Phantom Pains of Empire
Russia’s imperial decline.

By Ariel Cohen, a research fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation & author of Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis
January 25, 2002 9:50 a.m.

olonel General Yurii Baluyevsky, first deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, completed his negotiations at the Pentagon last week.

Baluyevsky and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith are negotiating an agreement on strategic nuclear-weapons cuts. Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin agreed at the November summit in Crawford, Tex., to reduce offensive weapons from the current ceiling of around 6,000 warheads to 1,500-2,200 warheads.

While the Bush administration signaled earlier that it will not be interested in signing another Cold War-style arms-control treaty, Feith neither excluded such an option (he told reporters the United States was "completely open-minded on the subject") nor committed himself to it. Feith explained that he United States wants to provide the Russians "predictability and transparency" in the process of nuclear-arsenals reduction. He also sought to rebut criticism that the planned arms deal did not go far enough.

While the current talks focused on numbers and verification mechanisms, another Russian delegation, headed by the veteran Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov, is scheduled to visit Washington in late January. So it would seem the process is on track, and there is no need to worry.

Nevertheless, the inside-the-Moscow-Ring-Road crowd of analysts, journalists, and Duma members are mouthing the usual phobias of Russia being mistreated by the U.S. They bring as evidence President Bush's termination of the 1972 ABM Treaty, the administration's reluctance to sign a full-fledged arms-control treaty, and the Americans' desire to store some of the warheads, rather than destroying them, for possible use against future enemies.

Far from being a real concern about U.S. unilateralism, these are fears of Russia's imperial decline — fears that have been heard for the last twelve years. The factors influencing the geopolitical power balance actually go well beyond the recent American military successes in Afghanistan. Those successes may be particularly painful to the Russians, however, since the Soviet Army failed there so abysmally only twelve years ago. The Moscow whiners are offering a Russo-centric analysis for a phenomenon whose time frame is much wider, and whose scope is truly global.

According to the thinking of the policy trio at the Pentagon — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary Feith — the ABM Treaty simply outlived the world for which it was designed. In 1972, there were two military superpowers: the USSR, which invented and deployed its missile defense in the 1950s and 1960s, and the U.S., which was mired in Vietnam. It took President Johnson many hours to convince then-Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin to limit the deployment of the Soviet anti-ballistic missile shield to the capital city of Moscow.

Today the situation is different. While Russia will enjoy an ICBM arsenal capable of penetrating any American strategic defenses in the foreseeable future, an attack that originates from North Korea, Iran, Iraq or any other emerging nuclear power may be thwarted by the new ballistic missile defense. Thus, Russia has not been denied second-strike capability — and does not lose its strategic parity with the United States.

Moreover, the prevailing Republican party thinking on the ABM Treaty stems from President Reagan's idea of Star Wars, and thus has internal partisan-political roots. Missile defense featured prominently on successive Republican party platforms in the 1990s. And Reagan — the spiritual leader of the current generation of Republicans — envisaged technology sharing and other cooperation with Russia in this area.

Russian analysts such as Pavel Felgengauer claim that Russia received a "slap in the face" from its American ally. If President Putin had heard about Felgengauer's soundbite, however, he would have disagreed. His measured response shows that Putin understands that the U.S. and Russia are facing a common enemy: global Islamist terrorism, which is not limited to Afghanistan. The flames of jihad can be fanned in the Northern Caucasus and even in the Volga valley by the same people who bankroll Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network: rich fundamentalists based in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

Alexei Arbatov, the Duma Defense Committee Deputy Chairman, likes to quote an old saw from Otto von Bismarck about international coalitions that consist of a mule and a rider — implying that Russia is a mule, and the U.S., a rider. However, a glance at the map shows that Russia, with its unique geographic span and clout in Central Asia, is far from being a mule.

For a decade, Russia has been going through the phantom pains of the amputated superpower. Today, it's finally getting over it to realize its real place in the world: that of a great power, but not of a superpower. Certainly its GDP, GDP per capita, population size, and even military prowess make it less intimidating or dominant than the USSR, that Stalin's equivalent of the Golden Horde. But that is only to the good for the Russians. The costs of empire impoverished the Soviet Union's ordinary men and women.

Moreover, while the United States brilliantly won two wars — the 1991 Gulf War and the current campaign in Afghanistan — Russia lost both its Afghan campaign and the 1994-1996 Chechen campaign. The outcome of the current Chechen operation is in doubt. The Russian army is simply not up to par with the American military, primarily because, over the last twelve years, the Russian generals hopelessly bungled their military reforms, and because a modern military is a very expensive, high tech proposition — a luxury only very nations rich can afford.

Still, one should not forget that in the war in Afghanistan, Russia turned out to be more important for the United States than any of its NATO allies save Great Britain — and was second only to Pakistan in geopolitical importance. While Russian forces did not fight in Afghanistan, neither did the French or the Germans. In fact, the U.S. turned down the unprecedented offer of assistance by NATO not because of nonexistent unilateralism, but because of insufficient battlefield compatibility between the cash-starved European militaries and the high-tech U.S. forces.

Russians are gaining friends in Europe and the United States. But being treated as partners also implies playing by partnership rules, not supplying weapons to Teheran's terror-mongering ayatollahs — or providing the U.N. cover for the Butcher of Baghdad.