The Kremlin has long been urging the need to drop the Cold War clichés with regard to Russia. Our commentator IGOR FEDYUKIN has discovered in the book by American analyst Jeffrey Mankoff practical tips for Barack Obama on how to successfully "reset" the relations with Russia.
The meeting between the new American President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, in London in April prompted much talk about the "reset" of Russian-American relations. The upcoming Obama visit to Moscow in July generates even higher hopes. However, "resetting" the relationship between the US and Russia requires something more than the goodwill of its leaders. It requires building a coherent and logical case for the need and the possibility of such a move. Of course, try as he would, Barack Obama cannot simply erase from American public consciousness such events as the war in Georgia or the shutting-off of gas supplies to Ukraine (and half of Europe) over the New Year, as well as many other Kremlin foreign policy moves. To make a "reset" possible it is necessary to explain why the real conflicts of recent years need not be an obstacle to normalisation of relations with Russia.
Some interesting insights into the problem are offered in a recently published book by a young American analyst Jeffrey Mankoff, adjunct fellow for Russia Studies at New York's influential non-governmental Council on Foreign Relations. Although Mankoff's book has been receiving the highest praise from his older colleagues, there is nothing to suggest it should be seen as a policy document. Mankoff's central thesis is that it would be wrong to claim that Russia has been particularly aggressive under President Putin. First, the author argues, the foreign policy of Putin's Russia basically continued the line that had taken shape in the 1990s. Second, in spite of the obvious and very serious conflicts that flared up between Russia and the West, the Kremlin policy in recent years has not been prompted by the idea that confrontation and aggressive behaviour were ends in themselves. Even when it happened, Mankoff writes, confrontation was above all aimed at protecting Russian interests when, in the Kremlin's opinion, they were threatened by US actions.
The standard view, at least in the West, is that Vladimir Putin's coming to power in Russia, with his KGB background and a nostalgia for the lost greatness of the superpower, brought a sharp turn in Russian foreign policy: Moscow began to oppose the "colour revolutions" that challenged its influence and to support dictators in the former Soviet states and elsewhere. However, Mankoff argues that the Putin-Medvedev foreign policy was merely the climax of the process that had begun more than ten years earlier under President Boris Yeltsin. It was in the mid-1990s that most of the Russian political elite realised that Russia could not, in the foreseeable future, become part of the West and its institutions, and that such integration would probably not be in its interests anyway. The policy of the then Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev assuming that Russia and the West could live in harmony was cast aside, and Russia started reverting to its habitual mode of behaviour. Within that model Moscow sees itself as a power centre ("a great power"), the main principles of international relations are declared to be tough competition between states, unstable, pragmatic and situational character of any alliances, while the leading countries feel free to act as they like on issues of domestic policy. The new foreign policy paradigm was manifested, among other things, in Russia's increasing nervousness over NATO expansion, especially over the West's policy in former Yugoslavia, which at one point nearly provoked a shootout between Russian and NATO soldiers at Pristina Airport. So, if there was a sharp turn in Russian foreign policy, according to Mankoff, it was rather Vladimir Putin's decision to cooperation with the US in the wake of September 11, 2001.
Mankoff stresses that Russia's policy by and large reflects the broad consensus in the Russian elite on the role the country should play in the world. First, Mankoff stresses that significant segments of the military and foreign policy establishments espouse radically anti-Western ("Eurasian") views, which make Vladimir Putin's statements look fairly moderate. The author notes that Putin chose not to risk: his foreign policy did not go beyond the framework of the ideas of the ruling elites about Russia as a great power. This enabled him to neutralise opposition inside the elite and gain considerable tactical freedom of action. Second, no ideological shifts or changes in the composition of the political elite ("the advent of the siloviki") occurred at the turn of the millennia. It was simply that the demise of pro-Western Yeltsin, the strengthening of the vertical power structure, the staggering growth of energy prices and relative enfeeblement of the United States, which was bogged down in Iraq, made it possible to implement the ideas that had taken shape in the second half of the 1990s. Under Putin Russia did not embark on a new foreign policy course; it merely gained enough strength to behave in a way it would have liked to behave under Yeltsin, Mankoff concludes.
All this sums up the principles of American policy vis-à-vis Russia: Mankoff argues that Vladimir Putin's foreign policy is deeply rooted in the ideological perceptions of the Russian ruling elites; consequently there are no grounds for expecting a drastic revision of Russian foreign policy under President Medvedev or any other leader. That in turn means that the US and the West as a whole should learn to cooperate with Moscow as it is.
That such cooperation with the Kremlin regime is acceptable in principle is not so obvious: rightly or wrongly, the Kremlin is seen by many people in the West as an aggressor and a blackmailer. Mankoff's picture of the world has some important features that prove such cooperation to be morally admissible. First, Mankoff is confident that Putin and Medvedev (like the majority of the elite) do not seek confrontation; they seek partnership, but on terms acceptable to Russia, i.e. on terms set with Moscow's participation. Second, he recalls that Western countries maintain normal and even allied relations with a number of undemocratic countries: the state of democracy in Russia has a great impact on its foreign policy, but it does not in itself determine Moscow's ability or otherwise to find common interests with the US and Europe. Third, Mankoff is prepared to admit that the West is not always right in its relations with Moscow: the failure of attempts to integrate Russia into the Western community, institutionally and ideologically, automatically prompts a return to the containment models inherited from the Cold War. Mankoff also criticises the widespread and inappropriate wish to punish or isolate Russia, which merely fuels isolationist sentiments there.
Mankoff effectively calls for giving up the very Cold War clichés about which Russian leaders so emphatically complain. In his opinion, the West must come to terms with the existence of a strong Russia. Moscow's attempts to stand up for its interests should not be seen as a first step towards restoring "the communist empire." First, such restoration is impossible and, second, Georgia in 2008 was not Czechoslovakia in 1968. Russia did not storm Tbilisi or topple Saakashvili or annex the whole of Georgia. "If anything," Mankoff writes, "Russia's actions in the Caucasus looked much more like the kind of interventions long undertaken by the US in Latin America or France in La Francophonie, that is, the actions of a Great Power claiming an exclusive sphere of influence in an area where it has strong historical links." Conflicts and incidents should not be over-dramatised and should be seen in the same way as the numerous contradictions in the West's relations with China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan and many other large countries.
Although Mankoff's analysis is fairly convincing, his reasoning about the roots of the "deep-seated consensus among the Russian elite," which in his opinion explain how Russian foreign policy is bound to prompt questions. Granted, the ideas of the Russian elite about the world and Russia's place in it derive from the Soviet past and the history of the disintegration of the USSR. What's more, Mankoff does not limit his perspective to the recent past. He argues that being a powerful state deprived of natural borders (in terms of physical geography - I.F.), Russia throughout its history has felt that it must control the borderline states to ensure its own security.
However, the most interesting conclusion that can be drawn from reading Mankoff's book is that a "reset" of Russian-American relations implies the recognition that Russia is an ordinary country. In the minds of American and Russian hardliners, Russia is a weakened version of a superpower and any strengthening of Russia's economic or military potential must imply resumed rivalry with the US. The concept of "resetting" renounces this perception: the rest of the world should simply take Russia less seriously. If the West sees Russia as an ordinary, large, corrupt, authoritarian country of the developing world, it follows that its "adventures in Georgia" are no more important globally than, say, India's intrigues in Sri Lanka.
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Putin's foreign policy course was consonant with the deep-seated consensus among the Russian elite that Russia is a great power. There are no grounds for thinking that it will be revised under Medvedev.
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*Jeffrey Mankoff. Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.