Weekly Standard - 03.04.2002

The Weekly Standard

Putin's Progress

Russia joins the West

By Leon Aron
Prior to September 11, 2001, few would have predicted that Russia would back the United States so firmly in its response to the terrorist attacks. Now, after a remarkable show of solidarity and even crucial assistance to Washington and its allies, the question remains, why did Russia do it? Were its moves tactical, their effect destined to be short-lived? Or were they evidence of a deeper transformation of the U.S.-Russia relationship? Might they actually mean that the other nuclear superpower is moving toward not just occasional cooperation, but durable partnership with the West, perhaps even someday an alliance? Before attempting to tackle questions so fundamental to U.S. national security policy, let us recall what Russia did after the terrorist attacks:

SEPTEMBER 11. President Vladimir Putin was the first foreign leader to reach President George W. Bush on Air Force One. In addition, in a nationally televised statement to the American people, Putin called the attacks "a brazen challenge to the whole of humanity, at least to civilized humanity." He told Americans, "We are with you, we entirely and fully share and experience your pain. We support you." Further, Russia responded to the heightened state of alert of the U.S. armed forces by standing down its troops and canceling scheduled strategic bomber and missile exercises.

Within hours of the news from America, Russians began to take flowers, icons, burning candles, handwritten notes, and stuffed animals to the U.S. embassy on Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow and to the U.S. consulates in St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg. This would continue for days.

SEPTEMBER 12. Putin phoned Bush again to discuss cooperation against terrorism. The Central Blood Transfusion Station in Moscow announced a blood drive for the victims in the United States. The station was flooded with volunteer donors, as were the Russian Red Cross and the Ministry for Emergency Situations.

SEPTEMBER 13. By presidential decree, a national minute of silence at noon commemorated "the victims of the tragedy in the United States." Flags flew at half-mast, and television programs were interrupted with images from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

At Russia's instigation, the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council condemned the attacks in the strongest terms and pledged an "intensification" of cooperation "to fight the scourge of terrorism."

SEPTEMBER 22. With Russia's blessing, two C-130 U.S. military cargo planes and 100 U.S. military personnel arrived at an airbase near Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan.

SEPTEMBER 24. In a televised address to his nation, Putin announced that Russia had agreed to overflights by American and allied planes and to their use of former Soviet airbases in the Central Asian nations and had shared intelligence about the "infrastructure, locations, and training facilities of international terrorists."

SEPTEMBER 25. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that U.S. troops could use military facilities in Tajikistan to launch strikes into Afghanistan.

OCTOBER 3. More than 1,000 troops of the U.S. Army's Tenth Mountain Division landed in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan--the first regular U.S. Army infantry unit to be deployed on a combat mission in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

OCTOBER 3-4. Putin made the first visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels by any Russian or Soviet leader. After meetings with the secretary general, Putin announced Russia's "great readiness to cooperate and interact" with NATO. He also signaled a softening in Russia's opposition to further NATO enlargement, even including the three former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

OCTOBER 16. Putin announced the closing of two foreign military bases and listening posts, at Lourdes, Cuba, and Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.

The Lourdes complex, established in 1964, was Russia's largest military base and electronic listening post in the Western Hemisphere. It housed up to 1,600 full-time personnel. In addition to gathering and analyzing U.S. communications, Lourdes reportedly guided Russian intelligence agents in North America, provided links to the Russian spy satellite network, sent instructions to Russian ships and submarines, and tracked U.S. naval activities in the Caribbean. Russia decided to abandon Lourdes over the "complete" opposition of the Cuban government, which called the closing "a grave threat to Cuba's security" and a "special gift" to President Bush. In Moscow, Communist and nationalist deputies in the Duma were similarly indignant.

The Soviet Union, then Russia, had maintained the base at Cam Ranh Bay since 1979.

NOVEMBER 14. Putin stated that Russia was "prepared to expand cooperation with NATO and we are prepared to go as far as the Atlantic alliance is prepared to go."

NOVEMBER 14-15. At the summit in Crawford, Texas, Putin and Bush agreed to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals from around 6,000 weapons to 1,500-2,000.

DECEMBER 7. NATO and Russia agreed to set up a new decision-making council giving Russia greater say in certain NATO activities. The council replaced the Permanent Joint Council established in 1997.

DECEMBER 13. While calling the unilateral U.S. decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty a "mistake," Putin told his nation that it did not present a threat to their national security. He went on to say that the "current level of relations" between the two nations "should not only be retained, but also used to work out the new framework of a strategic relationship."

