#5
Moscow Times
January 21, 2002
... Or Just Irrational Exuberance?
By Vladimir Frolov
Vladimir Frolov, an advisor to the chairman of the State Duma foreign affairs committee, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times. The views expressed are those of the author.

It cannot be seriously disputed that since the tragic events of Sept. 11 and President Vladimir Putin's statement two weeks later the tone in the United States-Russia relationship has considerably improved. Both nations seem to have finally found at least one common objective: fighting international terrorism. Moscow has all but renounced a zero-sum approach vis-a-vis the states of the former Soviet Union. Washington has decided to "feel Russia's pain" regarding Chechnya. And pundits in both capitals have been bubbling with excitement over the pending U.S.-Russian strategic alliance.

Such talk is at best premature. A U.S.-Russian alliance, although conceivable and even desirable, is not in the cards at least for now. The giddy feeling among pundits is reminiscent of what Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once aptly described as "irrational exuberance" (he was referring to the U.S. equity markets, of course). It turned out to be bad for investors and it could be equally damaging for the long-term prospects of a stable and cooperative U.S.-Russian relationship.

This irrational exuberance is dangerous for two reasons.

It creates unrealistic expectations both on the part of policy makers and the public as to the closeness and depth of the relationship that can possibly be attained, as well as with regards to the specific political and economic benefits to be gained. When those heightened expectations do not materialize, the relationship will come crashing down in an orgy of mutual recriminations and disappointment. We have been down that road before at least twice. Another boom and bust cycle is the last thing the U.S.-Russian relationship needs.

The irrational exuberance also has the unfortunate effect of lulling the political leadership into complacency. It quickly creates a false sense of success and allows drift to set in. More importantly, it obscures the need for building durable political support behind substantive policy changes, which are essential for transforming the relationship from one of political expediency to a long-term alliance of shared interests and values.

It is precisely the political support for such a policy goal that has been somewhat ambiguous in Moscow and almost completely lacking in Washington. When it comes to votes, George W. Bush's White House and most members of Congress will find NATO enlargement to include the Baltic states a much more rewarding issue than redrawing the relationship with Russia.

A year into his presidency, Bush has yet to lay out a compelling vision for U.S. policy toward Russia.

He has said repeatedly that he wants to move beyond the Cold War toward some new strategic framework based on mutual trust. However, his failure or reluctance to spell out the legal arrangements for such an overarching framework suggests that he views it as little more than another one of his "faith-based initiatives."

Bush has shown no inclination to articulate the desirability of a long-term U.S.-Russian alliance as something that is strongly in the national security interests of the United States. He thus has little incentive to recalibrate certain U.S. policies to make this objective easier to achieve and to build political support in Congress and among the American public for such a policy goal. In fact, he may be about to squander the political opening created by Putin's reaction to Sept. 11 by pursuing an unimaginative policy that almost looks like it was borrowed from his father's playbook: "status quo plus."

In the run-up to the Crawford summit and after it, the Bush administration's policy toward Russia has been heavy on symbolism and light on substance. The most noticeable movement has occurred in areas of relatively minor importance to the White House that do not require it to wage costly political battles (e.g. Jackson-Vanik, WTO accession and Chechnya). In more sensitive areas, like strategic arms control, the administration has stuck to its guns.

The unilateral strategic arms reductions announced by Bush are largely disappointing. Although they break the symbolic 2,000 level (albeit by an accounting gimmick), the remaining U.S. strategic forces structure maintains an extensive capability for a large-scale nuclear attack on Russia. This will perpetuate the inherently adversarial nuclear deterrence relationship between the two countries. (Was this not something that the Bush administration initially sought to portray as a relic of the Cold War?) And the prospects for codifying the irreversibility of these reductions appear slim.

By unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM Treaty at precisely the moment Putin was signaling greater flexibility, Bush showed that for him building a constructive relationship with Russia takes second place to pandering to a zealous political constituency within the Republican Party for whom trashing the ABM Treaty was never a policy but a religion.

When President Bill Clinton visited Europe in June 2000 he challenged the Europeans to open NATO and the European Union to Russian membership. A year later in Warsaw, Bush stopped well short of that. The proposed new format for the Russia-NATO relationship -- "NATO at 20" -- is not very likely (due to some vocal opposition in the United States) to dispense with the principle of NATO first reaching agreement at 19. This puts in doubt the administration's commitment to making the new arrangement work. More importantly, it does nothing to address the core security issue between Russia and NATO -- their remaining adversarial military posture, supported by such relics of the Cold War as the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty.

For his part, Putin has not articulated a specific policy objective of forming a long-term political alliance with the United States. If he has indeed made the strategic turnaround in Russian foreign policy toward the West, the Russian public is yet to be informed of this momentous decision and its implications.

While his recent actions have been unusually cooperative, the overall strategic objectives of Putin's policy toward the United States have been left deliberately ambiguous. Just like Bush, Putin has not made a compelling case to the Russian public and to the Russian political class in favor of a lasting alliance-type relationship with the United States that would transcend the narrow agenda of the war on terrorism. Accordingly, he has yet to begin building a broad-based political coalition to support such an objective.

To succeed in his overtures to the West, Putin will have to offer a substantially redefined and modernized concept of Russia's national interests to make them much more congruent with Western interests in general. Such redefinition is absolutely essential if Putin is serious about pursuing meaningful cooperation with NATO on issues like nonproliferation and security in the Balkans. He will also have to further broaden Russia's foreign policy agenda to make it less self-centered and parochial and to engage the West -- or at least Europe -- on such issues as promoting democracy, human rights and humanitarian intervention. Like his friend British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he needs to turn Russian foreign policy into "a pivotal force for good."

It may be, of course, that the creative ambiguity of Putin's policy toward the United States reflects a limited tactical agenda of more effectively constraining U.S. unilateralism through a policy of cooperation rather than a policy of denial. However as the case of the ABM Treaty shows, with the Bush administration that kind of strategy could very easily turn into a spectacular failure. The successful war in Afghanistan is more likely to exacerbate the unilateralist bent in U.S. foreign policy than diminish it.

The war against terror is too narrow a basis for a U.S.-Russian alliance to emerge and endure. We cannot even agree completely on a definition of terrorism, and Russia's practical contribution to the U.S. anti-terror campaign is likely to diminish substantially beyond the Afghan theater. Aready now Moscow is painfully learning that its cooperation on Afghanistan does not give it any special rights with Washington, nor does it make Russia the most important relationship in the world for the United States. At best, the anti-terror coalition provides a useful framework for a new pattern of serious U.S.-Russian cooperation to take hold.

The practical policy objective now is not building an alliance, which will require further internal evolution in both nations, but to construct a workable legal framework for maintaining the current cooperative momentum and reducing the corrosive effects of differences that will inevitably crop up further down the road.

As one former U.S. diplomat elegantly put it in a recent analytical paper: "It is not the end of history in U.S.-Russian relations. Yet."