US-Russian Relations After Genoa: No Cause for Celebration
by Srdja Trifkovic
September 1, 2001

When Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin finished their second meeting, at the end of the G8 summit in Genoa last month, the proponents of the missile defense plan and of NATO's further expansion claimed a victory for their policies. They alleged that the Russian leader is now reconciled to his country's incapacity to resist either scheme, and that Putin's inability to say "nyet" amounts to a blank check for the United States to proceed without pause on both fronts. Some have also invoked the results of the summit to undercut criticism by France and Germany of those projects.

Neoconservative triumphalism is no substitute for coherence, and the apparent ability of this Administration to go ahead with "Son of Star Wars," or to extend NATO deep into Russia's back yard, is no proof that those policies are desirable or justified. Those plans entail hidden political costs that may become fully apparent only when it is too late to reverse the decision. There are five main areas of concern.

1. Rapprochement between Moscow and Peking

It is in the interest of the United States to prevent the emergence of an alliance between other powers that would be directed against it. One consequence of the missile defense project is the ongoing improvement in Russo-Chinese relations that does not have the character of a formal alliance as yet. Their current rapprochement may nevertheless create the groundwork for its emergence if Moscow and Peking continue to feel threatened by what they perceive as American unilateralism. Putin came to Genoa only days after signing a landmark friendship treaty with China that was openly designed to challenge American influence. He and his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin, were careful to emphasize that they were not creating a military alliance, but they also issued a joint statement supporting the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972, which America says is obsolete.  After the signing ceremony in the Kremlin, Mr. Jiang said that the friendship treaty "will bring Russian-Chinese friendship from generation to generation. This is a milestone in the development of Russian-Chinese relations."

The two nations were thus reacting primarily to the "Star Wars" program, which they fear will compel them to engage in a costly arms race that neither can afford. They also fear that the energy with which Washington is pushing ahead with its plans is a sign that America intends to strengthen its power in the world regardless of their interests. The particular concern of the Chinese is President Bush's declaration that the United States would do "whatever it took to help Taiwan defend itself," which amounted to the revival of the defense treaty defunct since 1979. The administration also announced that it would sell submarines, destroyers, missiles and electronic equipment to Taiwan, although this decision is in violation of the Taiwan Relations Act that restricted sales to defensive weapons. The subsequent permission to Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian to meet U.S. congressmen during stopovers in the United States amounted to granting Taiwan semi-official status, in violation of the key "one-China" commitment.

The treaty seeks to settle permanently the centuries old border disputes between Russia and China that nearly led to war in 1969. The two leaders said the treaty was not aimed at other countries and had no secret military clauses, but an accompanying statement in support of the ABM treaty of 1972 shows the depth of concern in Moscow and Beijing over missile defense. It said: "Russia and China stress the basic importance of the ABM treaty, which is a cornerstone of strategic stability and the basis for reducing offensive weapons, and speak out for maintaining the treaty in its current form."

2. Russia remains an adversary

If both missile defense and a new round of NATO expansion will go ahead, regardless of Moscow's misgivings, this will perpetuate an inherently adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow. Forget the soothing NATOcrats' rhetoric; to appreciate the effect of enlargement on Russia's political establishment just imagine the reaction in this country if China were to sign a pact with Mexico, Cuba, and the republics of Central America, if it equipped and trained their armies, and guaranteed the inviolability of the Rio Grande frontier. The first victims were Moscow's own friends of the West. A few years ago Alexei Arbatov, the former deputy chairman of the Defense Committee of the Russian Parliament, complained that "many of those who have been trying to persuade the United States not to expand NATO are the people who have staked their careers – and probably more than that – on Russia's close and fair cooperation with the United States."

