One of the most important forces in Russian national history and one of the major keys to understanding Russia has been the country’s enormous collective inferiority complex relative to the West.
It explains why, three hundred years ago, with Russia’s elite bent on mimicking Europe and being more engaged in the life of the West, Peter the Great moved his capital to Saint Petersburg.
It also helps to explain some of the motivation behind the development of the Soviet “evil empire” and the late Soviet Union’s self-destructive spending on military domination.
Russian history is replete with the need of at least a sorry succession of leaders for Russia to be taken seriously by the outer world. When combined with the country’s culture of authoritarianism, it explains why Russia has behaved as it often has on the world stage: a brutal thug.
The past twenty years have been particularly hard for Russia, irrespective of the nation’s rising, if limited, freedoms. The pain seems to have been especially acute for Vladimir Putin, the real power in Russia today, who, as cited in my post of Wednesday described the breakup of the Soviet Union, an event which the civilized world greeted with joy, as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, I was among the group — led by George Kennan, the father of “containment” theory, Senator Sam Nunn and the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum — that argued against expanding NATO, at that time.
It seemed to us that since we had finally brought down Soviet communism and seen the birth of democracy in Russia the most important thing to do was to help Russian democracy take root and integrate Russia into Europe [emphasis mine]. Wasn’t that why we fought the cold war — to give young Russians the same chance at freedom and integration with the West as young Czechs, Georgians and Poles? Wasn’t consolidating a democratic Russia more important than bringing the Czech Navy into NATO?
All of this was especially true because, we argued, there was no big problem on the world stage that we could effectively address without Russia — particularly Iran or Iraq. Russia wasn’t about to reinvade Europe. And the Eastern Europeans would be integrated into the West via membership in the European Union.
No, said the Clinton foreign policy team, we’re going to cram NATO expansion down the Russians’ throats, because Moscow is weak and, by the way, they’ll get used to it. Message to Russians: We expect you to behave like Western democrats, but we’re going to treat you like you’re still the Soviet Union. The cold war is over for you, but not for us.
On Wednesday I wrote of how the US and Europe needed to develop a common policy to confront Putin’s apparent desire to resuscitate the old Soviet empire in some form. No amount of Western hubris or Georgian incompetence can justify the Russian invasion of Georgia or the saber-rattling that Moscow is now using to threaten its neighbors and former slave states. It must be confronted.
But any US and European policy, however firm, must take into account that pesky, pervasive Russian inferiority complex, as well as Russia’s ego, wounded by the collapse of its erstwhile empire.
At one level, the expansion of NATO, an entity brought into being during the Truman years as the bulwark of US/European containment policy toward the Soviet Union, made little sense during the Clinton years. There was no Soviet Union left to contain any longer.
And bringing former satellite states, now understandably hostile to Russia, into NATO, while at the same time seeking to foster democracy in Russia, to integrate Russia into the world economy, to convince Russia to honor the sovereignty of former Soviet republics and satellites, and perhaps most importantly, to get Russia to dismantle its vast and dangerous cache of nuclear weapons, was bound to pour salt into Russia’s wounded national ego.
So, it seems, Friedman has a point. A good one.
In light of that historical background, what to make of the deal signed between the US and Poland Wednesday placing a US missile defense base just 110 miles from Russia?
US insistence that the oft-discussed base, to be in place by 2012, is not a response to a perceived Russian threat, but one from Iran, has always seemed, at best, an incomplete explanation, if not completely disingenuous. While Russia’s increasingly authoritarian “democracy” might not have taken the Putin route had the West modeled its post-war policy toward Moscow after Lincoln, Wilson, and Truman rather than Thaddeus Stevens and Lloyd George, it clearly is a threat to, at the very least, former Soviet republics and satellite nations. Some response to that condition, extant even before Russian tanks rolled into Gori, is totally appropriate. Those might include UN and EU sanctions or a move toward exclusion of Russia from the G-8 nations, to name two examples.
But to wound the Russian ego and invite Putin to give vent to the national penchant for authoritarianism doesn’t advance US interests. Nor does it give Putin incentive to dismantle his country’s nuclear arsenal or honor the sovereignty of its neighbors.
One wonders the US didn’t thoughtlessly wound the Russian Bear’s ego yesterday by signing the missile base agreement with Poland. It evoked an immediate threat from Russia, from several sources, each intimating that Russia would take military action against Poland. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose academic specialty was Russia, seemed to make matters worse by reminding Putin that this is 2008, not 1988.
Of course, international relations isn’t a psycho-therapeutic encounter group. Russia’s invasion of Georgia demonstrates that Vladimir Putin is insusceptible to gentle suasion.
But the winners of major conflicts can go a long way to ensure lasting peace with former enemies by helping them rebuild their societies rather than by, in turn ignoring them, then disdaining them. A Republican practitioner of realpolitik, Theodore Roosevelt, mostly kept his own counsel when he said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” (A huge exception was the taking of Panama, about which TR bragged.) When confronting a country that suffers from a national inferiority complex, that dictum is even more apt.
Let’s hope that things haven’t progressed so far that a new Cold War is inevitable. In the face of all our other challenges, the US needs a healthy Russia, one that feels no need to invade its weak neighbors to prove its mettle.
[My personal blog is here.]