U.S.-Russian Partnership:  Meeting the New Millennium

2.   Divorced Security Agendas and U.S.-Russians Relations

Robert Legvold

INTRODUCTION

Although the United States and Russia live and act in the same much-changed world, the challenges they pose for each are very different, often with unhappy consequences for their mutual relationship. As U.S.-Russian relations bump along, continuously threatening to slide off the road and into deeper tension, the harm done by their differing security agendas lurks as a subtle, easily overlooked complicating factor. For policymakers and analysts struggling to understand and manage the all-too-evident, work-a-day conflicts—over NATO expansion, strategies for dealing with Saddam Hussein or the violence in Kosovo, ballistic missile defense, and the rest of a growing list—the notion that a discrepancy in the security felt by the two countries jeopardizes their mutual relations may seem hopelessly abstract. Unless this possibility is faced in some fashion, however, the deeper underpinnings of unease and friction will be missed, and, worse, policies designed to deal with concrete problems are likely to be off target.

To help move in this direction, this essay undertakes four tasks: to explore ways in which the key security challenges facing each country differ, to explain the reasons for these differences, to consider the consequences of these differences for the relationship, and to suggest some ways—particularly those open to the U.S. side—to mitigate these effects.

CONTRASTING SECURITY AGENDAS

The most fundamental contrast is also the most obvious. While the United States exists as a stable entity, with a settled political system, and a long-formed and, for the moment, dynamic economy, none of this can be said of Russia. Russia knows insecurity in the most primal sense. Caught in the violent currents of historic change, Russia has no guarantee of surviving the passage without a widespread breakdown in the civil peace, a far-reaching economic collapse, or the disintegration of the country itself. U.S. leaders, whatever the array and intensity of their concerns, do not worry about the integrity of their country’s political system, the durability of its economy, or the existence of the Union.

Even if Russian leaders attach modest probabilities to disaster of this magnitude, that it forms a part of their universe or that they can imagine a path leading in this direction sets them dramatically apart from U.S. leaders. When the implications are sufficiently grave, even low-probability threats can be preoccupying, as demonstrated by the effect of the specter of nuclear war on U.S. and Soviet security thinking during the Cold War.

How moved Russian leaders and elites are by these nightmarish prospects cannot be easily determined. Yevgeny Primakov, when foreign minister, consistently listed the preservation of the country’s internal stability and territorial integrity as the dominant first-order concern of Russian foreign policy.3 During the 1998 mini-crisis over Yeltsin’s attempt to bring Viktor Chernomyrdin back as prime minister and amidst a far more serious economic crisis, various political figures described in grim terms how close Russia was to the abyss. Yeltsin’s representative to the Duma, Aleksandr Kotenkov, spoke of swelling anger and the looming prospect that the masses would explode in "a popular uprising, merciless and senseless."4 Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist party, added, "If we fail to reach an agreement here, everything will spill out to the streets." The governor of Saratov province, Dmitri Ayatskov warned that Russia was in danger of dissolving into a loose confederation, each part headed in a different direct, operating with its own currency.5 Aleksandr Shokhkin, the leader of the Our Home is Russia faction in the Duma, compared the situation to the moment before the breakup of the Soviet Union.6 Much of this may have only been for effect. No polling data and none of the anecdotal evidence suggested that the public had any intention of taking to the streets, and the power flowing to the regions had more to do with the incompetence of the center than with a desire on the part of the regions to tear the country apart. Still, the mere use of such language as political currency is telling.

Earlier, in 1993, when spelling out the tasks formally assigned to the Russian military—much to the dismay of the professional military—close to the top of list appeared the responsibility of controlling conflicts within Russia’s borders. It spoke volumes that Russia’s political leaders envisaged needing the regular military in "localizing and blockading a conflict region, suppressing armed clashes, and separating the conflicting sides, and also in defending strategically important installations."7 It also dramatized the contrast between Russian and U.S. security agendas, because it is beyond imagining that U.S. leaders would have reason to make this concern a priority of defense planning.

There is a second closely allied source of contrast. If the United States confronts uncertainty, it is over the nature, scope, and manner of executing its role in a changing world. Russia’s uncertainty exists at the more basic level of identity: who is Russia as it struggles to create a new order at home and a new relationship with parts of the former empire; among the major powers, who are its friends, which, if any, is a potential ally, and which, a strategic rival, even a potential adversary; and what place can it expect to be accorded by the other major powers in the principal arenas of international politics?

