George Friedman
Last week I flew into Moscow, arriving at 4:30
p.m. on Dec. 8. It gets dark in Moscow around that time, and the sun doesn't
rise until about 10 a.m. at this time of the year — the so-called Black Days
versus White Nights. For anyone used to life closer to the equator, this is
unsettling. It is the first sign that you are not only in a foreign country,
which I am used to, but also in a foreign environment. Yet as we drove toward
downtown Moscow, well over an hour away, the traffic, the road work, were all commonplace.
Moscow has three airports, and we flew into the farthest one from downtown,
Domodedovo — the primary international airport. There is endless renovation
going on in Moscow, and while it holds up traffic, it indicates that prosperity
continues, at least in the capital.
Our host met us and we quickly went to work
getting a sense of each other and talking about the events of the day. He had
spent a great deal of time in the United States and was far more familiar with
the nuances of American life than I was with Russian. In that he was the
perfect host, translating his country to me, always with the spin of a Russian
patriot, which he surely was. We talked as we drove into Moscow, managing to
dive deep into the subject.
From him, and from conversations with Russian
experts on most of the regions of the world — students at the Institute of
International Relations — and with a handful of what I took to be ordinary
citizens (not employed by government agencies engaged in managing Russia's
foreign and economic affairs), I gained a sense of Russia's concerns. The
concerns are what you might expect. The emphasis and order of those concerns
were not.
Russians' Economic
Expectations
I thought the economic problems of Russia would
be foremost on people's minds. The plunge of the ruble, the decline in oil
prices, a general slowdown in the economy and the effect of Western sanctions
all appear in the West to be hammering the Russian economy. Yet this was not
the conversation I was having. The decline in the ruble has affected foreign
travel plans, but the public has only recently begun feeling the real impact of
these factors, particularly through inflation.
But there was another reason given for the
relative calm over the financial situation, and it came not only from
government officials but also from private individuals and should be considered
very seriously. The Russians pointed out that economic shambles was the norm
for Russia, and prosperity the exception. There is always the expectation that
prosperity will end and the normal constrictions of Russian poverty return.
The Russians suffered terribly during the 1990s
under Boris Yeltsin but also under previous governments stretching back to the
czars. In spite of this, several pointed out, they had won the wars they needed
to win and had managed to live lives worth living. The golden age of the
previous 10 years was coming to an end. That was to be expected, and it would
be endured. The government officials meant this as a warning, and I do not
think it was a bluff. The pivot of the conversation was about sanctions, and
the intent was to show that they would not cause Russia to change its policy
toward Ukraine.
Russians' strength is that they can endure
things that would break other nations. It was also pointed out that they tend
to support the government regardless of competence when Russia feels
threatened. Therefore, the Russians argued, no one should expect that
sanctions, no matter how harsh, would cause Moscow to capitulate. Instead the
Russians would respond with their own sanctions, which were not specified but
which I assume would mean seizing the assets of Western companies in Russia and
curtailing agricultural imports from Europe. There was no talk of cutting off
natural gas supplies to Europe.
If this is so, then the Americans and Europeans
are deluding themselves on the effects of sanctions. In general, I personally
have little confidence in the use of sanctions. That being said, the Russians
gave me another prism to look through. Sanctions reflect European and American
thresholds of pain. They are designed to cause pain that the West could not
withstand. Applied to others, the effects may vary.
My sense is that the Russians were serious. It
would explain why the increased sanctions, plus oil price drops, economic
downturns and the rest simply have not caused the erosion of confidence that
would be expected. Reliable polling numbers show that President Vladimir Putin
is still enormously popular. Whether he remains popular as the decline sets in,
and whether the elite being hurt financially are equally sanguine, is another
matter. But for me the most important lesson I might have learned in Russia —
"might" being the operative term — is that Russians don't respond to
economic pressure as Westerners do, and that the idea made famous in a
presidential campaign slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," may not
apply the same way in Russia.
The Ukrainian Issue
There was much more toughness on Ukraine. There
is acceptance that events in Ukraine were a reversal for Russia and resentment
that the Obama administration mounted what Russians regard as a propaganda
campaign to try to make it appear that Russia was the aggressor. Two points were
regularly made. The first was that Crimea was historically part of Russia and
that it was already dominated by the Russian military under treaty. There was
no invasion but merely the assertion of reality. Second, there was heated
insistence that eastern Ukraine is populated by Russians and that as in other
countries, those Russians must be given a high degree of autonomy. One scholar
pointed to the Canadian model and Quebec to show that the West normally has no
problem with regional autonomy for ethnically different regions but is shocked
that the Russians might want to practice a form of regionalism commonplace in
the West.
The case of Kosovo is extremely important to
the Russians both because they feel that their wishes were disregarded there
and because it set a precedent. Years after the fall of the Serbian government
that had threatened the Albanians in Kosovo, the West granted Kosovo
independence. The Russians argued that the borders were redrawn although no
danger to Kosovo existed. Russia didn't want it to happen, but the West did it
because it could. In the Russian view, having redrawn the map of Serbia, the
West has no right to object to redrawing the map of Ukraine.
I try not to be drawn into matters of right and
wrong, not because I don't believe there is a difference but because history is
rarely decided by moral principles. I have understood the Russians' view of
Ukraine as a necessary strategic buffer and the idea that without it they would
face a significant threat, if not now, then someday. They point to Napoleon and
Hitler as examples of enemies defeated by depth.
