Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The subject of the evolvement and development of a new Russian foreign policy, its domestic roots, its impact on the world at large, especially the United States and Russia's neighbors, is as complex as it is fascinating and important. I have tried to provide a more detailed and nuanced assessment of these issues in a long chapter in the book, The New Russian Foreign Policy, edited by Michael Mandelbaum, and just published by the Council on Foreign Relations. I am also submitting for the record another very recent publication, the Spring 1998 issue of the Russian Outlook quarterly, published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Today in 10 minutes I have, I will attempt only an outline of the factors that to me seem to frame the dynamic of Russian foreign policy and to determine it for years, perhaps decades to come. They are: post-imperial territorial, ideological and diplomatic adjustment vis-a-vis East/Central Europe and in the former Soviet Republics, the Newly Independent States; radical de-militarization; and a new role for and new objectives of Russian behavior in the world, especially toward the United States, after Russia's loss of the superpower status.

I ask the Committee's indulgence as I read from my notes in order to save time.

Between 1992 and 1995 Russia scrupulously implemented all of Mikhail Gorbachev's commitments and completed a remarkable--peacetime and voluntary--contraction of the empire it inherited from the Soviet Union. On September 1, 1994, when the Russian units left Germany, most of the troops already had been removed from Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.  In four years Russia had repatriated (frequently without homes for officers or jobs for their spouses) 800,000 troops, 400,000 civilian personnel and 500,000 family members.

When the last Russian soldier left the Paldiski submarine training base in Estonia in September 1995, his departure marked the end of Russian presence in East-Central Europe. The lands acquired and held during two-and-a-half centuries of Russian and Soviet imperial conquests were restored to the captive nations. Russia returned to its seventeenth century borders.

Unfolding in parallel was de-militarization, historically unprecedented in speed and scope. "Reduction" is a ridiculous euphemism for the methodical starvation, depredation and strangulation to which Yeltsin has subjected the enormously bloated armed forces and the mammoth military-industrial complex that he inherited from the Soviet Union. In a span of a few years, the Russian defense sector--formerly the country's omnipotent overlord, the source of national pride, the master of country's choicest resources and of the livelihoods of one-third of the Russian population--was reduced to a neglected and humiliated beggar.

Begun by an 80 percent decrease in defense procurement ordered by the Acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar in 1992, the share of the Russian GDP spent on the military declined from at least 20 percent to between 5 percent and 7 percent today.  Yeltsin promised to reduce it to 3 percent by the year 2000.

Along the way, Russian army shrank from around 4 million in January 1992 to between 1.7 million by late 1996. In July 1997, Yeltsin signed several decrees mandating a reduction of armed forces by 500,000 men to 1.2 million.

The shrinking of Russian military was due to the weakening of the Russian state's grip on the economy and to the constraints imposed on imperialism, aggressiveness and brutality by public opinion, free mass media and competitive politics, which have forced the Kremlin to end the war in Chechnya, to admit the defeat and retreat in less than two years. Tardy in bestowing on Russia its other blessings, the Russian democracy has already made high defense expenditures and violent imperial projects quite difficult to sustain.

To be sure, a less than seven- year-old post-communist Russia is a long way from becoming a liberal capitalist democracy. However, it has undeniably established a skeleton structure, which no matter how obviously flawed, comprises some of the necessary although by no means sufficient conditions of a liberal democratic state: freedom of speech, assembly and political activity; freedom of privately owned mass media from government censorship; freedom for political opposition and election campaigning; a real choice of candidates and programs before the voters at election time; and, finally, free elections.

As regards Russian behavior in the world both inside and outside the former Soviet borders, the most fundamental choice that Russia had to face was the one between what "non-revisionist" and "revisionist" stances.  The former seeks advantage within the constraints of an existing framework, accepted by the majority of the international community. The latter is aimed at undermining and changing the framework itself. Russia has chosen "non-revisionism."  She may bemoan the unfairness of the score (and does so often and loudly), but she does not try to change the rules of the game.

This does not mean of course, that everything is fine. There is, for instance, a crushing burden of the Soviet legacy. Seven years ago, an enormous and very evil empire, which had deformed and poisoned everything and everyone it touched, broke to pieces. Yet its harmful rays, like light from a long dead star, will continue to reach us for a very long time. And any American policy-maker who is not prepared to handle Soviet strands in the fabric of Russian behavior and who does not confront and counter them resolutely would fail in his or her duty: be that the relentless and often senseless spying or sales of nuclear- or missile-related technologies to nations hostile to the United States.

