THE NEW RUSSOPHOBES ARE HERE

Average Americans might see all this as good news. Over the past few months, however, an army of foreign policy experts led by grand strategist Henry Kissinger has been reporting back to the op-ed pages and talk shows with gloomy news from the analytic front. The elections don’t matter, they say. There is no democracy in Russia and will be no democracy there no matter who wins. Freedom House president Adrian Karatnycky believes the elections will lead to a “more authoritarian,” anti-Western Yeltsin. Where foreign policy is concerned, Simes says there’s not much to choose between Yeltsin and Zyuganov, only shades of “dark gray and very dark gray.” We can expect a continuation of Russia’s “ancient imperial drives,” Kissinger argues, and “relentless expansionism” no matter who is in the Kremlin. George E Will informs us that ” expansionism is in Russia’s national DNA”; the populace has “an expansionist gene.”

Like a bad penny, the doctrine of Russophobia is back with a vengeance. It first gained prominence in the late 19th century, when grand thinkers like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Adams expressed their view of Russia as an inhuman and unstoppable force. To Adams, Russia was “a wall of archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal . . . and more likely to advance.” At a time when social Darwinism suffused the thoughts of serious strategists, Mahan saw in Russian foreign policy neither intelligence nor design but rather “obedience to natural law and race instinct.” Teddy Roosevelt feared that the Russians saw themselves “as huge, powerful barbarians, cynically confident that they will in the end inherit the fruits of our civilization . . . despising as effete all of Europe and especially America.” Then, as now, Russophobia combined in roughly equal measure fear of Russia’s barbarian strength and a profound self-doubt about “effete” America’s will to resist it.

The Russophobia of the 1890s looked pretty foolish when Japan thrashed the Russians on both land and sea in 1904. And before the United States ever got around to clashing with the barbarian Slav civilization, it had to fight two world wars on Russia’s side against Germany and Japan, two emerging threats the old Russophobes almost completely ignored.

Are we poised to make the same kind of mistake again, stirring ourselves up about an overblown Russian threat to the exclusion of all other strategic considerations? During the Cold War, Moscow controlled an empire that stretched into the heart of Europe, maintained a huge army on German, Czech, Hungarian, and Polish soil, and posed the most dangerous threat after Hitler to America’s vital national interest in a Europe free from domination by any single power. Soviet ideology called for eternal struggle against and eventual overthrow of the democratic capitalist system of the United States and its Western allies. Its leaders were prone to saying things like, “We will bury you.” Fear of the Soviet Union was not Russophobia; it made good strategic and ideological sense.

But in the past few years, a post-Communist Russia has withdrawn its troops not only from Eastern and Central Europe but also from the Baltic states, Ukraine, and most of the former Soviet Union. And so the alarms being raised about Russian “aggression” and “relentless expansionism” are excessively shrill.

Here are a few simple facts: The CIA estimates that since 1988 Moscow’s defense spending has declined by about 80 percent. While the U.S. defense budget was a little over $ 260 billion this year, Russia plans to spend about $ 60 billion on defense. The once-formidable Red Army has been cut nearly in half and is starved of funds. “The Russian army today is weaker in relative terms than it has been for almost four hundred years,” writes Moscow correspondent Anatol Lieven in the summer issue of the National Interest. Demoralization and desertions are up, professionalism and combat capabilities are down. Although on paper the army boasts a force of 1.7 million men, Lieven notes that the “real disposable strength of the army is much lower, and the number of effective combat units lower still.”

In a recent column, Will compared present-day Russia to Napoleon. He must have meant Napoleon on St. Helena. Even if Russian leaders devoted every waking minute, and every scarce ruble, to reinventing the Red Army, it would take ten years to bring it back to its 1980s strength. They don’t seem inclined to try. Gen. Aleksandr I. Lebed, who ran a strong third on June 16 and days later joined Yeltsin’s team, has made it clear that he considers a serious arms buildup out of the question. “If we cannot afford to maintain 5, 000 airplanes, let there be fewer,” declared the veteran paratrooper whom Kissinger has described as advocating a “strong, nationalist foreign policy.” “It is time to understand that the world has changed . . . We do not have to keep up with the United States or NATO in terms of quantity.” Only in the area of submarines have the Russians even attempted to keep pace with the United States in recent years. And you can’t overrun Ukraine or Poland with submarines.