Those people are now finished, disillusioned and discredited. In their place the realists are back in charge in Moscow. The professions of Western benevolence unburden their strategic thinking, which now entails an unabashed reliance on nuclear weapons and their possible first use. This is hugely detrimental to American security, and cannot be offset by any conjectural benefit of extending pax Americana to the suburbs of St. Petersburg. The only rational reason for a country to enter into an alliance is to enhance its security. Even in its weakened state Russia remains a nuclear power, with nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads. If NATO enlargement is effected and if America presses ahead with its antimissile system, Mr. Putin has warned that Russia will retaliate by putting more nuclear warheads on to each of its ballistic missiles. While this may be of no consequence to the denizens of Riga or Vilnius, it should focus the minds in New York, Seattle, or Omaha. By extending its protectorate in Eastern Europe the United States is acting irrationally because it is diminishing, not enhancing its own security.

3. America will overextend its security guarantees to third countries

Another cost of the forthcoming NATO expansion is the security guarantee itself. Article V of the NATO Charter clearly states that an attack on one is an attack on all, an automatic guarantee of aid to an ally in distress. The United States will supposedly provide its protective cover to a host of new clients right in Russia's geopolitical backyard, in an area that had never, ever been deemed vital to this country's interests. But once included, those flatlands will become a permanent fixture of our foreign policy establishment's mindset. This is a form of "vital-interest-creep": the United States will assume the nominal responsibility for open-ended maintenance of a host of disputed frontiers that were drawn often arbitrarily by communists, and bear little relation to ethnicity or history. At no visible benefit to itself America will underwrite the freezing in time of a post-Soviet outcome that is neither inherently stable nor necessarily "just" or "democratic."

That Washington and Jefferson would be horrified is obvious; even Metternich would frown, not on principle but because the policy is simply illogical. It means two things: either the United States is serious that it would risk a thermonuclear war for the sake of, say, Estonia's border with Russia, which is insane, or it is not serious, which is both frivolous and dangerous. President Clinton naturally leaned to the latter option. He tried to smoke but not inhale by questioning the meaning of words and asserting that Article V "does not define what actions constitute ‘an attack' or prejudge what Alliance decisions might then be made in such circumstances." He claimed the right of the United States "to exercise individual and collective judgment over this question."

This classic fudge cannot be the basis of serious policy. This is an echo of previous Western experiments with security guarantees in the region – of Czechoslovakia's carve-up in October 1938, or Poland's destruction in September 1939 – which provide a warning that promises nonchalantly given today may turn into bounced checks or smoldering cities tomorrow. Over seven decades later the lesson of Locarno for the Bush administration is clear: security guarantees that are not based on the provider's complete resolve to fight a fully blown war to fulfill them are worse than no guarantees at all. They are certain to be challenged.

4. Division of Europe will be perpetrated

There is another geopolitical price to pay. By having its nose rubbed in its defeat Russia will remain an adversary at a time when its economic and demographic weakness may result in a violent Asiatic scramble for its natural resources and increasingly depopulated territories along its southern rim and east of the Urals. By extending its cordon sanitaire around Russia the United States indirectly encourages the belief that the bear may soon be up for grabs. A coherent long-term policy based on American interest would dictate a very different strategy: Far from being treated as a threat, Russia should be helped on the road to recovery so that it can become the new antemurale christiensitatis as we enter the century that is certain to see a renewed assault of militant Islam on an enfeebled Europe.

NATO extension pleases some East European ethnic lobbies that never see the forest for the trees, but it will jeopardize Europe's chances of long-term survival. The United States should understand why some former Soviet satellites have a vested geopolitical interest and an even more acute psychological need to treat Russia as the enemy, but it should never allow itself to be seduced by their obsessions. They all proclaim their undying devotion to the ideological assumptions of the new NATO but their real agenda is twofold: to have a western (read: American) security guarantee against Russia, and to strengthen their own position vis-à-vis those neighbors – mostly again Russians – with whom they have an ongoing or potential dispute. NATO membership may even embolden some to revive territorial or ethnic claims that would have otherwise remained dormant. The experience of Turkey shows that the alliance has no means to stop one of its members from aggressive intent or adventurous conduct.

Future new members know – and rather like – what Western NATO apologists so unconvincingly deny: that extending NATO into Eastern Europe is a real threat to Russia, and that it recreates the division of the continent that was supposed to be lifted a decade ago. Their fears of Russia may be based on some real experiences of yesteryear. Instead of pandering to their insecurity the United States should encourage them to comprehend what a few farsighted "real" Westerners already see: that we all need a Russian economic revival focused on its links with Europe, and a strategic understanding with Washington based on the underlying common interest with the United States in keeping Islamic marauders at bay. A litmus test of their preparedness for the "Western" club should be their readiness to follow, in relation to Russia, the Franco-German post-1945 model of overcoming ancient grievances.

5. Global hegemonists win again; America loses

Last but by no means least, NATO expansion is bad for America is that it strengthens the unholy alliance of one-world multilateralists and neoconservative global interventionists who run the show in Washington and who now see the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a permanent tool for the execution of their policies. This misuse of NATO by the enemies of the Old Republic is a recent phenomenon, and painful to those of us who appreciated the alliance's key function during the Cold War.

In NATO's early days and until the fall of communism America's leading role in the alliance was not incompatible with a foreign policy based on the pragmatically defined national interest and true to the spirit of the Republic. NATO came into being as an implicitly temporary arrangement to prevent Stalin's invasion of Western Europe. It was America's response to a dramatic moment in European history when, had it been left to its own devices, the Old Continent could have succumbed to totalitarian might. Its creators never thought of the U.S. role as permanent: Eisenhower told Congress at the time that American troops would not be needed along the Iron Curtain for more than ten years, by which time the Europeans would be able to defend themselves.

A decade turned into four, but with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact the stated rationale for NATO's existence had finally disappeared. Yet instead of proclaiming victory and closing shop, over the past decade the ruling duopoly in Washington has invented a new mission for NATO: that of the self-appointed promoter of democracy, protector of human rights, and guardian against instability. It was on those grounds, rather than in response to any supposed threat, that the Clinton Administration pushed for the admission of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary four years ago. In Mrs. Albright's words this expanded "the area in Europe where wars simply do not happen." It is important to note that under the new doctrine NATO's area of operations is no longer limited, and its "mandate" is entirely self-generated. Its war against Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 marked a decisive shift in NATO's mutation from a defensive alliance into a supranational security force based on the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention." The trusty keeper of the gate had become a roaming vigilante.

In world affairs this remarkable process has mirrored the longer and by now almost completed domestic evolution of the federal government into a Leviathan unbound by constitutional restraints. The lack of debate about missile defense or NATO's expansion is unsurprising, considering the dominant duopoly's identity of basic assumptions and its domestic consensus. Expansion was advocated in the Republican "Contract With America" and eagerly embraced by President Clinton in 1996. It suited both the globalist "left" and the hegemonist "right," for different reasons but with the same result: George Washington's warning against permanent alliances will now be violated in perpetuity. Reinvention of NATO as an organization based on the ideology of neoimperial interventionism proves yet again that foreign policy is an extension of domestic politics.

Finally, America's insistence on the missile shield and its curious lead in extending NATO may jeopardize its relations with some of its old allies in Western Europe. A few wise Frenchmen already suspect that the latter-day, U.S.-led Drang nach Osten is a poisoned chalice that the Germans will only accept to their peril. From a neoconservative, global-hegemonist point of view there is no better way to ensure American dominance in Europe in perpetuity than by preventing the long-overdue Russo-German rapprochement. This historic step remains the last unfulfilled prerequisite for a long period of stable peace throughout the Old Continent. NATO expansion will artificially postpone it in favor of a psychotic imperial utopia made in Washington that is utterly divorced from the interests, political traditions, and natural inclinations of the American people.

Srdja Trifkovic is the foreign affairs editor of Chronicles and Executive Director of the Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies. He received his BA in 1977, at the University of Sussex; his BA (1987), from the University of Zagreb, and Ph.D. (1990), from the University of Southampton. He was a broadcaster, producer, and news sub-editor at BBC External Services, London, 1980-86, and then went to work for the Voice of America, and was also South-East Europe correspondent for the US News & World Report. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution & Peace, in Stanford, California, 1991-2.