If Russia existed in a secure, stable, and prospering environment, these differences would doubtless still agitate Russians, but in a more abstract and remote fashion. Russia’s immediate environment—again, in marked contrast to the United States—is anything but secure, stable, and prospering. All around, Russia sees itself surrounded by new and struggling states, whose efforts to fashion cohesive national communities, viable economies, and effective governments have far to go. To the south, violent conflict has pockmarked the scene from Moldova to Tajikistan, and still threatens to re-erupt in several places, not the least because in none of the five major conflicts have the underlying causes been removed.8 In contrast, at no point in the last fifty years has immediate U.S. environment been more free of political instability and local conflict.

For Russia, not only is its immediate neighborhood to the south populated with violence or potential violence, but these regions back onto to other regions of larger and longer standing conflicts—from the Balkans through the Middle East, to the Persian Gulf, and the Northern Tier of South Asia. In some cases—as the Tajik and Afghan civil wars—conflict in the post-Soviet space mingles directly with conflict next door. In nearly all instances it threatens to draw in outside powers—Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, China, possibly the United States. For the United States, even Cuba no longer represents a vehicle or venue by which outside powers can exploit trouble within the neighborhood, not the least because there are no candidates to do the exploiting.

Moreover the shadow of other major powers’ military potential is nearer and more immanent than for the United States. The growth of Chinese military power and the uncertainties surrounding Russia’s course represent concerns for U.S. defense planners, but as distant, ambiguous, and, for now, easily countered challenges. For Russia the reality of China’s military presence and of the NATO approach are far more concrete and compelling, because, were Russia’s relations with either to evolve toward hostility, Russia’s disadvantage would have grave implications. Again, the contrast between Russia and the United States is fundamental: For the first time in several centuries Russia is militarily inferior to every major power or combination of powers capable of threatening it. For the first time in its history, the military power of the United States is clearly superior to that of every other state or any combination of states conceivably a threat to it.

From these three fundamental contrasts emerges a fourth. Unlike the United States, which places increasing emphasis on new, nontraditional security threats, Russia remains preoccupied with traditional security threats. U.S. politicians and security planners have shifted much of their attention to the threat of nuclear and missile proliferation, nontraditional security threats, such as drugs and terrorism, and, to judge from President Clinton’s commencement address to the Naval Academy last May, to threats to the country’s information systems originating in cyberspace. They can afford to do so, because the immediate environment is free of danger, the military capabilities of no other power or powers threaten the United States, and what traditional threats to peace do exist are far from U.S. shores.

Russian politicians and security planners, on the other hand, find it far harder to look beyond traditional fears to focus on the new threats. For them, actual and potential instability on their borders poses a conventional threat, made all the more potent by the fragility of Russia’s own internal stability. Military balances between Russia and China and Russia and NATO have a compelling significance missing for the United States, not the least because these balances are likely to be ever more tilted against Russia.9 And, it should be added, because Russia faces this challenge with no plausible set of allies capable of making up the difference.

If to American and other Western observers Russian apprehensions seem anachronistic and out of tune with the changed security environment in a post-cold-war world, with a moment’s thought, they should recognize that threats—including classic security threats—look different depending on which end of the telescope you are holding. One can afford to overlook the balance of capabilities and trust the intentions of the other side—intentions which NATO insists are on its part entirely benign—when the balance is unmistakably in one’s own favor. No matter how changed the world, the United States would not likely discount the significance of a decidedly adverse military balance with another major power or set of powers. Even less would it do so if the country were undergoing a traumatic recasting of its political and economic system. Or were its immediate vicinity as trouble torn as the post-Soviet space.

Finally, even in the brave new world of unconventional security threats, the situations of Russia and the United States differ markedly in one crucial respect. True, the sudden vulnerability of Russian society to the flow of drugs up through Central Asia gives the two countries something in common, and the menace posed by organized crime operating in and across their borders as well as the vulnerability of each to domestic terrorism create a basis for cooperation. Where economics intersect security considerations, however, their circumstances diverge strikingly. The United States draws strength from its integration into the international economic order; for Russia the picture is far more mixed. American leaders may worry about managing powerful new economic forces, such as the unconstrained surge of massive capital flows, but largely because they are capable of destabilizing third economies indirectly affecting U.S. fortunes. Russia, as the events of summer 1998 demonstrated, is one of the countries capable of being directly and disastrously affected. The financial crisis that engulfed Russia in 1998, as investors fled its securities and bond markets as well as the ruble, serious in itself, represented but one manifestation of Russia’s vulnerability to the effects of the international economic environment. Not even the largest and strongest economies, such as the United States, can avoid the harm that comes from large negative current account balances, imported inflation, the weakening of export markets, or the loss of confidence in its national currency. But the effect is to degrade economic performance, not to threaten the stability of the system, let alone national independence.

