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 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.
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