Yet, very much unlike the Soviet Union, the tweaking, the shouting and the occasional painful kick in the shins we get from Russia must not be confused with anti-Americanism of the kind that was professed by the Soviet Union, Iran in the 1980's, or Iraq, Cuba and Libya today. Russian truculence is not informed by ideology. It is not dedicated to a consistent pursuit of strategic objectives inimical to the truly vital interests of the United States, and it is not part of the relentless, "antagonistic"  struggle "to the end."  Rather, it is  pragmatic and selective.  And when America's wishes are communicated at the highest level, forcefully, directly and unambiguously, Moscow is likely to moderate opposition and even extend cooperation, as it did in Bosnia.

With respect to the Newly Independent States, Russia also made a choice from two different models of behavior. One, which migh be called imperial, ideological and revanchist,  was aimed at making the so-called "post-Soviet space" to resemble the former USSR as closely as possible and as quickly as possible. The cost - in treasury, world public opinion or even blood--was no object. All means were acceptable, including the stirring of nationalist and irredentist tendencies among the 25-million strong ethnic Russian diaspora in the newly independent states--just as Serbia did in Bosnia and Croatia.

In the other model, which might be called, "post-colonial," "re-integration" was instilled with a far less ambitious content. Its advocates relied on the incremental pull of a privatized Russian economy and democratic stabilization to do the job. Its time-frame stretched over decades. Haltingly and inconsistently, Russia opted for the latter game plan.

Now, as regards to the maintenance of regional dominance, however, we should have no illusions: Russia is likely to deploy the entire range of pressure and roguery that great land powers used for millennia to assert control over a self-declared "sphere of influence"-- from the ancient China Babylon and Persia to the United States in Central America through the 1950's. Yet, while relentlessly probing for weaknesses, exploiting their neighbors' troubles and taking advantage of openings to further its regional superiority, the "post-colonial" policy is constrained by a cost-benefit analysis. There is wariness of open-ended, long-term and expensive commitments in the "near abroad." Such considerations were anathema both to the traditional Russian and, especially, Soviet "ideological" varieties of imperialism.

For the proponents of the "post-colonial" choice de-militarization of conflicts in the "near abroad" had always been central. In that respect the year of 1997 was by far the most productive. Following Yeltsin's near-miraculous resurgence after a heart bypass surgery, Moscow moved to settle all the hostilities in the region. It succeeded in civil and ethnic conflicts in Moldova, Tajikistan, Ossetia and Ingushetia; and made significant progress in Georgia and Abkhazia and in relations between Russian and the Baltic States.

But by far the most impressive diplomatic coup of that busy year was the May 31 "Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership" between Russia and Ukraine signed by Yeltsin and President Leonid Kuchma in Kiev on May 31. An accord between Europe's largest (Russia) and its sixth most populous (Ukraine) nations is just as central to the stability of the post-Cold War European order as the French-German rapprochement, engineered by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer in 1958, was to the post-World War II stabilization.

As a result, Russia gave up the Crimean peninsula, where ethnic Russians outnumber ethnic Ukrainians by 2 to 1, and the old Russian city port of Sevastopol and ceded to Ukraine the entire Black Sea Fleet. The sides also agreed on the long-term settlement of Ukraine's debt to Russia for gas and oil deliveries, estimated at the time of the Treaty signing to between $3 billion and $3.5 billion, which is perhaps the most generous, and least publicized, bilateral foreign assistance program in the world today.

Let me conclude by saying that with all the enormous and real problems, with all the heavy and pernicious Soviet legacy the sorting out of which is likely to take decades  never in the almost four-and-a-half centuries of the modern Russian state has there been a Russia less imperialist, less militarized, less threatening to its neighbors and the world, and more affected by the Western ideals and practices than a Russia we see today. What makes one especially hopeful is the connection between democratization and national security policies is a new fundamentally different reality. Recalling one of Ronald Reagan's magnificently vindicated theorems--nations mistrust one another not because they are armed; they are armed because they mistrust one another--today's Russia, while still far from a model of openness and consistency, still is easier to trust than at any other time in its history.

Leon Aron is a resident scholar at AEI.