In Russia’s case, because of the underlying weaknesses in its fragile, half-constructed economy, the buffeting that comes from the outside carries far graver implications. When the price of oil plummets from $22 dollars a barrel to near $12 in less than twenty-four months, the Russian economy loses the bulk of its export earnings and suffers a substantial decline in revenues, since oil constitutes—or did—30 percent of its export sector and oil companies pay nearly 50 percent of taxes. The blow puts the government’s entire economic program in jeopardy. Still more serious, Russia’s massive external debt, of which $17.5 billion comes due in 1999, renders the national leadership’s independence nearly meaningless, as it finds itself crushed between the imperative of maintaining monetary and fiscal discipline and the desire to stimulate economic activity and meet minimal social needs. Choice is largely removed and alternatives, dictated by external circumstances, giving Russia’s political elites a strong sense that control over the country’s destiny is slipping from their hands.

THE SOURCES OF CONTRAST

Many elements contribute to the divorce in U.S. and Russian security agendas, but they all start from one painful reality: Russian power by any measure has collapsed. Its national economy ranks fourteenth in the world, after not simply those of the United States, Japan, China, and Germany, but Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico. Where the Soviet Union accounted for 6 to 8 percent of world GDP, Russia’s share scarcely reaches 1.6 to 1.7 percent. Its per capita GDP is smaller than Botswana, Panama, and Grenada.10 Even compared to itself, today’s Russian economy is but 60 percent of what it was at the start of independence.

By contrast, the U.S. economy exceeds the Russian fifteen-fold, having grown during the decade of the 1990s at an annual rate of 2.5 percent, while Russia’s economy shrank at an annual rate of 9 percent over the same period.11 A decade before, when decline had already set in, the Soviet Union’s economy still remained 55 percent the size of the United States, and annual (positive) growth rates were only slightly smaller than U.S. rates (2.8 to 2.9 percent).

Equally dramatic has been the collapse in military power. It is not merely that all the ratios once favoring the Soviet Union in the military balance between East and West are now reversed, as reflected in Table 1.

Table 1*

Threat

Victim

Land + Air Forces (Defensive Combat Ratios)

Probability of Successful Defense (%)
NATO (at end of Cold War) Warsaw Pact
(at end of Cold War)

0.82:1

99
Warsaw Pact (at end of Cold War) NATO (at end of the Cold War)

0.92:1

99
NATO (Today) Russia (Today)

3.78:1

1
Russia (Today) NATO (Today)

0.20:1

100
Expanded NATO Russia

5:18:1

0
Expanded NATO Russia + 25% of forces east of Urals

2.95:1

34

*Measures developed by the Armed Forces University of the Federal Republic of Germany and applied to 50 different conflict scenarios between NATO and the Soviet Union, as quoted in Frederick P.A. Hammersen, "The Disquieting Voice of Russian Resentment," Parameters (Summer 1998).

Nor is it only that the resources once devoted to the military have dwindled to risible levels. Expenditures on defense that during the Soviet period averaged 12 to18 percent of a GDP six to seven times larger than the present Russian GDP, now range downward from around 4 percent. On a per capita basis, they are but third of those during the Soviet period.12 (In 1997, U.S. per capita defense expenditures were two-and-half times larger than Russian.) The more unnerving aspect of military collapse is in the degradation of the forces themselves: Undertrained, underpaid, underfed, underhoused, and undersupplied, Russia’s army, navy, and air forces seem scarcely adequate to the immediate tasks assigned them, let alone defense against a well-armed major adversary. At a time when the U.S. military dwells on the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a revolution over which it is ascendant, and regularly displays its unparalleled technological prowess at great distances from its shores, Russia is unable to maintain even 50 percent of its army divisions at above 50 percent manning levels and none any longer above 75 percent.13

This vast erosion of economic and military power, in turn, stems not from a within-system pathology, such as the 1930s Great Depression in the United States, but from the death of a system and the burdens of constructing its replacement.14 Russia, in fact, faces the task of recreating not one but two systems—both its economic and political orders. It does so without the aid of a strong state. On the contrary, in the process of reinventing itself, the Russian state continues to bleed power. As a consequence, the process of rationalizing national security policy and adjusting defense resources to new circumstances is doubly prejudiced.

