The West's stake in Russia's future

ORBIS, Fall, 1997 by James H. Billington

Foreign policy was barely mentioned in the recent presidential campaign, and in the absence of major warfare abroad or immediately perceptible dangers, the American people seem not inclined to think much these days about the broader world. But periods of calm rarely last long in human affairs - particularly in times of rapid change - and indeed four sorts of real danger may loom on the horizon for our nation and type of society. Three of the four involve a Russia that Americans have perhaps too easily assumed that they no longer need worry about.

The first and most obvious danger is the continued presence and growing risk of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the refinement of delivery systems that could physically devastate and even totally destroy the United States. Although the cold war is over and Russian conventional armed forces are no longer a major threat to their neighbors, Russia still has the long distance strategic capability to obliterate the population centers and infrastructure of North America; and present and future rogue states already have or may acquire some of that potential. This makes the continuance of Russia along its present reform path something the United States should be supporting even more strongly than it has in the past.

A second, less recognized danger is the risk that, having won the cold war against the Soviet Union, Americans could nevertheless still lose the older, more basic struggle against authoritarian dominance in Eurasia. The United States fought five shooting wars in this century all basically to prevent a hostile authoritarian power from gaining control over the great Eurasian landmass. It fought twice in Europe - directly against Germany - and three times in Asia - fast against a Japan allied with Germany and then against peripheral but aggressive surrogates of an expanding Soviet Union. America became involved in all its overseas wars in the twentieth century for essentially the same reason that Britain became involved in continental wars in earlier centuries: in order to prevent an authoritarian hegemony over the world's dominant landmass and resource base. Such an imperium would have marginalized and could have ultimately reduced to vassalage the freer, more participative and entrepreneurial states that developed on the maritime periphery in northern Europe and North America.

This geopolitical risk provides a second reason for being concerned about the fate of the democratic experiment in Russia. If Russia succumbs to the crypto-fascist authoritarian nationalism which continues to threaten its fragile ruling coalition and/or if the radical Muslim states of the Near East or the still-Leninist colossus of China begin expanding their power, either of two likely results would spell disaster for the democratic states: either a spread of Yugoslav-type ethnic and religious violence or the formation of some kind of authoritarian alliance against the less populous democratic world.

But even if the recent trend toward democracy should prevail in Russia, a third gathering geopolitical danger lies in the global population explosion. A new kind of North-South conflict may replace the East-West conflict as the overpopulated, less developed world spills uncontrollably into the less populated nations of the Northern Hemisphere in ways tending to undermine, rather than strengthen democratic institutions.

Immigration streams from the south that began as invited guest workers already pose deep problems of assimilation: Algerians in France, Turks in Germany. Chinese are streaming into vast, resource-rich Siberia, which has a total population only one-hundredth that of China. The population of the newly independent Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union is exploding while that of their Slavic neighbors to the north is shrinking. All of this feeds the growing nationalist paranoia in Russia.

Even in the relatively tranquil American Southwest, the population influx from the south is beginning to cause some to question two features of American democracy that have never before been seriously challenged as being essential to sustaining unity in a large, diverse nation: a common language and inviolable borders.

Finally, this growth of population in a world of limited resources intensifies a fourth - and perhaps most ominous - threat on the horizon: the widespread resurgence of ethnic hatreds and conflicts which the international system seems largely powerless either to accommodate or to curtail. There sometimes seems to be a reversion to tribalism in Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and many other regions where the suppression of information is so effective (Tibet, the Sudan) that the outside world is not even aware of the extent of oppression.

Americans must be concerned about these breakdowns of elementary order and decency not just for humanitarian reasons but also because it is often more difficult in the end to avoid involvement than was assumed at the beginning. In addition, America itself is not immune from this type of breakdown, and, whether one likes it or not, the world looks largely to America as the nation that most defines the future.