"New" Russia

Memories of Containment

Coming to Grips With Russia’s New Nerve

By JAMES TRAUB

We all must think anew about Russia. But this process will prove harder for some of us than for others. When I grew up in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Soviet Union had already begun to look like the Ottoman Empire on its last legs; the face of Soviet Communism belonged to Leonid Brezhnev, with his drooping cheeks and beetle brows and thick, square glasses.

What was there to fear from this pitiful giant? In my left-wing, antiwar, social democratic hothouse world, anti-Communism seemed almost as absurd as Communism. John Kennedy’s call in 1961 to “bear any burden” in the struggle between two world systems was as remote to us as the sectarian debates of the 1930s between Trotskyites, Shachtmanites and so on.

We were, unlike an older generation of “cold war liberals,” anti-anti-Communists. Fear of the spread of Communism had gotten us into Vietnam, and rationalized American support for right-wing dictators across the third world. That fear, to us, was thus a far more dangerous force in the world than the thing that we as a country were afraid of — Soviet and Chinese expansionism.

“The war against Communism is over,” declared George McGovern, our tribune, in 1972. Several years later, a much more centrist figure, President Jimmy Carter, would lament the “inordinate fear of Communism” that he said dominated public discussion of foreign policy. (That remark looked slightly less sage after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.)

Of course, the Soviet Union continued to keep a chokehold on its own extended empire, sending tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968; and it kept the pot of insurgency bubbling across Africa and Asia. Yet, drained of all of its ideological attraction and much of its menace, Russia just didn’t seem to me very important, or at least very interesting. In “A New Foreign Policy for the United States,” a book written in 1969 that I read in college a few years later, Hans Morgenthau described the Soviet Union as a conservative and defensive power, driven by traditional national interests rather than ideology, and preoccupied above all with avoiding nuclear war with the United States. For all its bluster, it seemed eminently containable.

Russia had, in fact, been successfully contained; this was the era of summitry, détente and arms control treaties. A new generation of hardliners, soon to be known as “neoconservatives” and championed by Ronald Reagan, denounced the rapprochement as naïve; but their dark view of Russia seemed to us at odds with reality.

When I visited Georgia this summer, I felt like I had entered a time warp. Everyone in Tbilisi talked about Russia the way people had in the United States in, say, 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis. Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, said to me: “The Russians talk about globalization, of course. But behind this is an absolutely black and white picture: It’s ours. It’s theirs. Everybody is enemy or vassal.” Russia was a nation of “bandits” — predatory, insatiable, calculating. “And they are cynical about it — they know that no one will fight for us.”

It all seemed hyperbolic, and possibly paranoid — a neocon nightmare in the Caucasus. But the Georgians had spent almost two centuries under the Russian boot. And then, a month later, Russia sent its tanks into Georgia, and Mr. Rondeli’s worldview looked a great deal less far-fetched. The Georgians, of course, had provided a provocation by launching an assault on South Ossetia, the breakaway region on its border with Russia. But when the Russian Army not only ejected the Georgians from South Ossetia but moved further into Georgia, occupied major cities and destroyed infrastructure, the safety of the Ossetians began to look like little more than a pretext. Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, had apparently decided to teach Georgia, and its flamboyantly pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili, a lesson they would not soon forget.

But what is that lesson? That is the question the West must answer.

Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, said last week that, like other countries, Russia “has regions where it has privileged interests,” adding that Russia has friendly relations with countries in its sphere of influence. Presumably this was meant more as an assertion of right than as a statement of fact. Moscow has amicable relations with Armenia and Belarus, which comport themselves with suitable deference, but extremely turbulent relations with Ukraine and Georgia, which have openly allied themselves with the West. Perhaps President Medvedev was trying to express delicately the view that Russia could have on its borders only enemies or vassals.

This was plainly a very different Russia, if not from the containable one I grew up with, then certainly from the nascent democracy of the 1990s that aspired to join the West. Many American officials and analysts have condemned Russia’s violation of Georgian sovereignty in language very much like that of the Georgians. Vice President Dick Cheney in Tbilisi last week told the Georgians they had endured “an illegal, unilateral attempt to change your country’s borders by force.”