First, the defense sector is starved for resources because of a weak and shrinking economy, so much so that Russia’s armed forces, roughly equal in number to those of the United States, receive approximately 10 percent of the defense budget.15 In 1996 the Ministry of Defense requested FY97 $47 billion, reduced the request to $29 billion in final submission, was allotted $18 billion by the parliament, which was reduced by the executive to $14 billion, of which 70 percent was actually paid—a typical story. Russia cannot afford to sustain a military of 1.6 million personnel, but neither can the military proceed with appropriate reform. A military that cannot pay its energy and water bills, that often lags by four to five months in paying officer salaries, and that tries to feed a soldier on $1.85 a day scarcely has the means to undertake a wholesale makeover.16

More than money, however, stands in the way of an orderly and effective transformation of Russia’s top-heavy, dilapidated military and misshapen, unsustainable defense industry. As the current Minister of Defense and many Russian defense analysts recognize, Russia needs to pare its military to below one million, reverse the 2:1 officer/conscript ratio, create smaller, well-equipped mobile military formations, in fewer services (not five branches, eight military districts, more than thirty regular heavy divisions, and four fleets).17 But the turmoil of Russia’s broader political and economic transition and the concomitant absence of firm political leadership have made this impossible.

Since 1990, the United States has gone from a defense budget of $272.6 billion to one of $197 billion. It has cut active-duty army divisions from 18 to 10, air force fighter and attack wings from 36 to 20, navy combatant ships from 508 to 365, and personnel by more than 20 percent. It has done so, however, in a carefully planned and incrementally implemented program, guided by two fundamental national security strategy reviews: The Base Force plan of the Bush administration, which produced the lion’s share of the reductions, and the Bottom-up Review of the Clinton administration.18 This it could do because national security policy was the product of a well-institutionalized political system, under quite manageable economic pressures, with responsive political leadership.

In Russia, from the three-stage military reform announced by the new minister of defense, Pavel Grachev, in May 1992 through the abortive reform planned under the Presidency’s auspices in spring 1995 to the military reorganization decreed by President Yeltsin in December 1996 to the guidelines for future military reform announced by Yeltsin to the Federation Council in March 1997, virtually nothing happened.19 The most recent reform, led by the current minister of defense, Igor Sergeev, is more specific and steps have been taken to implement it, but all the obstacles remain in place. These begin with a weakly institutionalized political system that creates neither pressures to rationalize Russian defense nor mechanisms to impel and oversee the process. They are compounded by the failure of executive political leadership to fill the void, assume initiative, create agencies empowered to design reform, integrate the military leadership into the effort, and mobilize necessary legislative support. Partially this failure of leadership is peculiar to the Yeltsin presidency; to a far larger extent it is price paid to a weakened state caught in the tumult of an economic and political revolution.

In contrast, the United States emerges with a consciously designed defense posture, responsive to economic requirements and a changing security environment, carefully trimmed and reshaped, inspiring confidence in its adequacy. Russia suffers the hollowed hulk of a now-inappropriate Cold War military establishment, reshaped not by design but decay, mismatched to the security challenges facing the country, and understandably anything but a source of self-confidence.

In still another respect, the effects of domestic political and economic revolution contribute to the discrepancy in the security pictures of the United States and Russia. Russia, of course, is not the only post-Soviet state struggling to make its way through this transition. All its immediate neighbors are as well. Their half-formed institutions and inchoate economies are every bit as fragile as the Russian. They are still less capable of creating effective national defense, not the least, because in their case, they are attempting to jerry-build the odd military parts inherited from the Soviet Union into a defense posture for which there are no national antecedents. As a result much of the post-Soviet space is a security vacuum, leaving Russia without strategic frontiers.

Although a challenge to manage, the United States knows what and where it intends to defend, which beyond its own secure borders include the NATO states, Japan, and South Korea. Russia’s borders, porous in peacetime, represent poor and vulnerable barriers in war. But where then is Russia to defend? In the face of this uncertainty, Russian political leaders have attempted to compensate by creating unified air defense over those parts of the former Soviet Union willing to act jointly and bi-national border control, the last scarcely forward defense. Few knowledgeable Russians, however, believe so-called "double borders" and fragmentary forms of defense cooperation with states covering segments of the post-Soviet space solve the problem of strategic frontiers.

