“Stabilization and a New Consensus”

In the next four years, Russian policy toward the United States (as well as Russian domestic politics and economic policy) will be shaped largely by the components of a powerful and complicated social and political trend, which, along with the best economic growth in the past quarter century, is responsible for most of President Putin’s popularity (and for his victory in last week’s presidential election).  

This trend, well familiar from the histories of other great revolutions, is a post-revolutionary “stabilization” attendant with a conservative or even reactionary retrenchment, and a drift to the core of the national political and cultural tradition.
 
This phenomenon consists of two occasionally overlapping but distinct components. First, formerly dominant pre-revolutionary political and economic elites seek to stage a comeback, to regain their power and possessions.  In the Russian case, they are the secret police (KGB/FSB), law enforcement functionaries, and the federal bureaucracy--the groups that effectively owned Soviet Russia’s politics and economy.

The other part of the “stabilization,” well established by many polls and last year’s parliamentary elections, is an intense and widespread longing for predictability, security, and continuity--after a decade of political and economic revolutions, the relentless and dizzying onslaught of the new, and the taxing choices and responsibilities of freedom--even at the expense of some (although by no means all) newly-gained liberties.

As in all previous post-revolutionary “restorations,” there is a shift in popular sentiment from a near total negation of and shame for the ancien régime, to the desire for a partial recovery of traditional polices, institutions, and symbols. Unlike the radical liberal intelligentsia, a plurality of Russians over forty years old is not ready to dismiss the entire Soviet past. While condemning the crimes of Stalinism and the repression and corruption of the Brezhnev era, they continue to take pride in the Soviet Union’s role in defeating the Nazis, in its nuclear parity with the United States, and the pioneering achievements in space.

It is to his remarkable “fit” into what amounts to a new national consensus that Vladimir Putin owns a great deal of his extraordinary popularity.  Instinctively or by design (or, likely, both), he has come to embody and symbolize to millions of Russians a unifying synthesis, a still very precarious balance between the old and the new. 

As a result, in the next four years the direction of Russia’s foreign and security affairs will be determined largely by the interplay of three sometimes overlapping but distinct and occasionally clashing factors: the bureaucratic reactionary “restoration,” a new national consensus on “stability,” and President Putin’s interpretation of and mediation between them. 
      
The Foreign Policy Consensus

Early in the 1990’s, post-Soviet Russia adopted a tri-partite vision of the country’s core foreign policy and defense objectives: Russia as nuclear superpower, as the world’s great--but no longer super--power, and as the regional superpower.[1] It means that, while insisting on maintaining a nuclear parity with the United States, Russia has given up the Soviet messianic globalism and ideologically-driven worldwide competition with the United States. From the world’s leading “revisionist” power (that is, one relentlessly seeking a change in the “balance of forces”), Russia has become a status-quo power.

Secondly, during the same period, there has occurred a startling departure from traditional Russian criteria of national greatness. Asked recently how Russia can best assert its place in the world, 46 percent of the respondents in a national survey named “becoming more competitive economically” and only 21 percent mentioned “maintaining or rebuilding a strong military.” 
 
Thirdly, not one reputable poll since 1991 has shown a majority of Russians longing for the re-creation of the unitary Soviet empire in its pre-1991 form. No matter how nostalgic millions of them feel, most reject out of hand a recreation of the empire because of the enormous economic, political and military burden that such a project would entail. The past ten years have demonstrated that barring unlikely sudden threats to its strategic interests,  Russia appears to be interested most of all in the preservation of a status-quo in the post-Soviet space. 
 
At the same time Russia’s new popular sentiment is strongly in favor of greater assertiveness of national interests. Russians are no longer desperate to be liked by the U.S. (or “the West” in general): they realize that the latter are not going to protect them from Islamic terrorists who have killed over 500 people in Russia in the past 18 months. As a leading Russian expert, Dmitry Trenin, put it recently, Russia wishes “not to belong but to be.”[2] 

Finding themselves in a very rough neighborhood and sharing thousands of miles of borders with China and North Korea (and with only a string of unstable Central Asian states between them and Iran and Afghanistan) after a decade of  unprecedented unilateral disarmament, most Russians support a strong, efficient and modern military.[3] 
 
Enter the “Restorationists”

In foreign and defense policy, the “restorationists” are likely to go outside the consensus and seek to restore Russia as a global superpower counterbalancing the United States. They will go beyond assertiveness and to a tougher, even provocative stance toward the U.S. especially in what they consider Russia’s “sphere of influence”: the Caucasus, the Central Asia, the Far East, and North Korea.

Another item on the agenda is a massive re-armament and expansion of conventional and nuclear forces. The reactionaries have already succeeded in slowing down and diluting the progressive military reform, which couples modernization with a sharp reduction in the number of soldiers, the abolition of the draft and the creation of all-volunteer armed forces.

