Missed connections

National Interest, The, May-June, 2007 by Alexey K. Pushkov

Putin demonstrated he was also willing to part with the Cold War legacy and accommodate other U.S. priorities. By November 2001, the intelligence-gathering facility at Lourdes, Cuba--capable of monitoring up to 70 percent of U.S. territory--was shut down. Most notably, despite his persistent objections to the idea of the United States pursuing a national missile-defense system, Putin did not make an issue of Washington's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty.

What Putin was hoping for was a tacit agreement that, in turn, the United States would not encroach on those of Russia's priorities that did not have a major importance to America. But what he has discovered is that U.S. priorities are everywhere, even in the most unlikely areas. Let's go back to Moldova. The strategic importance of this tiny country for the United States remains a mystery for Russian observers. Yet, the desire of the Bush Administration to thwart Putin's policy towards Moldova was telling. This episode was just one in a long list of mounting grievances with the Bush Administration: the unlimited expansion of NATO; the inability to see the Jackson-Vanik amendment repealed; double standards on Chechnya; reflexive support for anti-Russian leaders on Russia's borders; no true sharing of intelligence--take your pick. Over time, it became much more difficult for Putin to claim this was a true partnership when Russia felt that Washington was only paying lip service to Russian interests, while stubbornly pursuing its own agenda--no matter how destructive it was to the partnership with Russia.

NOWHERE HAS it been seen more clearly than in Russia's relations with NATO. From 1989-91, I served as a counselor in the International Department of the Communist Party's Central Committee and was a member of Gorbachev's team of foreign-policy speechwriters and analysts. Many of us thought the way forward as the Cold War ended would be the emergence of a new Europe, one not defined by blocs, and where the old confrontations and antagonisms would be gone. Perhaps these expectations were naive, but, nonetheless, they were very appealing. In the beginning of the 1990s, the idea of a close partnership with the United States, even an alliance, was popular in Moscow. Although the Cold War ended in the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new Russian elites were operating from the presumption that democratic Russia should not be treated as a defeated country. On the contrary, we thought, it should be included in the Western community as a new state that had decidedly parted with communism. The thundering applause and standing ovations Boris Yeltsin received at the joint session of the two houses of the U.S. Congress in June 1992, during his first trip to the United States in his capacity as president of a democratic Russia, seemed to confirm those anticipations.

Unfortunately, the whole history of Russia's relations with NATO was a history of broken promises, guarantees and obligations. In March 1999, NATO broke its obligation to coordinate its actions with Russia when it decided to attack Yugoslavia against opposition from Moscow. It was in clear breach of the Russia-NATO Founding Act, signed on May 28, 1997, in Paris.2 In this act, NATO also gave a guarantee that on the territory of the new member states of the alliance there would be no military bases, troop deployments and nuclear armaments. Thus, when in December 2006 it became known that the United States plans to establish a military missile-defense base in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic, it was taken as yet another sign of broken obligations by the United States and its allies in Moscow. Those missile defenses might be indeed aimed at neutralizing Iran, but given that NATO in the past had broken its obligations, Putin had reasons to worry they were but the first steps in a system that in the future would be aimed at Russia's nuclear potential. All the more so that by mid-March it transpired that the U.S. administration plans to establish such radar stations in Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan as well.