Despite the end of the ABM regime, Putin reiterated Russia's support for "radical, irreversible, and verifiable" reductions in nuclear arsenals and its intent to formalize the agreement reached at Crawford.

SEPTEMBER THROUGH DECEMBER. Throughout the fall of 2001, Russia--the largest independent oil exporter, with 7 percent of the world market--resisted demands by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to reduce exports by 100,000-150,000 barrels a day and thus shielded the U.S. and Western European economies from the adverse effects of higher energy costs. Russia's example prompted the other two leading independent exporters, Mexico and Norway, to follow suit.

On November 15, after several weeks of intense pressure by OPEC, Russia promised a symbolic cut of 30,000 barrels per day (or 1 percent of Russia's daily exports). As the market registered the trivial magnitude of this cut, the price of crude oil in New York fell almost 12 percent to $17.45 a barrel, the lowest in more than two years. Eventually Moscow agreed to cut exports by 150,000 barrels in the first quarter of 2002. But even that cut, should it materialize, would represent only 2 percent of total production and would largely reflect increased domestic consumption during the coldest winter months.



TO ACCOUNT for this impressive record of sympathy and helpfulness post-September 11, the American media have offered three principal explanations, in various combinations: Russia's behavior (a) amounted to a tactical quid pro quo, (b) was all Russia could do since it "couldn't afford" military expenditures, or (c) reflected the whim of a single leader. The first two of these are easily dismissed.

According to the quid pro quo theory, Moscow was actually pursuing five short-term objectives. It wanted to prevent the United States from withdrawing from the ABM treaty; facilitate Russian entry into the World Trade Organization; prevent or delay the second round of NATO expansion; reschedule and secure partial forgiveness of Soviet-era debt to the lenders of the Paris Club; and mute criticism of alleged Russian human rights abuses in the war in Chechnya.

More than five months later, not one of those alleged goals has been attained. The United States has served notice of its withdrawal from the ABM treaty; no exceptions have been made to WTO membership requirements for Russia; NATO is expected to announce new members at the end of the year; the Paris Club has not softened its position about repayment on schedule; and after a brief lull, U.S. officials are back to criticizing Moscow's Chechnya policy. If Russia was aiming to secure a quid pro quo, it failed totally.

Budgetary pressures have been proffered to explain Moscow's insistence on radical cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and the abandonment of Lourdes and Cam Ranh Bay. As for the base closings, Russia paid Havana the annual $200 million rent for Lourdes in crude oil and spare parts for obsolete Soviet military equipment--hardly a heavy burden for a country with a nearly $300 billion GDP. It leased Cam Ranh rent free.

Whatever the savings, the economic explanation for Russia's willingness to part with 4,000 nuclear weapons is simply unsound. Nations determine how much to spend on the military not by consulting balance sheets but by examining their national priorities, which are shaped by people's or rulers' passions, such as fear, hatred, or pride. Thus, China, with per capita GDP about half Russia's, maintains the world's largest army (almost three times larger than Russia's) and has increased defense spending by 8-10 percent annually over the past decade. The Soviet Union itself, for that matter, was one of history's most spectacular negations of the policy-by-affordability theory of military expenditures. In a country with 10,000 nuclear warheads and 4 million men under arms, 35 percent of hospital beds were in facilities without hot water, and half of schools had no central heating, running water, or indoor toilets.

By contrast, the theory that Vladimir Putin's idiosyncratic preferences explain Russia's course since September 11 cannot be dismissed out of hand. Putin has clearly made an enormous personal investment in Russia's policies, from his televised address to the American people, to the overruling of his own minister of defense on the use of Russian air space and former Soviet bases, to his highly publicized speeches, statements, and interviews.

Yet it is hard to imagine a leader less impulsive than Putin. A former mid-ranking officer in the Soviet foreign-intelligence bureaucracy, Putin is no Boris Yeltsin, pushing and pulling the nation toward his vision of what is good for Russia, sometimes at enormous political and even personal risk. The cautious Putin takes pride in being a conciliator and consensus-builder. Mindful of public opinion, he is jealous of his astronomical public approval ratings. Until he began implementing major economic reforms in his second year in office, he took care not to alienate any important political constituency, including the Communists. Abrupt policy departures are not in such a man's repertoire.