But it’s not only cold warriors like Mr. Cheney who have characterized Russia as a rogue state. Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus, former officials in the Clinton administration, compared Russia’s assault on Georgia with Hitler’s march on Czechoslovakia, airily justified by the alleged need to protect ethnic Germans. For the first time in almost 30 years — at least since the invasion of Afghanistan — Russia has come to be seen as a threat to world order.

But though widely shared, this view is not universal. A number of scholars and diplomats argue that Russia acted not out of an age-old impulse for territorial expansion, or the wish to banish the humiliation and contraction of recent years, but in response to a series of intolerable provocations. It was we, not they, this argument goes, who had violated the status quo.

“American unilateralism in the Balkans,” wrote Flynt Leverett, another former Clinton diplomat, “along with planned deployments of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and support for ‘color revolutions’ in former Soviet republics, trampled clearly stated Russian redlines.” This was, I suppose, the kind of view I once would have embraced, though I don’t think I would have equated support for democracies with missile deployment.

These two pictures offer very different understandings of the nature of Russia in the Putin era: It is either an expansionist, belligerent power whose ambitions are insatiable, or a “normal” state seeking to restore influence and regional control along its borders, commensurate with its growing wealth and power.

If the first, Russia had no right to demand acceptance of its “sphere of influence.” Invading a neighbor who poses no threat to you or others is, as President Bush put it, “unacceptable in the 21st century.”

If, on the other hand, Russia was essentially demanding its due, then the moralistic response was inappropriate (not to mention hypocritical), and America should acknowledge the legitimacy of Russia’s concerns. The author Francis Fukuyama offered a variation on this theme, asserting that “an adversely shifting global power balance” means that the United States is no longer in a position to enforce its will, whatever the merits of the case.

How you think about the nature and legitimacy of Russia’s ambitions largely determines the response you advocate. Mr. Leverett argues that “America’s promotion of a dubious ‘democratic’ movement in Georgia — or in other ethnically divided and unstable post-Soviet states — is not as important to Western interests as working with Russia on the most significant energy, economic and international security challenges of our time.” He and Mr. Fukuyama would quash the ambitions of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO; more broadly, they would reduce the grasp of American policy to reflect our more modest reach.

If, on the other hand, Mr. Putin’s Russia has embarked on a drive for regional hegemony — if not through conquest, then through intimidation and economic blackmail — then the policy question is: How can the West block Russia’s ambitions? Mr. Cheney promised the Georgians $1 billion in reconstruction aid and vowed to redouble American support for Georgia’s campaign to join NATO — an absolute redline for Russia.

Georgia’s fate, however, rests not with President Bush, but with his successor. John McCain, a longtime friend of Georgia and President Saakashvili, has threatened “severe, long-term consequences” for United States-Russia relations, and has proposed offering security guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia, including NATO membership. Barack Obama, whose natural inclinations are less punitive, has also declared that we “must review all aspects of relations with Russia,” though he and several leading Democratic policy figures have been more cautious on the question of NATO.

Of course, American policy will not be shaped only by our view of Russia. Our European allies, especially Germany and France, are more dependent on Russian energy and trade than we are, and far more directly threatened by Russian aggression. European officials, by and large, have been every bit as appalled by Russian behavior as Washington has been; but most have taken a less confrontational line. Sheer proximity made ideological anti-Communism an unaffordable luxury for Europe a generation ago; the same may be true for an anti-Russian posture today.

In America, though, where we do have the luxury, the struggle between Russia and Georgia feels almost Miltonic. Even some former ’60s peaceniks find themselves sounding like neocons, who no doubt would say the peaceniks have finally woken up to the truth. Or perhaps there’s another explanation: that there’s all the difference in the world between an enfeebled and defensive empire, and a nation emboldened by vast wealth and brimming with resentment at past humiliations. This Russia does not look so very containable.