As President Bush cruised around European capitals last week, it was amusing to note, while demonstrators greeted him everywhere he went, that those who want that proverbial Yankee to go home are not confined to Third World countries.
Though most of these European protesters were the usual suspects — anarchists, Mother Earth environmentalists, anti-globalists, Oxfam agitators, human rights activists and, in Brussels, an American contingent holding up a banner that fetchingly read “Dear Europe, we did not vote for him either” — it is a fact that the European intellectual and leadership elite has always been imbued with a streak of anti-Americanism, anchored in the belief that the US betrayed its proclaimed ideals when it backed, at one time or another, violent regimes around the world, from Greece to East Timor.
Despite that, there is no danger, of course, that Europe will turn against or become alienated from Washington any time real soon. In addition to their long-entrenched alliance with the US, Europeans remain bound to America by trade, culture, history, political traditions, moral values and social norms.
Rather, analysts who followed Bush’s European maiden voyage focused their attention on the Central European country of Slovenia, where the American president and his Russian counterpart. Vladimir Putin, met last Saturday. The talk of the town was whether Washington could convince Moscow that America’s missile defense system is not aimed at Russia, and that expanding NATO to include nations “from the Baltic to the Black Sea”, along with the large former Soviet republic of Ukraine, is not meant as a ganging up on Russian borders. (NATO will meet early next year in the Czech Republic to decide which countries can join.)
To be sure, the two-hour meeting between Bush and Putin could hardly be called a summit, or even a bargaining session. It was an abbreviated encounter with abbreviated expectations, where no substantive agreements were reached. The two presidents merely aimed at establishing a personal bond that could lead to more serious talks later this year.
Some experts dismiss the brouhaha over NATO and missile defense as a sham debate. American-Russian relations, they contend, run deeper than that. Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as America’s ambassador at large to the former Soviet Union from 1997 to 2001, wrote in the New York Times last Friday that relations between Moscow and Washington will be “based on hard boiled scrutiny of national interests.”
For its part, claims Sestanovich, the United States’ overriding concern has been animated this last decade by one large goal, which is “the integration of Russia into the Western political and economic mainstream.” That goal, however, has continued to elude American policy-makers.
There is doubt that Russia wants, or even can, given the constraints of its political culture and the nature of its civil society, implement the kind of commitments that would make that integration a reality. (The same problem faces Turkey today in its hitherto futile efforts to join the European Union: Does Turkey want to make, and indeed can it make, the kind of social, political and economic reforms that would formalize its eligibility for EU membership?)
That is the major issue confronting Moscow. Missile defense and a putative encirclement of Russia’s borders by an expanded NATO are a side show.
Despite its stockpile of nuclear weapons, Russia today is a basket case, and Russians are not convinced that the West will ever concede them the role they have at one time played, and continue to want to play, as a big power swinging its big ego around.
And if you think national ego does not play a role in this instant, think again. Masha Lipman, a Russian journalist who contributes a monthly column for the Washington Post, wrote there last Saturday that American commentators seem to be missing the point: “Russia’s concerns about national missile defense have very little to do with Russia’s security, or anybody else’s for that matter ... This isn’t about security, it’s about wounded pride.”
How true!
Russia was until so recently in history the seat of power of an empire that included virtually half the globe. It controlled client states in Eastern Europe and wielded influence with Communist or pro-Communist regimes in Africa, Asia and South America. Today, however, it is a basket case.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago, Russia has failed miserably in building a state based on the rule of law. Its two post-Soviet central goals, of transforming into a Western-style democracy and market capitalism, were never realized. Instead, Russia descended down the path of a corrupt, authoritarian regime — in effect going back to its traditions, under Russian czars and Communist Commissars, of arbitrary rule and ruthless exercise of power. (You want to know how ruthless that exercise of power is then look into that ongoing war in Chechnya that no one appears to care much about these days.)
The price, then, that Russia needs to pay, to integrate into Europe, is not only exorbitant but beyond its means. Moreover, Russia, a non-European country that was never touched by any of the European intellectual traditions rooted in the Renaissance and the Reformation, sees the mere idea of having to pay that price, that is, of emulating the West, as an act of national humiliation. And what, Russians may very well ask, is the payoff for them from meeting these standards?
Does Washington really believe that there is hope that Russia will somehow, sometime, join the European family of nations? That’s very much in doubt. As Zbigniew Brzeziinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, told the Washington Post last week: “I think the administration has got rid of the delusional optimism of the Clinton era and views Russia realistically, namely that it neither a serious threat nor a genuine partner.”