I tried to provide a strategic American
perspective. The United States has spent the past century pursuing a single
objective: avoiding the rise of any single hegemon that might be able to
exploit Western European technology and capital and Russian resources and
manpower. The United States intervened in World War I in 1917 to block German
hegemony, and again in World War II. In the Cold War the goal was to prevent
Russian hegemony. U.S. strategic policy has been consistent for a century.
The United States has been conditioned to be
cautious of any rising hegemon. In this case the fear of a resurgent Russia is
a recollection of the Cold War, but not an unreasonable one. As some pointed
out to me, economic weakness has rarely meant military weakness or political
disunity. I agreed with them on this and pointed out that this is precisely why
the United States has a legitimate fear of Russia in Ukraine. If Russia manages
to reassert its power in Ukraine, then what will come next? Russia has military
and political power that could begin to impinge on Europe. Therefore, it is not
irrational for the United States, and at least some European countries, to want
to assert their power in Ukraine.
When I laid out this argument to a very senior
official from the Russian Foreign Ministry, he basically said he had no idea
what I was trying to say. While I think he fully understood the geopolitical
imperatives guiding Russia in Ukraine, to him the centurylong imperatives
guiding the United States are far too vast to apply to the Ukrainian issue. It
is not a question of him only seeing his side of the issue. Rather, it is that
for Russia, Ukraine is an immediate issue, and the picture I draw of American
strategy is so abstract that it doesn't seem to connect with the immediate
reality. There is an automatic American response to what it sees as Russian
assertiveness; however, the Russians feel they have been far from offensive and
have been on the defense. For the official, American fears of Russian hegemony
were simply too far-fetched to contemplate.
In other gatherings, with the senior staff of
the Institute of International Relations, I tried a different tack, trying to
explain that the Russians had embarrassed U.S. President Barack Obama in Syria.
Obama had not wanted to attack when poison gas was used in Syria because it was
militarily difficult and because if he toppled Syrian President Bashar al
Assad, it would leave Sunni jihadists in charge of the country. The United
States and Russia had identical interests, I asserted, and the Russian attempt
to embarrass the president by making it appear that Putin had forced him to
back down triggered the U.S. response in Ukraine. Frankly, I thought my geopolitical
explanation was a lot more coherent than this argument, but I tried it out. The
discussion was over lunch, but my time was spent explaining and arguing, not
eating. I found that I could hold my own geopolitically but that they had
mastered the intricacies of the Obama administration in ways I never will.
The Future for Russia
and the West
The more important question was what will come
next. The obvious question is whether the Ukrainian crisis will spread to the
Baltics, Moldova or the Caucasus. I raised this with the Foreign Ministry
official. He was emphatic, making the point several times that this crisis
would not spread. I took that to mean that there would be no Russian riots in
the Baltics, no unrest in Moldova and no military action in the Caucasus. I
think he was sincere. The Russians are stretched as it is. They must deal with
Ukraine, and they must cope with the existing sanctions, however much they can
endure economic problems. The West has the resources to deal with multiple
crises. Russia needs to contain this crisis in Ukraine.
The Russians will settle for a degree of
autonomy for Russians within parts of eastern Ukraine. How much autonomy, I do
not know. They need a significant gesture to protect their interests and to
affirm their significance. Their point that regional autonomy exists in many
countries is persuasive. But history is about power, and the West is using its
power to press Russia hard. But obviously, nothing is more dangerous than
wounding a bear. Killing him is better, but killing Russia has not proved easy.
I came away with two senses. One was that Putin
was more secure than I thought. In the scheme of things, that does not mean
much. Presidents come and go. But it is a reminder that things that would bring
down a Western leader may leave a Russian leader untouched. Second, the
Russians do not plan a campaign of aggression. Here I am more troubled — not
because they want to invade anyone, but because nations frequently are not
aware of what is about to happen, and they might react in ways that will
surprise them. That is the most dangerous thing about the situation. It is not
what is intended, which seems genuinely benign. What is dangerous is the action
that is unanticipated, both by others and by Russia.
At the same time, my general analysis remains
intact. Whatever Russia might do elsewhere, Ukraine is of fundamental strategic
importance to Russia. Even if the east received a degree of autonomy, Russia
would remain deeply concerned about the relationship of the rest of Ukraine to
the West. As difficult as this is for Westerners to fathom, Russian history is
a tale of buffers. Buffer states save Russia from Western invaders. Russia
wants an arrangement that leaves Ukraine at least neutral.
For the United States, any rising power in
Eurasia triggers an automatic response born of a century of history. As
difficult as it is for Russians to understand, nearly half a century of a Cold
War left the United States hypersensitive to the possible re-emergence of
Russia. The United States spent the past century blocking the unification of
Europe under a single, hostile power. What Russia intends and what America
fears are very different things.
The United States and Europe have trouble
understanding Russia's fears. Russia has trouble understanding particularly
American fears. The fears of both are real and legitimate. This is not a matter
of misunderstanding between countries but of incompatible imperatives. All of
the good will in the world — and there is precious little of that — cannot
solve the problem of two major countries that are compelled to protect their
interests and in doing so must make the other feel threatened. I learned much
in my visit. I did not learn how to solve this problem, save that at the very
least each must understand the fears of the other, even if they can't calm
them.
George Friedman, Stratfor, December 16, 2014
"Viewing
Russia From the Inside is republished with permission of Stratfor."
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