Is there much evidence that the Russian people or their leaders really want to reacquire their lost empire? The Russian government has taken a heavy- handed and at times brutal role in some of the former Soviet republics along its southern frontier. It has played a rough game in Georgia, first supporting separatists there and then offering President Eduard Shevardnadze ” protection” in the form of two Russian army divisions. It has taken advantage of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan to solidify its predominance in that oil-rich region. It has stationed troops on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan (but with the consent of the Tajik government, which is locked in a civil war with Muslim rebels). At the same time, Russia has taken a more benign approach to other former Soviet republics.

Does this mixed record constitute a reemergence of Russian imperialism? One of the most intemperate Russophobic outbursts was Jacob Heilbrunn’s warning in the New Republic against a new Russian “drive to the East,” a “return to the former dreams of Russian imperialists for a landward expansion into Central Asia, China and the Far East.” Now, as it happens, when Russia’s imperial drive took it eastward to China in the late 19th century, it arrived only to find the place teeming with British, French, German, and Japanese imperialists who had gotten there first. For Heilbrunn, evidence of the ” recrudescence of the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions” included the fact that Yeltsin traveled to Beijing this spring and signed a “strategic partnership” with Chinese leaders. Hellbrunn found this meeting “ominous,” somehow presaging a Russian takeover of “Eurasia.” Kissinger also found the Russo- Chinese meeting alarming, although one recalls no similar anxieties on his part when Mikhail Gorbachev dramatically visited Beijing in 1989.

Exhibit number two demonstrating Russia’s “new imperial” ambitions in “Asia” has been the war in Chechnya. Indeed, that war has figured prominently in all the Russophobic accusations about a “new aggressiveness” in Asia. But without in any way absolving Yeltsin and his military for their brutal conduct of a war that most Russians, including Lebed, have vigorously opposed, there is nevertheless one simple point to be made: A military action on Russia’s own territory cannot be considered a first step in an imperial drive for the conquest of Eurasia. Hellbrunn writes that Russian leaders deem possession of Chechnya a “vital interest.” Well, most leaders would take that view of territory that had been part of their country for more than a hundred years.

Which is why Russia’s benign behavior toward Ukraine and the Baltic states these past few years has been amazing. No one could have predicted five years ago that Ukraine, which had experienced scarcely five minutes of independence from Russia during the previous millennium, would be as independent as it is today. The two countries have argued over the nearly worthless Black Sea fleet and border demarcations in a small part of the Crimea, but their negotiations have been peaceable. Russia formally recognized Ukraine’s sovereignty in 1994 and has done nothing since to try to subvert the government, incorporate the heavily Russian eastern section of Ukraine, or use military intimidation to force the new nation’s “Finlandization.” Nor has Moscow taken any steps to try to regain lost positions in the Baltic region, which since the 18th century have been thought essential to Russian security. Were Ukraine or the Baltic states to be swallowed up by Russia, a new “Cold War” would indeed begin, as Kissinger suggests — and rightly so. That seems to be precisely why Moscow has handled its disputes in these places so gingerly.

The Russophobes don’t see it that way. They depict Eastern and Central Europe as trembling before what Will calls Russia’s “overwhelming military superiority.” History, according to Kissinger, proves Russia won’t be able to resist the imperial temptation: “Russia has generally excluded Eastern Europe [and] the Balkans . . . from the operation of the balance of power, insisting on dealing with them unilaterally and often by force.” One would never know that throughout the last three centuries Europe has managed to contain some other aggressive powers — like Austria, which consistently tangled with Russia in the Balkans, or France, which under the foolish Louis Napoleon set off the unnecessary Crimean War. In the new Russophobe’s view of European history, there is little mention of the fact that two great powers on three separate occasions carried out a conscious, aggressive design for the conquest of all Europe — neither of which was Russia. (For those without a scorecard, they were Napoleon’s France, and Germany, twice in this century.) Yet Kissinger is quick to indict present-day Russian foreign policy by bringing up the 1833 Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. (Nicholas I imposed some very harsh terms on the Turkish Porte. Would you believe it?)

Russia, like almost all great powers in history, has ambitions, and in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire it is suffering some wounded pride. It should be watched, influenced, deterred, and, when necessary, confronted. But we should not build our global strategy around unfounded fears. In the June 16 elections, exit pollers asked Russian voters which issue was most important to them in making their decision. Thirty-five percent said government payment of their pensions and salaries. Twenty-five percent said it was the economy; 20 percent said it was Chechnya; 13 percent said it was crime. Only two percent of Russians identified foreign policy as their main concern, and of these a plurality chose Yeltsin over the candidates with an anti-Western platform. The new Russophobes say it doesn’t matter who governs Russia, or how. But in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, and in the former Soviet republics, most people openly wished for a Yeltsin victory in a free and fair election. Fortunately for them, and for us, those wishes are likely to be granted.

By Robert Kagan