To Accommodate That Preference

Daniel Larison writes:

Matthew Feeney writes:

It should worry Americans that Russia, straddling both Europe and Asia, will be able to dictate the pace of the twenty first century more and more. It looks like Russia’s influence will continue to be exerted under corrupt and illegitimate governments with a demonstrable disregard for civil liberties and expansionist mindset. Whoever is the President this time next year (probably Obama) should make more of an effort to establish good economic and diplomatic relations with countries still under Russia’s shadow, especially countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, in order to limit the amount of damage an presidency like Putin’s can inflict.

It seems unlikely that Russia “will be able to dictate the pace of the twenty first century more and more.” Russian demographic decline is one reason why Russia will be relatively less influential as the century wears on, but it will continue to exert influence among its neighbors through the energy it supplies to them and the rest of Europe. That influence shouldn’t particularly worry Americans. As things stand now, the U.S. has reasonably good relations with almost all of Russia’s neighbors (except Belarus), and almost all of Russia’s neighbors currently have reasonably good relations with Russia (except Georgia). One good way to wreck the latter is to cultivate relationships with Russia’s neighbors as part of a deliberate policy of containing Russian influence. The Russian government is already prone to characterize U.S. moves in the region as anti-Russian, so the worst thing the U.S. could do would be to lend substance to those fears. This is what the U.S. did for the better part of the last decade, and the unfortunate results speak for themselves.

A recent article in The American Interest by Samuel Charap and Mikhail Troitskiy discussed how U.S. and Russian policies toward ex-Soviet republics have been trapped in patterns of bad habits established during the last twenty years. Charap and Troitskiy argue that “the goal of bolstering post-Soviet Eurasian sovereignties somehow became conflated with the need to counter all forms of Russian influence there.” I would argue that the two have become so thoroughly conflated that many Americans tend to see any increase of Russian influence as a compromise of the sovereignty of its neighbors, and these same people seem to regard the negation of Russian influence as more important than the effects this may have on Russia’s neighbors.

The authors go on to say that the U.S. approach is outdated and ignores contemporary political realities:

U.S. advocates of geopolitical tit-for-tat tend to overlook the fact that over the course of the past twenty years the former-Soviet republics (with several prominent exceptions involving separatist disputes) have fully consolidated their sovereignty and nation-building projects. They have also developed a decent record of withstanding pressure from both Washington and Moscow when they deem it necessary.

They also make a number of interesting recommendations for changing the bad habits of both U.S. and Russian policy, and conclude with the following:

These steps—transparency, consultation and appropriate rhetoric—can erase the muscle memory of past policies and put an end to pointless tug-of-war games rendered obsolete by more than twenty years of post-Soviet history. While great-power bargaining conducted “behind the backs” of the post-Soviet Eurasian states is definitely not a policy option in the 21st century, zero-sum games in the region do not serve their interests either—nor those of the United States and Russia.

As the U.S. discovered in at least two ex-Soviet states in the last decade, when the U.S. forces Russia’s neighbors to choose between them and us, pluralities or majorities in these countries will typically favor Russia for economic, political, and cultural reasons. A significant percentage of the population in all ex-Soviet republics would prefer to have good relations with both the U.S. and Russia, and it is in the American interest to accommodate that preference. There is not much of a constituency in any of these countries for a policy that favors the U.S. at the expense of good relations with Russia. If U.S. policy treats the region as a zero-sum competition, the U.S. will end up losing influence in most of these states.