High over the Bering Sea where the black Arctic sky bends toward
Alaska, Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers moved in for the kill last week. In
rapid succession, cruise missiles dropped from beneath them like deadly
spawn, fanning out toward their targets. Eleven thousand kilometers
away in the warm waters south of Florida, a Russian naval squadron
approached, carrying more megatons of nuclear weapons than the Cubans
ever dreamed of during the missile crisis that brought the world to the
edge of annihilation in October 1962. The Russians' goal: to link up
with the military forces of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, who has cast
himself as the successor to Fidel Castro in leading hemispheric
hostility to the United States of America.
Geopolitical thriller writer Tom Clancy could set this scene.
Flashbacks would provide the context: Moscow's punitive invasion of
little Georgia last summer; its tanks and missiles parading in Red
Square last May; its coffers filled with hundreds of billions of
dollars paid by Western Europeans addicted to Russian gas and oil; and
the vows of former KGB operative, former president and now Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin to use this war chest for an ever more powerful
military machine. Clancy could make it all sound like, well, the eve of
World War III. But State Department spokesman Sean McCormack last month
made the latest Russian operations above the Arctic and in the
Caribbean, dubbed "Stability 2008," sound more like a joke. Sneering at
the weakness of Russia's fleet en route to Venezuela, McCormack said,
"We'll see if they actually make it there. Somebody told me they had a
tugboat accompanying them in case they break down along the way."
All is not what it seems in the new cold war, if such a thing
exists—and most leaders in NATO insist emphatically that it does not.
The world is too interdependent, they say, to allow that sort of global
standoff. Russia is not the Soviet Union. And the Western powers don't
want to be drawn into a game of bluff that will only inflate Putin's
prestige. "One cold war is enough," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates
told Putin to his face at a conference in Germany last year. In
Washington, where policy fell prey to political fictions for much of
the Bush administration, the mantra of the moment is "realism." For too
many years the White House looked at the world through a crude,
dialectic lens—"with us or against us," "war or appeasement." Since
Gates took over at Defense in late 2006, he has demanded from the
waning administration "a pragmatic blend of resolve and restraint."
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for her part, talks about a
"uniquely American realism." It has an idealistic tinge favoring
friends and allies who share Western democratic values. But, that said,
Rice's brand of realism readily allows an autocratic Russia, or for
that matter China, to be accepted as competitive on some issues and
embraced when cooperative on others.
The approach harks back to the days 60 years ago when University of
Chicago professor Hans J. Morgenthau led what came to be known as the
realist school of international relations. "Foreign policy must be
conducted in such a way as to make the preservation of peace possible
and not make the outbreak of war inevitable," he wrote. Moderate,
reasonable, focused on clearly perceived national interests, he warned
against "the crusading spirit," insisted on looking at the political
scene from the viewpoint of other nations, and advocated compromise on
any issue not absolutely vital to a country's well-being.
Such views have always been a hard sell with the U.S. public.
Especially after an incident like the invasion of Georgia, Americans
tend to hanker for definitive confrontations and conclusions that smell
like victory. To talk about responding with what Gates calls
"nonmilitary tools of national power"—what others call "soft
power"—sounds soft, period. (You won't hear the phrase cross the lips
of any presidential candidate.) But when you have the preponderance of
power, you can husband your resources and still contain your adversary.
That was the point Sean McCormack was making about Russia's rickety
fleet. Moscow is not the threat that it wants to appear. With more than
5,000 nuclear warheads and its status as the world's largest energy
exporter, it cannot really be called a paper tiger. Not militarily and
not economically. But in both respects it is a pretty dysfunctional
bear. "The Russian military is still a lot more bark than bite," says
Alexander Kliment, an analyst at the consultancy Eurasia Group. During
the cold war the West used nuclear weapons as an equalizer, backing up
an inferior conventional force. Now that's what the Russians are doing.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country has invested most
of its defense money in maintaining its nuclear weapons, while
conventional forces were left to decay. "Now it's 20 years later," says
Kliment, "and the better part of the Russian Navy is rusting in dry
docks." The country has a single aircraft carrier, compared with a
dozen in the American fleet. Russian troop strength at 1.2 million is
about a quarter of what it was in 1986 and morale is low. "A Russian
soldier has fewer rights than a Russian prisoner," says Valentina
Melnikova, the head of the Union of Soldiers' Mothers. One Army
lieutenant, who despaired after repeated attempts to point out the
disastrous condition of his barracks, recently made a rap video (to an
Eminem tune) showing the decrepit plumbing and filthy corridors, then
posted it on YouTube. The lieutenant was ordered to transfer to Siberia
Putin has been promising huge new infusions of cash to solve some of
the military's problems, and on the financial front his government
wisely built up an enormous reserve of some $600 billion in foreign
currency over the past nine years. But those monies may be needed now
to stave off economic disaster, not re-create the old war machine.
