The Russian Connection
A crucial ally.

By Tom Nichols, professor of strategy, Naval War College & author of The Russian Presidency.
October 16, 2001 11:50 a.m.

Editor's note: The opinions are those of the author and not of any agency of the U. S. government.

ow Russia and America have both experienced mass terrorism by Islamic extremists — but we experienced it first." This allusion by a Russian academic last week to the 1999 string of apartment bombings in Moscow was more somber than accusatory. And in it, there was also a sentiment that many Russians, and their president, seem to share: that the time is right to use cooperation in the war on terror to improve relations between Russia and the United States. After so many years of clumsy and ham-fisted anti-Russian diplomacy on the part of the Clinton administration, it is an opportunity for a new start that the Bush administration should seize.

This chance at a renewal of Russian-American relations came about, in part, because of a new Russian sympathy for the Americans after September 11. Indeed, many Russians feel that they have been living for years with the kind of fear that Americans are only now experiencing, and there seems to be little satisfaction among them that Americans now live with the same anxieties. Even before the Moscow bombings, there was apprehensiveness in the Russian capital about the possible repercussions of the civil war in Chechnya; since the 1999 bombings, however, Muscovites in particular have been more watchful about the odd parcel on the subway, a feeling that has returned and intensified since the Twin Towers and Pentagon disasters. (Last week in Moscow, police could be seen stopping bearded young men and checking their identification. Racial profiling may not be nice, but it happens everywhere.) Although gun-toting Chechens are no longer as visible in the capital as they once were — I was once seated at a table in a hotel dining room across from a group of them sporting shoulder-holstered weapons, and was advised to leave before they drank too much — the attacks against America have rekindled in many Muscovites the tensions they felt at the worst moments of the Chechen events and a subsequent, growing sense of solidarity with their former enemy, the United States.

The scale of the Moscow bombings two years ago did not match the carnage in New York and Washington, but the method was similar, with bombs, triggered in the dead of night to maximize casualties, that leveled entire buildings filled with innocent civilians in one blow. When then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised to put paid to the terrorists (he was reported to have used Russian gangster slang in vowing to "wipe them out in their crappers"), his popularity, like President Bush's now, shot through the roof, reaching unheard-of levels for a Russian politician. Although much of Putin's later election in 2000 can be traced to his privileged position as Acting President in the wake of Boris Yeltsin's sudden resignation, his brutal attacks on the Chechens were perhaps the single more important issue on which the voters supported him. At the time, many Western commentators tut-tutted that this was little more than cynical jingoism, but Putin's victory reflected more of an understandable craving for stability (and revenge, to be sure) on the part of ordinary Russians than it did any kind of slick electoral marketing.

None of this is to excuse the undeniable excesses of Russia's Chechen campaigns. But Russians, in turn, now ask what course America would take under the same circumstances, knowing full well that U.S. force would be used more judiciously, but it would be — and in their view, should be — used nonetheless. This may be why more than over 40 percent of Muscovites in recent polls are now more inclined to view the United States as justified in the use of force, a sea change from previous beliefs.

Moreover, the September 11 attacks, and the resonance that American fears have found among many Russians, overshadows issues like NATO expansion that now seem almost trivial as sources of Russian-American friction. This in turn has opened a clear opportunity to undo much of the damage inflicted on the Russian-American relationship by the lurching policy of the Clinton years — smiling handshakes one moment, barely disguised insults the next — as both Moscow and Washington find a common interest in a global defense against terror.

The Russians have much to offer in both political and strategic terms, not the least of which is Moscow's continued acquiescence in American and allied movements through the states of the former Soviet Union. If the Russian government were to object, perhaps suspecting an attempt to use the war on terror as a pretext for placing U.S. forces close to Russian borders, it would greatly complicate military (not to mention diplomatic) planning. But if Russia is a partner, rather than an observer, in this war, it will go far to allay such fears. Furthermore, the partnership would not only provide the Western coalition with a powerful ally, but would send a message to the terrorists and their state sponsors alike that the civilized nations of the world can overcome their immediate differences to attend to the more important work of finding and exterminating murderers.

Greater cooperation with the Russians will not solve our differences with them overnight, but it will help to cast them in a new light. Moscow objects to President Bush's hopes for missile defenses, to take but one example, but a joint effort against terrorism may help to convince the Russians (finally) that terrorists with nuclear missiles should be thwarted just as surely as terrorists flying hijacked airplanes. At the very least, strengthening ties with Moscow and engaging the Russian people in a cause that is theirs as well as ours can help to lay the last vestiges of the Cold War to rest, and to convince the terrorists that the war they've brought upon themselves cannot be won by dividing old enemies or new friends.