INSTEAD, the true explanation for Russia's post-9/11 behavior lies elsewhere. Far from being a startling departure, as the Western press imagined, Putin's response to the war on terrorism was, in fact, fundamentally consistent with the 1990s foreign policy of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin--the man, after all, who handpicked Putin as prime minister and heir apparent. This course in foreign policy, moreover, was itself a product of the Russian nation's new domestic direction--the new course charted by the anti-Communist revolution.

Never in the four and a half centuries of the modern Russian state has there been a Russia less imperialist, less militarized, and less threatening to its neighbors and the world than the one forged in the 1990s. Between 1992 and 1999, Russia abandoned its empire and underwent a demilitarization unprecedented for a country not defeated in a war and occupied by the victors. Defense spending has plummetted from at least 30 percent of GDP to less than 5 percent. By 1995, Russia had repatriated 1,200,000 troops and civilian personnel (plus 500,000 dependents) and returned to its 17th-century borders. Last September Putin proudly noted that for the first time in its history Russia was spending more on education than on defense.

The army Russia inherited from the Soviet Union was 4 million strong; today's active duty force of 1 million is slated to be cut by 350,000 by 2003. The president has approved a transition to an all-volunteer force by 2010.

Russia's relationship with NATO, too, has been gradually transformed. When NATO was about to expand eastward by admitting--over Russia's strenuous objections--former Warsaw Pact members Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, Yeltsin nevertheless chose to sign the NATO-Russia Founding Act in Paris on May 27, 1997. It committed both sides to "building together a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principles of democracy."

Russia's new relationship with the Western powers was severely tested in the Balkans. Yet Russia supported the efforts of the United States and its allies to end the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, voted for the U.N. sanctions against Yugoslavia, and provided peacekeepers. In 1998 Moscow again joined the economic sanctions against Yugoslavia and voted for the U.N. Security Council resolution demanding the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo.

Though angered by the March 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and against the urging of its own nationalist Left, Russia provided no military or material assistance to Slavic and Orthodox Yugoslavia. After Yeltsin fired his anti-American, pro-Yugoslavia prime minister Yevgeny Primakov and appointed former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin as his personal envoy for the Kosovo conflict, Moscow became actively involved in ending the Kosovo war. By June, the United States and Russia had agreed on a common negotiating position. After they presented a joint ultimatum to Milosevic on June 3, Yugoslavia agreed to a settlement.

As regards nuclear weapons, Moscow first proposed to the United States a mutual reduction of nuclear arsenals to 1,500 weapons each in August 1999. A year later it adopted a plan for a unilateral radical downsizing of its strategic rocket forces. Putin fired his defense minister and the head of the strategic rocket forces for opposing these reductions.


YET THE roots of Russia's behavior following September 11 go deeper still. If Russia's foreign policy has changed, it is because in the past decade Russia itself has become a changed country.

In politics, Russian voters decisively chose the pro-reform, pro-Western Boris Yeltsin over the anti-Western, nationalist Communist alternative in the 1996 presidential election. They reaffirmed their choice when they snubbed the "popular patriotic" Left in the December 1999 parliamentary election, and again three months later when they gave Vladimir Putin a 53-29 percent victory over Communist Gennadi Zyuganov.

Today, the Duma has a stable pro-reform majority, as reflected in its 268-101 vote of support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Not surprisingly, then, 71 percent of Russians surveyed last October approved of close cooperation between Russia and the United States in the fight against international terrorism. A month later only 13 percent of the national sample thought of the United States as their country's enemy--down from 48 percent in 1999.

On the economic front, the revolution Yeltsin led has become irreversible. Since Yeltsin's resignation on New Year's Eve 1999, the fierce battles of the mid-1990s over privatization and economic liberalization have yielded to consensus among the political elite, including the moderate Left, that prosperity and stability can be achieved only through a market economy and participation in the world economic system.

Today, the private sector produces at least 70 percent of Russia's GDP. Despite all-out opposition from the Communists in the Duma as recently as last summer, urban land can now be privately owned, bought, and sold. Taxes on corporate profits were slashed from 35 percent to 24 percent effective January 1, 2002. A new labor code has made it much easier to hire and fire.

Other reforms first outlined by Yeltsin in 1997 that are now politically feasible include the radical restructuring and partial privatization of the pension system, the phasing out of enormous state subsidies for rent and utilities, and the introduction of market competition in the supply of gas, water, and electricity. In the pipeline are banking reforms and the breakup of state monopolies in rail transportation, gas, and electricity.