Russia's fortunes are tied directly to the volatile price of oil and
gas, which is headed down sharply as the world economy slows. Russian
markets started hemorrhaging capital even before the confrontation in
Georgia, then took massive hits when the shock waves from the global
credit crisis started rolling over the country in September. The Moscow
bourses had to stop trading several times in September. Last week they
dropped 21 percent in a single day. Even before the current crisis, the
scale of Russia's $1.3 trillion economy was roughly on a par with
Mexico's and Brazil's, well behind China's (at $3.3 trillion) and the
United States' (at $13.8 trillion).
The second salient point appreciated by today's realists is the role
NATO and the European Union played transforming the old Eastern bloc
into a collection of increasingly prosperous democratic states and,
yes, steadfast allies who share U.S. values. In the 1990s NATO was at a
loss to justify its original hard-power reason for being. If the
Western Europeans' rationale for the alliance after World War II was
"to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down," the
fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to that game. There weren't going to
be any European wars of the kind NATO was created to fight so it would
have to adapt to small conflicts elsewhere. The catchphrase in the
halls of Brussels became "Out of area or out of business." And soon
enough, those little wars were found: first Kosovo, which was a quick,
relatively clean victory in 1999, then Afghanistan, a fight that has
gone on for seven years and is getting uglier by the day.
The story of NATO's soft power was different. The collapse of
the Soviet Union had left a vacuum in Central Europe, and NATO rushed
to fill it, not with troops, but with ideas about good governance and
democratic societies. To vulnerable new regimes, the alliance held out
the tantalizing prospect of membership with guarantees of defense under
Article 5 of the treaty. But that came at a price. According to Ronald
Asmus, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe, in the
1990s "the administration consciously used potential membership in NATO
as a 'golden carrot' to encourage the countries of Central and Eastern
Europe to consolidate political and economic reforms, resolve minority
issues and border disputes and establish civilian controls of the
military." The expansion of NATO was "values driven," not militarily
driven, Asmus said. As the EU expanded its membership, too, the borders
of "the West" were pushed east from the Elbe by 1,600km. Not a shot had
been fired, not a brigade deployed. Soft power had triumphed.
But success brought its own complications. Analysts as
distinguished—and as tough—as former secretaries of state Henry
Kissinger and George Shultz now regret the lack of attention paid to
the Russians' pride in the 1990s when the country was poor and its
people often felt humiliated. "What they have sought, sometimes
clumsily, is acceptance as equals in a new international system rather
than as losers in cold war to which terms could be dictated," the elder
statesmen wrote jointly in an op-ed piece earlier this month.
NATO tried to discourage its new partners from embarking on
campaigns to build up conventional war-fighting capabilities that might
look provocative to Moscow. War with Russia, no matter how weak the
Kremlin had become, was not what Brussels wanted. In fact, the American
administration was looking for NATO's new members to fill useful niches
for its far-flung "war on terror," whether in Iraq or Afghanistan. But
the aspirants inevitably saw their training in a different light.
Ultimately, their grudges were against Russia.
Georgia became a case in point of this simmering animosity—and of
Morgenthau's dictum to "Never allow a weak ally to make decisions for
you." Though the little country in the Caucasus was not a NATO member,
U.S. military trainers were teaching local troops basic tactics for
counterinsurgency operations. In a stunning miscalculation, Georgian
President Mikheil Saakashvili, paying too much attention to talk of
"common values" with the West, made the decision to attack South
Ossetian rebel positions, which caused the Russians to move in to
relieve their allies. NATO stepped back, not forward, which was the
unpalatable but prudent thing to do. Moscow's military, whatever its
shortcomings, then rolled over the Georgian troops like a lawn mower
over an anthill.
