Will Russia Force Rebirth of Realism?

To understand just how unsettling Russia’s invasion of Georgia is to American foreign policy, it’s useful to highlight a short exchange that Senator McCain’s leading foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann had with a reporter from Radio Free Europe in April.

Scheunemann was asked whether the U.S. should be willing to “trade off” Georgia and Ukraine’s NATO aspirations in return for Russian support for U.S. missile defense systems in Central Europe.

“Well, I think first of all the administration has said very clearly and publicly that there will be no trade-offs,” Scheunemann responded. “Trade-offs like that are kind of a relic of a bygone era of power politics.”

This view of diplomacy with the former Soviet superpower – that U.S. positions were inviolable and that we would make no serious accommodation to Russia on behalf of a hierarchy of interests - was dealt a severe, if not lethal blow by the Russian invasion of Georgia.

For years, the U.S. had pocketed Russian concerns about NATO expansion and protests about attacking Serbia and later recognizing an independent Kosovo. Then, as now, American officials have argued that none of the measures cited by Russia as grievances were legitimate. They were never undertaken to encircle or weaken a former adversary.

American actions have not been “inherently threatening to Russia,” said Derek Chollet, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former State Department official in the Clinton administration. Instead, the Russian reaction owed more to the wounded and aggressive nationalism of Vladimir Putin, who once called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in history.”

Under different leadership, Chollet said, Russia would likely see things differently. “This has more to do with Russia than it does with the West,” he said.

The point was also made that Russia could not expect to exercise a veto over the interactions of sovereign governments. Yet at the same time that the U.S. expected Russia to come to its post-imperial senses, we also expected Russia to join U.S.-led efforts to disarm North Korea and dissuade Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. All this, while steadily fortifying U.S. power ever closer to Russia’s borders.

Russia’s grievances may be unjustified on the merits, but they can no longer be ignored. It is unclear just how aggressively Russia intends to reassert control over her neighbors, but what is clear is that the U.S. and the West are on the brink of a major recalibration of their relationship with Russia. As NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters earlier last week, "There can be no business as usual with Russia under present circumstances.”

The Bush administration is trying to walk a fine line, observed Stephen Flanagan, Director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They’re trying to salvage our cooperation with Russia on issues like proliferation while showing we won’t roll over and play dead” if they rampage through the Caucasus. Rather than a full-blown Cold War, Flanagan said, the U.S. is likely to return to a state akin to détente with the Russians: not recognizing the legitimacy of their actions but not pushing so hard as to endanger needed cooperation on issues of immediate concern.

The U.S. needs Russian assistance to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons and know-how, particularly to Iran. Is it willing to forgo this cooperation on behalf of the countries bordering Russia? The U.S. has typically operated under the assumption that preventing proliferation was in Russia’s interests also, so there was no need to make a special accommodation for their help. How long can that assumption hold as the U.S. begins to pressure Russia on Georgia?

A return to a form of détente with Russia would represent a sharp turn in U.S. foreign policy. Not least because it was jettisoned by the very party – Republicans – that had successfully incubated and executed the strategy in the 1970s. With the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, détente was cast aside as an immoral sop to the Evil Empire. The contemporary conservative sentiment on the issue was recently voiced by Vice President Cheney, who scoffed that we “don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat it.”

The notion that the defeat of evil in the world is a prerequisite for American security has a home among the left as well, albeit in less theological terms. Cries to intervene in failed states or to end the genocide Darfur are frequently couched in terms of both morality and national security, on the grounds that such lawlessness and violence breeds international terrorism.

Yet the greatest push-back would come from neoconservatives, particularly those like the Carnegie Endowment’s Robert Kagan, who are advising John McCain. They helped shovel dirt over the original practice of détente and have worked tirelessly to promote the notion that the U.S. can only be secure if it exercises a “benevolent hegemony” over the globe – a hegemony which can admit of no other nation (let alone an autocratic one) claiming a sphere of influence. Given that the battle against the relatively smaller menace of radical Islam was proclaimed (by neocon lion Norman Podhoretz) to be World War IV, there’s a good bet that a resurgent Russia will be greeted with even more robust hyperbole (if that’s even possible).

There has always been a tension between America’s professed values and the practice of her foreign policy. At the end of the Cold War, we were lulled into believing that America power had banished the era of moral ambiguity forever. We believed, as Scheunemann said, that to acknowledge and accommodate a great power was a “relic of a bygone era.” The prerogatives of global power, once viewed as a means to an end, had become an end itself. There would be no trade-offs.

The U.S. may yet prevail on Russia to change course, to recognize the obvious: that it has nothing to fear from the U.S., and stands to gain far more by cooperating with the West than by bullying its former colonies. But the Russians may not listen to reason. They may argue that if the U.S. can claim hegemony over the globe, then they have a right to hegemony over their immediate neighbors. Try as it might, the U.S. may find itself confronted with choices it believed it no longer had to make.

Let’s hope we still possess the wisdom to make them.