A further source of contrast is political geography—political geography in motion. The collapse of the Soviet Union has not only left in its wake large pockets of potential instability and great voids in the security envelope that Russia enjoyed as the core of the Soviet system, but a whole new set of dynamics on Russia’s shrunken periphery. The old Soviet borders, once a bulwark against external influences, are now essentially porous, permitting not only the inflow of drugs and illicit trade, but the import of the competitions to the south (between Iran and Turkey, India and Pakistan, and within Islam). As a result, Russia must not only worry about protecting economic, resource, and strategic interests now beyond its sovereignty, but it must do so against the encroachment of other powers whose ambitions and contests complicate and, at times, threaten the pursuit of those interests. Whether it is Turkey seeking to benefit Georgia and Azerbaijan by removing Russian options, Pakistan abetting the Taliban in Afghanistan, which as seen as a threat in Central Asia, China securing rights to 50 percent of the Akyabinsk oil fields in Kazakhstan, or the Chechens seeking recognition and support among the Islamic League, Russia finds the immediate setting, where its national interests are the most substantial, increasingly competitive. If it fails to do well in this increasingly complex set of competitions, Russia fears that national security, not merely national welfare will suffer.

Enter the United States and the West. Among the competitions most salient to the Russians is the one most Russian officials—and the bulk of the political elite—see emerging between Russia and the United States in the post-Soviet space. Quite apart from what may be the intent of Washington, Moscow reads a wide range of U.S. activity in the new states of the former Soviet Union as designed to create strategic positions in the post-Soviet space and, in the process, to weaken Russian positions and roll back its influence. Whether it is Partnership for Peace exercises whose scenario may be interpreted as coping with prospective Russian actions, U.S. support for cooperative enterprises among Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova (known as GUAM), or Washington’s commitment to the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, Russians see this as of a pattern. And some of official Washington’s explanations for its stake in the pipeline scarcely challenge the impression. As Bill Richardson, the secretary of energy, put it, "We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the West. We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political interests rather than going another way."20

NATO expansion ties these developments together and brings the Russian perception to a fine point. Russia’s emotional and near universal opposition to NATO expansion and its continuing suspicion of the next NATO steps can be explained at several levels: Ranging from a notion of betrayal over the terms by which the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and the unification of Germany were accepted to an aggrieved sense of exclusion from Europe’s politics to; from anger at seeing a core institution of the Cold War move alongside Russian frontiers to a genuine fear over when and how NATO might be used against Russia. One important part of the explanation, however, derives from the tendency to view the U.S.-Russian interaction in the post-Soviet space as one of incipient strategic rivalry. From this perspective, the prospect that the United States and its European allies mean to cross the borders of the former Soviet Union and incorporate the Baltic States and possibly Ukraine into NATO represents the boldest and most formidable step toward disadvantaging Russia within its own security sphere.

The new political geography, therefore, shapes the gap between U.S. and Russian security agendas and in ways harmful to their mutual relationship. For the United States political geography remains global and ephemeral. It has been wherever the international peace might be ruptured in telling ways, as, say, Iraqi aggression in the Persian Gulf or war on the Korean peninsula. When the basic requirements of the Clinton administration’s Bottom Up Review—namely, forces to handle simultaneously two major regional conflicts (MRC)—are questioned, it is to substitute a notion of political geography still more open-ended and shapeless. The challenge, say many, is to develop capabilities suitable to a wide range of contingencies, several of which may arise at any given time, from intervention to contain intra-state strife to the precision-use of force against non-state actors to the deterrence of rogue-state aggression to the management and control of a major regional crisis.

