Russian bear not ready to bite

By Theo Sommer

BONN: Is the honeymoon between post-Communist Russia and the West over? Are we inexorably slithering into another Cold War? And must the industrial democracies once again fear Muscovite expansionism -- the reappearance of a deadly menace to international peace and the European order?

These disturbing questions first cropped up in late 1994 when a blustering Boris Yeltsin warned the West of a "cold peace," abruptly put off the signing of the planned Partnership for Peace with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and ordered Russian troops into Chechnya. They were posed anew when Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev railed against any eastward expansion of the Atlantic Alliance, threatening a breach of several disarmament accords in the event, promoted ultranationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky to lieutenant colonel and engineered the extension of the term of military service to two years.

They were raised once again when Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev declared that Moscow would not hesitate, if need be, to use military force for the protection of 25 million Russians in the "near abroad."

The inconclusive meeting between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin earlier this month did not provide the answer to these questions. Western doubts about Russian intentions persist. The Kremlinologists, prematurely considered as an endangered species, are back in business. What is Moscow up to?

The simple answer is that post-Soviet Russia, like any other great nation, is guided in its foreign policy by considerations of interest, power and prestige. For a while the West deluded itself that this was going to change; that Moscow would unswervingly toe the Western line from now on; that in future its comportment on the international scene would resemble that of a Monaco writ large. This was a naive expectation, and the West was quickly disabused of it. The backlash against what many Russians, even reformers, perceived as an "only yes" foreign policy was inevitable. So was the reassertion of traditional Russian patterns of thought predating Communism by three or four generations.

Thus Yeltsin's Moscow warned Turkey against seeking to insert itself into Central Asia. In the bloody conflict that engulfed post- Socialist Yugoslavia, it has steadfastly backed Serbia, its protege for more than 100 years. Through a series of treaties with the Moslem republics and, more recently, Belarus, it has recreated a kind of cordon sanitaire and assumed responsibility for the defense of the Commonwealth of Independent States border vis-a- vis China, Afghanistan and Iran in the South, vis-a-vis Poland, Lithuania and Latvia in the Northwest. And its spokesman keep harping on the theme that Russia is not a declining regional power but, despite all its current woes, a world power, no less.

So the Russia of our recent dreams has evaporated. The tone of the Kremlin leaders is less compliant today and more assertive than it was two or three years ago. But do we really have to start trembling again? Three reasons would seem to speak against it.

For one thing, the Russian Army in its present state need not scare anyone. Its 1.5 million men are poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly led -- that, if anything, is the lesson of the Chechnya campaign. The training programs of all services have been severely curtailed. For a number of years now, replacement of deficient or obsolete war material -- planes, tanks, artillery pieces, even jeeps -- has tended toward zero. More and more young men evade the draft. Army units are at half strength. The officers' corps is impoverished, partially housed in tent camps, forced to seek odd jobs to make ends meet. And for the greater part the generals remain opposed to the "war party." Most of them are professional soldiers who conceive their mission as a strictly defensive one.

Second, there is no indication that Moscow intends to recover the ground it lost in the West. The Warsaw Pact is dead, its forward infrastructure destroyed, the former Red Army withdrawn. Russia will suppress any secessionist movement -- and the war in Chechnya proves that it will not shy away from unspeakable brutality to hold the Russian Federation together. In the same vein, it feels honor-bound to protect the 25 million fellow-countrymen left stranded outside Russia proper when the Soviet Union broke up -- and who would contest the legitimacy of such undertakings if Russian minorities in the "near abroad" were harassed or massacred?

A military threat to Eastern Europe, let alone to NATO Europe, is nowhere visible. Even those East European countries that keep knocking at the door of the Atlantic Alliance have not been able to point to any concrete menace. There may be a case for bringing Poland, Czechia and Hungary into NATO, but it is not connected to any clear and present danger emanating from Moscow.

Third, Russia's stubborn opposition to NATO's eastward expansion does not reflect a determination on the part of the Kremlin leadership to return to confrontation. Rather it mirrors age-old apprehensions: a deep sense of isolation and vulnerability shared by many in the reform camp. It is hard for many Russian patriots to understand why NATO should not only continue to exist after the demise of the Warsaw Pact but should, in addition, push closer to the borders of the fatherland. This raises worrisome issues. Will there be forward deployment of foreign troops, for instance in Poland? Stationing there, to boot, of U.S. nuclear weapons? The close strategic partnership offered to Moscow as a sort of compensation is still a vague concept, unsuited to allay Russian fears and assuage Russian pride. For the time being, distrust and frustration abound.

How is the West to deal with the new Russia? There are two different schools of thought. The proponents of neo-containment adhere to a new domino theory. First, Chechnya will be subdued. Subsequently, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia will fall, followed by Belarus and Ukraine. The Baltics would be next, then the Visegrad countries, then the Balkans, ultimately Constantinople and the Straits. It's a gruesome scenario, salvaging the enemy image prevalent during the Cold War by substituting traditional geopolitical concerns for the ideological obsessions of the postwar period.

The school of pragmatic realism makes short shrift of this concept. Its adherents do not expect Russia to pursue a cooperative policy at all times. They accept some level of disagreement with Moscow. For the rest, they are convinced that Russia is "a weak state more likely to implode into anarchy than to explode beyond its frontiers in an orgy of conquest and aggression" (Walter Russell Mead). It is the disintegration of the Russian Federation rather than a new expansionism that threatens the world: by compounding the task of managing the nuclear legacy of the Soviet Union; by creating a bloody chaos from which millions will want to flee west; by undermining the chances in Russia of working its way out of the 19th into the 21st century.

In this view, Russian readiness to stand guard over Central Asia to stem the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalism is not so much an indication of resurgent imperialism but a commitment to be welcomed by the West. From this vantage point, the request to revise the disarmament arrangements, made in 1990, for the southern region appears reasonable: an attempt to bolster the status quo rather than overthrow it. Likewise, Moscow's desire to reassemble the economic space of the former Soviet Union makes eminent sense to the pragmatists. If it succeeds, this will be to the benefit of all. Anyway, they argue, NATO is still around: a credible assurance against any revival of Muscovite expansionism. If worst came to worst, the Atlantic Alliance could reconstitute its former fighting strength much more rapidly and efficiently than Russia with its weakened industrial base.

I have no difficulty siding with the realists. It is far too early to give up on Russia. We should not provoke by our own actions what is in our vital interest to prevent. The world is not headed back to the Cold War. The troubles we grapple with are the troubles of normalcy, not of renewed confrontation.

A century ago, the French Ambassador to St. Petersburg remarked: "Russia is never as strong or as weak as it looks." That is good counsel still today. Russia may yet become a risk factor again, of course. But so far it is not beyond cooperation. Security from Russia, if necessary, security with Russia, if possible -- this ought to be the Western guideline. We must not plummet from the heights of exuberance into bottomless pessimism. The honeymoon may be over, yet that does not mean that a divorce is inevitable.

Theo Sommer has been editor in chief of the German weekly Zeit newspaper since 1973. He also served as chief of the West German Defense Department's planning office in 1969-70.

-- The Daily Yomiuri