Finally, on the territory of the former Soviet Union, the “restorationists” are likely to push beyond the current Russian position of a strongest economic and military power and toward that of an overlord and, perhaps, an imperial master. 

Putin

Given the obvious disjoint between the popular and the restorationist versions of foreign and defense policies, Putin’s position is critical to policy-making. He may, of course, surprise us, but there is little in his past behavior to indicate that he will adopt an extreme reactionary agenda.

The Russian President is not a man of abrupt changes and risky policies. He is obsessed with and addicted to his popularity. He is thinking of his place in history, and, as far as we can glean from his public statements, he sees his legacy as that of economic revival, restoration of law and order, and the reduction of incompetence, over-bureaucratization and corruption in the Russian state. In the end, Mr. Putin is most likely to stay within the consensus or never deviate too far or for too long.

In addition to such policies’ being outside the consensus, an aggressive, Soviet-like anti-Americanism with a global reach would reverse the post-Soviet tradition and directly challenge Mr. Putin’s key domestic objectives because of the massive increase in the share of national income devoted to defense that such a policy would necessitate.

After the Yeltsin-Gaidar government cut military spending by 90 percent in 1992, it was kept at no more than 3 percent of the GDP during the 1990’s. Putin has generally hewed close to this parameter. Even in the booming economy and state flush with tax receipts and bursting with gold and hard currency (and even with a 19-percent increase in defense appropriation this year, the first such increase in eleven years), Russia spends 2.8-3.7 percent of the GDP on defense (344 billion rubles or an equivalent of slightly over $11 billion in a $300-$400 billion economy). Last year, President Putin rejected calls to use the country’s swelling hard-currency reserves for defense because that money “provided the basic foundation for our economic development.”[4] In 2004, the spending is set at 411 billion rubles, $14 billion or 3.5- 4.6 percent of the GDP--or at least six times smaller than the defense’s share during the Soviet era.

In addition to radically skewing national priorities and breaching the consensus, a pro-defense restructuring of the budget would spell the end to Mr. Putin’s declared objective of doubling the country’s GDP between 2000 and 2010.

“Near Abroad”: a Potential Area of Tension

At the same time, there is likely to be a great deal of saber rattling and chest beating on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Like big continental powers, from Babylon, China, Persia and Rome, have done for millennia (and as the U.S. did in Latin America for most of this country’s history)  Russia will seek to maintain, or enforce, stability by securing friendly policies by friendly regimes on its borders. She will do so by seeing to exerting pressure and control over the “near abroad”--and by continuing to keep some of its impoverished neighbor-states with electricity, oil and gas free of charge or orders of magnitude below the world prices in what amounts to perhaps the world’s largest bilateral economic aid program,  particularly in Ukraine, Armenia, and Georgia. 
 
Thus, the recent U.S.-Russian tensions over Moldova and Georgia will not be the last. Yet such conflicts are likely to be contained by the overarching mutual strategic agenda, especially war on terrorism. 
 
Conclusion

In developing Russia’s strategic posture toward the United States, President Putin is likely to mediate between the national consensus and the “restorationists” agenda. In end, the resultant policies are likely to be closer to the former rather than the latter. The anti-American impulse is likely to be constrained both by the over-arching mutual strategic agenda and by the cost of neo-globalism and massive re-armament that such an impulse would dictate. While increasing Russian assertiveness on the territory of the former Soviet Union, Russia is not likely to undermine the U.S. strategic interests--provided such interests are clearly demarcated and communicated to Russia in no uncertain terms. 

Notes

1. For details see Leon Aron, “The Foreign Policy Doctrine of Postcommunist Russia and Its Domestic Context,” in Michael Mandelbaum, ed., The New Russian Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1998), pp. 27-42.

2. Dmitry Trenin, Lecture at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 25, 2004, Washington DC.

3. Natalya Arkhangel’skaya, “The Inscrutable Middle Class”, Expert, February 26, 2004 (www.expert.ru)

* After dipping to around 30 percent in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the favorable views of the U.S. in Russia have been restored to their 10-year norm of around 50-55 percent. For example, the most recent (February 19-March 3) Pew Research Center country-by-country survey found 47 percent of Russians viewing the U.S. favorably--second only to Britain among the major European countries polled.

4. RFE/RL Newsline, November 19, 2003, pp. 3-4.

† Another traditional item on the U.S.-Russian strategic agenda, nuclear non-proliferation, has been significantly weakened by Russia’s material and technological assistance to Iran’s nuclear program and Russia’s continuing defense of Iran from tougher sanctions in the International Atomic Energy Agency. Additionally, as recent discoveries in Iraq have shown, the Kremlin cannot (or will not) establish control over Russia’s private companies aggressively peddling both advanced conventional weapons and missile technology.  

Leon Aron is a resident scholar at AEI.