Russia has a more proximate, integral, and traditional sense of political geography. It features its own immediate neighborhood and the arenas contiguous to it. When Russian defense analysts speak of planning for one MRC and one sub-regional contingency, the MRC is large-scale conflict in post-Soviet space or at the intersection of the post-Soviet space and adjacent regions, and the subregional contingency presumably means within Russia or where Russia’s troubles mix with instability next door. Hence, each country’s notion of political geography—to the extent either acts on it—is perceived by the other as a part of the security challenge facing it, rather than a part of the solution.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONTRAST

If U.S.-Russian relations look much different today from their hope-filled start in 1992, a good part of the reason resides in the growing divergence of their security agendas. This is not what leaders in the two countries expected to happen. At the outset, on both sides, they assumed the security challenges of the post-Cold War world draw the two countries together. Yeltsin even spoke of a security partnership uniting the major states of the Northern Hemisphere from "Vancouver to Vladivostok." American leaders, first Bush, then Clinton, took it for granted that the dramatic departures instituted under Gorbachev would be continued and accelerated under the new regime. Indeed, they were initially. Not only did Russian leaders agree to radically deeper START II cuts, they, primarily the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, simply dismissed the importance of great discrepancies in Russian and U.S. or NATO military power, apparently based on the premise that Russia meant to integrate itself into the West.21 Each assumed not merely that the other would cease to be a security concern, but that the other would play a constructive role in addressing a range of common security problems.

Neither leadership says openly that its original hopes and assumptions have failed, but reality suggests as much. In some respects the consequences are obvious. When, in November 1993, Russia announced a new military doctrine, it no longer contained the nonfirst-use (of nuclear weapons) pledge promulgated in 1982. Russia’s vastly weakened conventional forces had led Russian national security planners to turn toward nuclear weapons in compensation. Russia’s new nuclear dependency not only ran counter to the general trend reducing the role assigned to nuclear arms in the security policies of the major nuclear powers, it drove Russian defense planners and politicians back to an emphasis on parity as a standard for Russia’s nuclear arsenal. This led in turn to new obstacles to ratification of START II in the Duma, as parliamentarians fussed over the marginal advantages conferred on the United States by the treaty, including the risk that in the event of "breakout" the United States might steal a step on Russia.

At this stage, in 1993-95, Russia’s renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons (from a position of weakness) remained something of an abstraction, largely irrelevant to the core security challenges spelled out in the 1993 military doctrine. NATO expansion changed this. Although Russia has not yet formally moved away from its claim that Russia is without enemies and that NATO no longer poses a direct threat to Russia, movement eastward by an enlarged NATO has given concrete meaning to an otherwise anachronistic nuclear posture. As Alexei Arbatov writes, "If Russian concerns with an expanded NATO cannot be settled diplomatically, Moscow will have to rely on a doctrine of enhanced nuclear deterrence, much the way NATO did in the 1950s and 1960s."22 More specifically, "this strategy could include basing limited ‘trip-wire’ conventional forces in key areas along Russia’s western borders, and having a nuclear deterrent force consisting of some combination of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons." And then to complete the circle, "whereas it was once considered acceptable to unilaterally reduce force levels to levels lower than those of the United States, with NATO expansion overall parity would be considered essential for enhanced nuclear deterrence."

Eventually the Russian Duma is likely to ratify the START II agreement, if only because parliamentarians are coming to understand that by the early part of the next century Russia’s nuclear position will be still weaker without it. But this does not gainsay the fact that the combined effect of the degradation of Russia’s conventional forces and the expansion of NATO has been to privilege nuclear weapons in Russian defense as never before. This constitutes one of the more obvious consequences of the growing gap in the security agendas of the United States and Russia.

Another is less obvious. Even during the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union regarded stopping the spread of nuclear weapons to be a first-order priority and, thus, a reason to cooperate, a cooperation that endured even the sharp deterioration in relations following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Signs are now, however, that Russia, preoccupied with narrower, more intense traditional security concerns, no longer regards salvaging the nonproliferation treaty to be of the same urgency. Hence, its tepid reaction to the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in spring 1998 and, hence, the tendency of Russian commentators to treat the appearance of new nuclear powers, even ones near Russia’s own borders, as quite secondary to the principal security threats facing the country. In some quarters the thought arises that Russia might trade its support on steps to contain nuclear proliferation, which remains a high U.S. priority, for U.S. concessions in areas of Russian concern, such as a larger voice in determining the outside community’s response to regional crises.

In the end, however, the effects of diverging U.S. and Russian security agendas are most profound at a deeper and more fundamental level. If there is one fundamental problem that threatens healthy and constructive U.S.-Russian relations, it is not a renewed preoccupation with the threat that either poses to the other or even the many issues over which the two sides are disagreed. It is indifference—the mounting indifference to the other side at all levels, in government, among politicians, in the media, in research organizations, and among the public. Except for fleeting moments of rekindled attention, as during the financial crisis this past summer or when Yeltsin’s health suddenly deteriorates, neither the U.S. government nor the analytical community, let alone the press and the public, any longer devote sustained attention to developments within Russia; even less do they think deeply about the implications of developments within and around Russia for U.S. national interest. The same can be said of Russia in reverse.