Finally, improvements in the standard of living, interrupted by the 1998 financial crisis, have resumed. Although the main beneficiaries have been the young, the college-educated, and the urban, millions of Russians have been given hope for a better life. The average income rose 6 percent in 2001, real wages 20 percent, and pensions 23 percent. There were 18 cars per 100 households in 1990; 42 in 2001. The produce shortages and ubiquitous lines of the Soviet era have been forgotten. Fresh and delicious food is available everywhere. For the first time since the late 1920s, Russia not only feeds its people and livestock but is a net exporter of grain.

In the past two years the number of Internet users has grown 40 percent to almost one in six Russian households. Because of the profusion of private institutions of higher education, there were 75 percent more colleges in Russia and 50 percent more students in 2000 than in 1992. Overwhelmingly private-sector, the post-Soviet middle class has proved resilient. It has grown from near zero in 1991 to between one-fourth and one-third of the Russian population.

In dealing with both the vociferous anti-Western Left and the Cold War defense and foreign-affairs bureaucracies, Putin's hand has been strengthened by economic growth of 4 percent in 1999, 8 percent in 2000, and 5-6percent in 2001. Introduced on January 1, 2001, the 13 percent flat tax on personal income--Putin called it "revolutionary" and the "lowest in Europe"--boosted collection of personal income taxes by 30 percent in the first half of 2001.

Meeting with American journalists on the eve of his departure for the Crawford summit last November, President Putin pointed to the domestic sources of Russia's post-September 11 policies:

"If anyone thinks that Russia can again become an enemy of the United States, those people do not understand what has happened in Russia, what country it has become. What the Russian leadership is doing today is dictated not only by the political philosophy of Russian leaders. Russia's actions are dictated by its domestic situation and public opinion. And the most important is that an overwhelming majority of the Russian population want to live [in a country with] effectively functioning democratic institutions. An overwhelming majority of the Russian population want to live [in a country with a] social market economy, want to feel themselves and their country to be an integral part of modern civilization. . . . People want freely to move around the world, to use to the fullest all the advantages offered by normal democratic society."

The Cold War, in other words, is never coming back. The Russian public will not allow it. To be sure, U.S.-Russian relations will have their ups and downs. Among the tests ahead are a greater role for Russia in pan-European security and decision-making as NATO expands, human rights in Chechnya, censorship of the electronic media in Russia, Moscow's selective prosecution of environmental activists and scholars for contacts with the foreign press, and--most urgent of all--the challenges associated with nuclear arms reductions and the "axis of evil."

In the post-ABM world, the diplomats will have to reconcile Russia's desire for minutely negotiated deep cuts in nuclear arsenals with the Bush administration's preference for informal agreements and its plan to store rather than destroy the dismantled warheads.

Washington's policies toward the "axis of evil," meanwhile, are bound to impinge on Russia as a regional power. Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are all within Russia's centuries-old sphere of influence. Moscow wants to play a role, in particular, in the pending review and restructuring of U.N. sanctions against Iraq and in pressuring Baghdad to readmit weapons inspectors.

In addition, Russia is Iraq's largest trading partner, supplying Baghdad with $700 million in goods under the U.N.-mandated oil-for-food program. Iraq owes an estimated $8 billion to the Soviet Union and Russia, and Moscow wants to make sure that debt is honored by any post-Saddam government. The Kremlin is also under pressure from Russian oil companies to protect their lucrative contracts with Baghdad.

Iran, similarly, is Russia's third-largest arms customer (after China and India). An agreement signed last year could bring Moscow $300 million in annual sales to Iran for several years--a hefty sum for a starved military-industrial complex. In addition to conventional weapons, Russia exports missile and nuclear technology to Iran. Long an irritant in U.S.-Russian relations, these transfers are viewed with greater concern than ever by the White House.

Yet even these pending issues in U.S.-Russian relations, serious though they are, are essentially short-term--whereas Russia's post-September 11 behavior indicates a profound shift in national priorities, the fruit of a revolutionary decade. There are good reasons to believe that Russia's gradual reorientation toward the West over the course of the 1990s reached a point of no return in the autumn of 2001. At the very least, September 11 made it unmistakably plain that Russia, in its great journey forward, is fast approaching what Lord Byron in "Don Juan" called the "post-house, where the Fates / Change horses, making history change its tune."

Leon Aron is resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.