Part One: U.S. strategy in the 21st century: leadership through hegemony
Chapter II: Role and Place of the USA in the Twenty-first Century in the Research of American Political Scientists and Scholars of International Affairs
Russia as Seen by the Heritage Foundation
In January 1998, the Heritage Foundation organized a conference, The State of Russian Foreign Policy and U.S. Policy Toward Russia, which was attended by experts on Russia.39
All the participants, with the sole exception of Stephen Sestanovich, were critical of Russia’s foreign policy and U.S. policy toward Russia. The direction of their criticism is of interest. Stephen Blank, the Mac-Arthur professor of research at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, emphasized the gap between Moscow’s foreign policy goals and Russia’s real status in the world. In his opinion, Russia still views security problems in terms of military capabilities and a zero-sum game, which seems to put Russia on an equal footing with the United States. Russia’s military programs are oriented toward preserving the traditional structures of armed forces, corresponding to a strategic role and missions that do not reflect Russia’s actual status. Because Moscow still holds on to “neo-imperialist and hegemonist goals,” NATO’s expansion to the East is entirely justified, especially because, as former Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev noted: “Weakening NATO serves only those who wish for empire and autocracy.”40
Blank presents an excerpt from an article by Sergei Rogov, director of the USA-Canada Institute, that says: “Washington should recognize the exceptional status of the Russian Federation in the formation of a new system of international relations, a role different from that which Germany, Japan, or China or any other center of power plays in the global arena.” (15) This pretension to a unique status coincides fully with the mystique of “Derzhavnost (powerness),” notes Blank ironically. “From a government that is essentially a ward of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and which lost the Cold War, these demands are not only undeserved, unacceptable to Europe, and fantastic, but worse, are also unrealizable. As Talleyrand would have said, it is worse than a crime; it is a blunder.” (15) “Policy is now based on the premise that Russia must be seen as a great power equal to the United States based on its potential, not its real power, which is steadily declining both absolutely and relatively.” Blank continues: “That Russian power in all these areas is declining or becoming more irrelevant to the modern world while the government dithers and becomes less relevant to international issues eludes virtually all those involved in foreign policy. Russian invocations of multipolarity serve more to gain status or inhibit solutions than to assume responsibility or offer a positive agenda for multilateral action abroad. Tragically, Russia still pursues objectives and policies in Europe that its power does not merit, that are unsustainable, and which ultimately endanger its own security.”(15) Can such a state be trusted?
Other participants of the conference respond to this question with a well-argued no.
Angela Stent, professor of government at Georgetown University, draws attention to the phenomenon she calls “the Privatization of Foreign Policy.” She writes about it with some surprise, because it’s Russia she is dealing with. But there is nothing surprising about it, really, because in the last ten years Russia has become a capitalist state, adequate in its internal organization to state-monopolistic capitalism of the Russian type. In any SMC country, two foreign policies coexist: the state’s policy and the monopolies’ policy. (I have written about this previously, using the example of Japan.)41
Stent confirms this banal truth, using the example of contemporary Russia. She writes: “Russian foreign policy is also becoming increasingly ‘privatized’; that is, energy companies and industrial-financial groups are pursuing their own commercial interests, which do not always coincide with the agendas of the Russian Foreign or Defense Ministry—or even the Kremlin.” (24) She notes, however, the “specifics of the Russian variant,” meaning that the big companies (Gazprom, Lukoil, etc.) have close ties with government officials. As examples, she mentions the names of Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais, “whose interests lie more in economic integration with the West than geostrategic influence.” (ibid.)
This is all somewhat amusing because this kind of “intertwining” of interests can be found in any capitalist country and not necessarily of the state-monopolistic type. But the American researcher is used to expecting from Russia only foreign policy of the singularly stratified kind, fitting the old Soviet standards, and she is sincerely amazed by what she describes as “deviations” in Russia’s current foreign policy.
Be that as it may, the presentations of other conference participants (including Mark Gage, professional staff member for East Europe and the New Independent States Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives; Robert O. Freedman, president of the Baltimore Hebrew University; Paula J. Dobriansky, the vice president and Washington director and Kennan Fellow for Russia, at the Council on Foreign Relations) contained an urgent appeal to the Clinton administration to revise Washington’s policy toward Russia because Russia’s foreign policy contradicts U.S. national interests. Stephen Sestanovich, ambassador at large and special adviser to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States, U.S. Department of State, was the sole voice of dissent. Not denying the presence of a multitude of problems in American-Russian relations, he nonetheless expressed optimism about the possibility of their resolution. His evaluation in this area is close to that of Strobe Talbott. This is not surprising because every government official in every country is always an optimist.
39 Heritage Foundation, Heritage Lectures, no. 607 (April 6, 1998).
40 See Andrei V. Kozyrev, “NATO Is Not Our Enemy,” Newsweek (February 10, 1997), 31.
41 See Aliev, Japan’s Foreign Policy, 23-35.
The 21st Century: The World Without Russia
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)