Daniel Larison writes:
So in less
than eight years Bush went from a strategy of “keep Russia in the tent” to a
strategy of “make Russia democratic” to a strategy of “isolate Russia by
expanding NATO as far as possible into the former Soviet Union.”
Pursuing one
of these strategies might have worked. Pursuing two of them was very risky, but
could potentially have succeeded with a lot of high level attention and a
healthy serving of luck.
Pursuing three entirely different strategies in such a
short period of time was begging for failure, and with such wild swings in
policy it should come as no surprise that when Bush left office relations with
Russia were worse than at any point since the end of the Cold War.
As Moscow saw things, there was only a very brief
period when the U.S. was trying to keep Russia “in the tent.”
Putin came to
believe that his early cooperation on Afghanistan had been repaid with a series
of slights and provocations, and unsurprisingly he responded with increasing
antagonism. That started with the earlier expansion of NATO in 2002, and the
next attempted round of expansion simply made things worse.
It’s worth adding
that Moscow didn’t see the democracy promotion and NATO expansion agendas as
entirely distinct from one another, but as part of a coordinated effort to roll
back Russian influence in the former USSR and destabilize the regime at the
same time.
The political changes in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan between
2003 and 2005 were seen as part of this effort, which U.S. support for the new
leaders in these countries seemed to confirm.
As it turned out, Moscow was crediting Bush’s
Russia policy with more coherence than it seems to have possessed, but the
resulting distrust and hostility were nonetheless easily foreseeable
consequences of these policies.
The most troubling part of Baker’s account of
is that the Bush administration was conducting a dangerous and confrontational
Russia policy without understanding how the Russians would react to any of it.
Despite pursuing a number of policies that predictably antagonized Russia,
worsened its relations with its neighbors, and harmed U.S.-Russian relations,
the Bush administration seemed perpetually clueless as to why Russia was
becoming more antagonistic.
In 1990 I though the best post-cold war policy from the U.S. ( and I guess the U.K.) perspective was a strategy of pretty much giving the Russian leaders what they wanted, on condition that they kept their hands off the smaller countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union. This probably would have meant not promoting "democracy" (not a big loss when you consider how the U.S. defines and practices democracy in practice) and allowing the Russians to do what they thought appropriate vs. the Chechens.
ReplyDeleteI still think this strategy is appropriate and doable, though I admit that it didn't occur to me that the Western elites would have wanted to loot Russia.