the country’s weight rather than submitting himself to the will of others. Over time, Putin went further. Summing up his own experience of fifteen years at the helm of the Russian state, he concluded that, if a fight is inevitable, one needs to strike first. Looking from the Kremlin, over the years Russia had drawn a number of red lines to its partners, which they chose to ignore. Finally, this provoked Moscow’s pushback. In Putin’s view, his predecessors’ main mistake was not being assertive enough in defending the country’s national interests.

These red lines, first drawn by Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov in 1996, referred to the issue of admitting ex-members of the Warsaw Pact, which had formed the Soviet Union’s strategic glacis in Europe, to NATO. The combination of Russian opposition to NATO’s enlargement and its support for self-proclaimed separatist states led in 2008 to the first large-scale use of Russian military power since the demise of the Soviet Union. The Russian forces were brought into action by the botched attempt by the impetuous Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to re-establish control over the rebel region of South Ossetia, which led to the killing of a number of Russian peacekeepers there.

Once the war began, Russian troops did not confine themselves to the immediate area of conflict but proceeded to occupy areas of Georgia proper, coming within a striking distance of the Georgian capital Tbilisi. The point made, they were ordered to stop. Soon thereafter, Moscow formally recognized the separatist statelets of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, thus redrawing the post-Soviet borders for the first time. This was a loud warning shot. However, it was soon muted by the avalanche of the global financial crisis. A short-lived reset between Washington and Moscow followed.

In a somewhat similar move, reacting to the 2014 Maidan revolution in Kiev, which brought to power pro-Western elements within the Ukrainian elite in a coalition with western Ukrainian nationalists, Russian forces took control of Crimea (where Russia had long had a naval base), threatened to use military force elsewhere in Ukraine, staged a referendum in majority-Russian Crimea on joining Russia, formally incorporated the peninsula into the Russian Federation as a result, and actively supported an armed rebellion in Ukraine’s south-eastern Donbass region. This time, Russia not only redrew borders; it annexed territory, claiming the right to protect the interests of its co-ethnics. Many countries with Russian minorities became immediately concerned, from the Baltic States in NATO to Russia’s own allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization such as Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Restoration of military power

Moscow’s more assertive foreign policy has been backed up by a reconstituted military force. After the 2008 Georgia war, Russian military reform began in earnest, and the decline of Russian military power which had lasted two decades began to be reversed. In 2010, a large-scale program of military modernization was adopted, with the stated aim of raising the share of “modern” weapons and equipment in the Russian arsenal from 30 to 70 percent by 2020. Military training and exercises were substantially upgraded. Russian military aircraft resumed routine patrols along the borders of the United States, the United Kingdom and other NATO countries, as well as Japan.

Even as Russia’s power began to grow, Moscow refused to live by the constraints imposed on it in its hour of weakness. When NATO countries refused to ratify the adapted Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, raising objections of the Russian military presence in Georgia and Moldova, Russia suspended its implementation of the original 1990 CFE document, which was negotiated when the Warsaw Pact was still around and which limited Russian troop movements within its own territory. With neither the adapted nor the original CFE treaty in operation, the risks of a surprise attack in Europe have grown.

The actual employment of force in Crimea in 2014 and in Syria in 2015 returned Russia to the ranks of major conventional military powers. The Crimea operation featured a very different military than the one that saw battle in Georgia six years previously, not to speak of the decayed army that fought in Chechnya in the 1990s. The actual use of Russian air and naval power in Syria was even more impressive. Russia’s post-Cold War military weakness has become history. Countries with strained relations with Moscow had to take notice.

Yet this concern needs to be put in perspective. Russia’s military power is a far cry from that of the United States. The Russian military budget is a small fraction of America’s. It trails far behind China’s. Except in the category of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, there is no balance between Russia and the US, not to speak of a comparison with NATO. The new emerging front line in Europe passes just a hundred miles west of St Petersburg. Kaliningrad is completely surrounded on land by NATO territory. Similarly, the scale and intensity of Russia’s military operations, from the Balkans to the Middle East, are dwarfed by those of the United States and its allies. And Russia has practically no allies.

Hybrid warfare

Many Russians have recently grown accustomed to quoting Emperor Alexander III, that Russia has only two friends in the world – its army and its navy. However, to protect and actively promote its interests, Russia is not relying solely on its military instruments. In the areas of conflict in the post-Soviet space, it has used a number of local allies – pro-Russian political formations, businesses and paramilitary groups – as well as bona fide volunteers and military advisers, specialists and other personnel from Russia. This heterogeneous combination of assets has made it possible to wage what has been called in the West “hybrid warfare” – in reality, the combined employment of military, paramilitary and non-military means in support of political objectives, which also made it more difficult to accuse Russia of direct military intervention.

The use of these assets in Crimea allowed Moscow to claim absolute victory “without fir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Analysis of Fears
• 2 The Russia Challenge
• 3 Bringing Russia into Line
• 4 Navigating the New Normal
• Conclusion: How Conflict with the West Impacts on Russia
• Further Reading
• End User License Agreement