Many factors account for this development, but the growing gap in what security means to each represents one of the more important of them. On the U.S. side, traditional security threats, among which the Soviet Union constituted the dominant instance, have given way to a diffuse array of lesser, non-traditional security threats, among which Russia and the post-Soviet region are only one among many problem areas. For the most part this is not an agenda that leads policymakers and politicians to assign special importance to Russia and the region. On the contrary, to the extent that popular sentiment in the United States and among legislators resists embroiling the United States in Somali- and Bosnia-like conflicts, disorder in the post-Soviet south reinforces the desire to look the other way.

Notwithstanding periodic rhetoric from the President or Secretary of State stressing the importance of Russia to international peace and stability, the U.S. body politic and the elites within it are having trouble persuading themselves that this is so.

Russia’s preoccupations likewise lead it to de-emphasize the relevance of the United States. So caught up are Russian politicians, elites, and public in the trauma of domestic transformation that reflecting on trends in U.S.-Russia relations seems of little urgency. Were the United States more central to the outcome of Russia’s internal political and economic travail, the story would doubtless be different. But the United States has long since ceased to be seen as of any consequence in this context. And, except for the challenge that NATO expansion raises, the U.S. role in affecting Russia’s core security agenda, including the threat to stability on Russia’s periphery, also seems remote.

Alas, where it does arise, increasingly it is to add to the factors complicating U.S.-Russian relations. I have already noted the tendency of many in Russia to view a variety of U.S. initiatives in the former Soviet Union as intended to diminish Russia within its own region, to contain its influence, and perhaps even to isolate and weaken the country itself. Among the conservative, nationalist right, it is taken for granted that the United States seeks to do to Russia what they believe it did to the Soviet Union. Others are less ready to assume that the United States wishes to do great harm to Russia or that it has a coherent plan for doing so, but they, and here one is talking about the vast majority of politicians and commentators, do assume that the United States has little respect for Russia’s voice abroad and little fear of challenging Russian interests within its own vicinity. Hence, a consequence of Russia’s collapsed power in the context of its complicated political geography is to create a deteriorating confidence in the benevolence of U.S. foreign policy.

This in turn helps to explain Russia’s increasingly churlish attitude toward the United States’ post-cold-war prominence in international politics. When foreign minister Prime Minister Primakov was particularly outspoken in condemning an arrogance of power predicated on the notion of the "unipolar moment" in international politics. Russia’s furious attachment to the norm of mulitpolarity and rejection of U.S. primacy has as much to do with the fear of Russia being discounted or, worse, being victimized by U.S. ambitions within its own sphere of interests as it does with principle.

Whatever its motivation, however, Russia’s discontent with the strains of unipolarity together with the spreading suspicion of U.S. intentions among the Russian elite make the management of U.S.-Russian relations more and more difficult. For some years, tracing back at least to 1995, leadership on both sides has recognized that theirs is again a mixed relationship. On the one hand, the two countries have genuine and substantial common interests (in controlling international pathologies, such as terrorism, crime, and drugs; in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction; in keeping their own nuclear weapons at low and mutually stabilizing levels; and in seeing Russia and her neighbors advance toward democracy and economic revitalization). On the other hand, a growing number of competing interests and contested views also marks the relationship (from policy in the Balkans to technology sales to Iran; from ballistic missile defense to the use of economic sanctions; and from the role of European institutions to NATO expansion).

Both leaderships have understood that in such circumstances the task is to manage the competitive, conflict-prone side of the relationship in ways protecting the pursuit of common interests. To succeed, both sides have consciously sought to treat areas of disagreement in positive-sum terms, that is, to seek mutually acceptable outcomes or, failing that, to create mechanisms for continuing the discussion. As disaffection invades a widening spectrum of the Russian elite and the patience of U.S. politicians wears thin, the underpinning for this approach erodes. Each side—particularly when parliaments weigh in—grow less invested in the relationship and less willing to expend energy in developing constructive approaches to issues dividing the two countries.

FINDING A WAY FORWARD

Little that has produced the sharply contrasting security environments for the United States and Russia is within the power of policymakers to undo or redirect. They, however, do have it within their reach to mitigate the consequences of this gulf.

To this end, I offer four general suggestions: