• Als Spam markieren
• Beitrag melden

• 
  Diese Gruppe Alles

• Archiv
• RSS-Feeds

• Kontakt
• Hilfe
• Impressum
• Datenschutz

Wrong on Russia

Wrong on Russia
By Stephen F. Cohen Published: July 1, 2008

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/01/opinion/edcohen.php

Neither of the two major American presidential candidates has
seriously addressed, or even seems fully aware of, what should be our
greatest foreign policy concern - Russia's singular capacity to
endanger or enhance our national security.

Despite its diminished status following the Soviet breakup in 1991,
Russia alone possesses weapons that can destroy the United States, a
military-industrial complex nearly America's equal in exporting arms,
vast quantities of questionably secured nuclear materials sought by
terrorists, and the planet's largest oil and natural gas reserves.

It also remains the world's largest territorial country, pivotally
situated in the West and the East, at the crossroads of colliding
civilizations, with strategic capabilities from Europe, Iran and other
Middle East nations to North Korea, China, India, Afghanistan and even
Latin America. All things considered, our national security may depend
more on Russia than Russia's does on us.

And yet U.S.-Russian relations are worse today than they have been in
20 years. The relationship includes almost as many serious conflicts
as it did during the cold war - among them, Kosovo, Iran, the former
Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, Venezuela, NATO expansion,
missile defense, access to oil and the Kremlin's internal politics -
and less actual cooperation, particularly in essential matters
involving nuclear weapons.

Even the current cold peace could be more dangerous than its
predecessor, for three reasons: First, its front line is not in Berlin
or the Third World but on Russia's own borders, where U.S. and NATO
military power is increasingly ensconced. Second, lethal dangers
inherent in Moscow's impaired controls over its vast stockpiles of
materials of mass destruction and thousands of missiles on hair-
trigger alert, a legacy of the state's disintegration in the 1990s,
exceed any such threats in the past. And third, also unlike before,
there is no effective domestic opposition to hawkish policies in
Washington or Moscow, only influential proponents and cheerleaders.



In the U.S. policy elite and media, the nearly unanimous answer is
that Russian President Vladimir Putin's antidemocratic domestic
policies and "neo-imperialism" destroyed that historic opportunity.
You don't have to be a Putin apologist to understand that this is not
an adequate explanation.

During the last eight years, Putin's foreign policies have been
largely a reaction to Washington's winner-take-all approach to Moscow
since the early 1990s, which resulted from a revised U.S. view of how
the cold war ended.

In that new triumphalist narrative, America "won" the 40-year conflict
and post-Soviet Russia was a defeated nation analogous to post-World
War II Germany and Japan - a nation without full sovereignty at home
or autonomous national interests abroad.

The policy implication of that bipartisan triumphalism, which persists
today, has been clear, certainly to Moscow. It meant that the United
States had the right to oversee Russia's post-Communist political and
economic development, as it tried to do directly in the 1990s, while
demanding that Moscow yield to U.S. international interests. It meant
Washington could break strategic promises to Moscow, as when the
Clinton administration began NATO's eastward expansion, and disregard
extraordinary Kremlin overtures, as when the Bush Administration
unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty and granted NATO membership
to countries even closer to Russia - despite Putin's crucial
assistance to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan after 9/11. It even
meant America was entitled to Russia's traditional sphere of security
and energy supplies, from the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia to Central
Asia and the Caspian.

Such U.S. behavior was bound to produce a Russian backlash. It came
under Putin, but it would have been the reaction of any strong Kremlin
leader. Those U.S. policies - widely viewed in Moscow as an
"encirclement" designed to keep Russia weak and to control its
resources - have helped revive an assertive Russian nationalism,
destroy the once strong pro-American lobby, and inspire widespread
charges that concessions to Washington are "appeasement," even
"capitulationism." The Kremlin may have overreacted, but the cause and
effect threatening a new cold war are clear.

Because the first steps in this direction were taken in Washington, so
must be initiatives to reverse it. Three are essential and urgent: a
U.S. diplomacy that treats Russia as a sovereign great power with
commensurate national interests; an end to NATO expansion before it
reaches Ukraine, which would risk something worse than cold war; and a
full resumption of negotiations to sharply reduce and fully secure all
nuclear stockpiles and to prevent the impending arms race, which
requires ending or agreeing on U.S. plans for a missile defense system
in Europe.

American presidential campaigns are supposed to discuss such vital
issues, but neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has done so. Instead,
in varying degrees, both have promised to be "tougher" on the Kremlin
than George W. Bush has allegedly been and to continue the
encirclement of Russia and the hectoring "democracy promotion" there.
To be fair, nobody has asked the candidates about any of these crucial
issues. They should do so now.

Stephen F. Cohen is professor of Russian studies at New York
University. His latest book is "Failed Crusade: America and the
Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia." Distributed by Agence Global.

Antworten