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Confrontation Won't Work With Russia

How quickly conservatives returned to Cold War rhetoric and attitudes in the wake of the Russia-Georgia conflict was astonishing.

Putin's Russia is an aggressive, nationalistic power. And that's a problem.

But Putin's Russia isn't the Soviet Union. It doesn't represent the same kind of threat to the West. The stakes just aren't the same, which means that Cold War attitudes don't lead to clear-headed thinking about how best to respond to the problem Russia does present.

The ambitions of the communist Soviet Union were universal. It wanted to remake the world in its image.

It promoted the spread of communism throughout the globe. It actively sought to undermine Western democracies, particularly in Western Europe. It posed a military threat to the independence of Western Europe.

Vladimir Putin has emasculated nascent democratic institutions in post-Soviet Russia. He has successfully turned Russia's oil and natural gas resources into an instrument of state power. Putin's Russia seeks power and influence.

But there is no evidence that Putin's Russia aims to remake the world in its image. Instead, it is seeking safe space for its authoritarianism.

It perceives itself threatened by Western powers who believe that legitimacy comes only from the sort of democratic expressions Putin has suppressed. That is why it reacts so adversely to NATO nestling up to its borders.

Putin's Russia has sought economic leverage to constrain Western Europe, and pretty successfully so. Europe gets 25 percent of its natural gas from Russia. The figures are even higher for countries such as Germany and Italy.

However, Russia, unlike the Soviet Union, poses no military threat to Western Europe. It probably poses no military threat to most of Eastern Europe either, although the one good thing that came out of the Georgian conflict was the willingness of the United States to provide Patriot missile defenses to Poland.

Russia's true military and economic threat, unlike that of the Soviet Union, is geographically constrained largely to the countries that immediately border it.

Many of those countries do not want to be in the Russian orbit. They want to align and integrate themselves with the West.

That's important, and it matters. But what the West can do to give these countries some living space independent of Russia is difficult to fathom.

Neither the United States nor particularly Western Europe is going to get into a shooting war with Russia over these border countries. That means that bringing them into NATO simply renders the already confused mission of that military alliance even more confused.

John McCain was right that Russia should have never been invited to join the G-7, turning it into the G-8. But what would booting it out really accomplish?

The G-8 is a useless enterprise, in which heads of government, or their foreign or finance ministers, get together and tell each other lies about what they are going to do to address common problems. Russia would lose nothing of concrete value by not getting together periodically for these preening sessions with the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada.

These are the self-appointed leading industrial democracies, a conceit the rest of the world increasingly ignores.
The other punishment most commonly advocated is blocking Russia's membership in the World Trade Organization.
To join the WTO, Russia would have to submit to rules-based trade, reduce its domestic tariffs and open up its domestic financial services industry.

And exactly how is all that to the disadvantage of the West?

Russia is hardly a manufacturing powerhouse. It imports twice as much in manufactured goods as it exports. So, the first effect of its WTO membership would likely be greater diversity of consumer goods available to the Russian people.

But let's assume that there is a benefit to domestic producers in Russia from WTO membership and its manufacturing exports begin to rise. Is the West better or worse off if Russia develops a more diversified economy less dependent on oil and natural gas?

Russia is an authoritarian power. It seeks to intimidate its neighbors, who aspire to associate themselves with other democracies with market economies. The West wants to help them and constrain Russia.

Nevertheless, despite all those compelling predicates, a confrontational strategy just doesn't seem to have anyplace useful to go.

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Related Topics: foreign policy | russia |

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