9 the Russian Federation and Asian Security.Do

The Russian Federation and Asian Security Marginalization or Integration? Andrew C. Kuchins Stanford University Alexi V. Zagorsky Russian Academy of Sciences October 1998 Contemporary discussions of virtually any aspect of Russian foreign and security policy must take as their point of departure the extraordinarily weakened condition of the Russian Federation. If one looks at economic and military power, the main traditional indices of national strength, Russia’s decline is dramatic. Alexei Arbatov, deputy chairman of the Committee on Defense in the Russian Duma, recently wrote that, “Not since June 1941 has the Russian military stood as perilously close to ruin as it does now.”1 The 1997 Russian military budget was officially less than $20 billion, and even including hidden or indirect expenses and the domestic purchasing power of the ruble, certainly not more than $30 billion.2 Currently the Russian GNP is approximately 8 percent that of the United States. If that number is not sufficiently sobering, Clifford Gaddy and John Steinbruner of the Brookings Institution have pointed out that the Russian economy today is about 25 percent the size of the U.S. economy in 1950—when the U.S. population was equivalent to Russia’s This paper was prepared for the conference “America’s Alliances with Japan and Korea in a Changing Northeast Asia,” August 20-22, 1998 at the Asia/Pacific Research Center, Stanford University. 1 Alexei G. Arbatov, “Military Reform in Russia,” International Security 22, no. 4 (Spring 1998): 83. 2 Ibid, p. 97. 1 2 The Russian Federation and Asian Security current population of 150 million.3 Not only are these traditional sources of national power remarkably diminished, but the state institutions responsible for making and conducting foreign and security policy are in various stages of disorder and disability. Perhaps the debacle in Chechnya epitomizes both the deterioration of the Russian conventional armed forces and the disorder in the Kremlin’s decision-making. The entire federal government continues to endure a fiscal crisis that has only grown worse in the last year. It is mind-boggling to realize that only a decade ago when Gorbachev embarked on his reform efforts, the Soviet Union was regarded as a global, albeit seriously flawed, superpower. Today the only vestige of its superpower status is the aging but still large arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. But even here the overriding fear is not so much that Russia would use these weapons, but rather that Moscow may not be able to control them and fissile materials more generally. Just in July of this year Alexander Lebed, newly elected governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai in Siberia, offered to take over a Siberian missile unit if Moscow did not pay the troops. 4 Today we are more likely to be fearful of Russia because of the possibility of state collapse or the implications of continued economic decline and social unrest leading to more political disorder. The analogy with Weimar Germany is the specter haunting Eurasia today. Gorbachev had diagnosed accurately some aspects of the Soviet malady, namely the excessive militarization of the economy, society, and foreign policy. The Soviet Union was a misdeveloped superpower capable of wielding a fearsome big stick coupled with an increasingly inefficient economy incapable of making the transition to the post-industrial era, not to speak of the information age. His prescription entailed strategic retrenchment to reduce the military demands on the economy and efforts to integrate the Soviet Union into the global economy, including core international economic and financial institutions. 5 Strategically 3 Clifford Gaddy and John Steinbruner, “The Bear Has Lost its Roar,” The Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1998. In other terms, they write that Russia is “running more than a century behind the United States in overall economic performance.” 4 Chrystia Freeland, “Lebed Raises Spectre of Russia Split into Nuclear-Armed Provinces,” Financial Times, July 25–26, 1998. Lebed went on in his open letter to Prime Minister Kiriyenko to say, “We, the people of Krasnoyarsk, are not yet a rich people. But in exchange for the status of a nuclear territory, we will, if you like, feed the unit, becoming with India and Pakistan, a headache for the world community.” 5 See, for example, Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996); Alexander Dallin, ed., Gorbachev Era (New York: Garland Publications, 1992); Christopher Dennelly, ed., Gorbachev’s Revolution: Economic Pressures and Defense Realities (Coulsdon, Surrey: Jane’s Information Group, 1989); William C. Green and Theodore Karasik, eds., Gorbachev and His Generals: The Reform of Soviet Military Doctrine (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990); Jerry F. Hough, Gorbachev and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Touchstone, 1990); Robert E. Miller, Soviet Foreign Policy Today: Gorbachev and New Political Thinking (North Sydney, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1991); Jean-Bernard Raimond, Le choix de Gorbachev (Paris: Andrew C. Kuchins and Alexi V. Zagorsky 3 retrenching has proven over the last decade to be far easier than economic reform. As a result, the Russian Federation (chief successor state of the Soviet Union) finds itself with less influence in both Europe and Asia than in the past three hundred years at least, perhaps even since the Time of Troubles at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Indeed, Russia is in the midst of another Time of Troubles. While in 1991 one of the co-authors of this paper referred to the Soviet Union as the “sick man of Asia,” it is hard not to regard Russia currently as the “sick man of Eurasia.”6 The capacity to function as a global superpower was an early casualty of the Soviet demise. Messianic aspirations which had formed an ideological backbone for the Russian empire as “the Third Rome” dating back to the sixteenth century—and for the Soviet Union as leader of the world socialist movement—were muted. The foreign policy “concept” for the Russian Federation, which emerged after lengthy deliberations in 1993, prioritized domestic economic, political, and social issues over foreign policy and security. Core components of the concept include: “maintenance of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces which exemplify Russia’s status as an international great power; promotion of Russia as a great regional power militarily, economically, and politically in the CIS, Europe, and Asia. Leon Aron has aptly described Russian foreign policy objectives in a Gaullist paradigm: a host of strategic objectives and tactical measures deployed to obtain by other (mostly symbolic) means that which used to flow from the abundance of tangible military-political assets. Charles de Gaulle was said to seek “nothing less than an independent France returning to great-power status” and a place in the post-World War II settlement. In the aftermath of the Cold War, these seem to be Russia’s goals as well. 7 Under these conditions Russia simply can not afford to challenge the existing system of U.S. military alliances worldwide, nor may it continue to project power to support a bid for superpower status in the Asia Pacific. Military confrontation has become an unaffordable luxury for Russian grand strategy, changing the whole paradigm of security thinking. The guidelines of the new Russian national security doctrine adopted in January 1998 declared for the first time in its history that “considering profound changes in the nature of relations between the Russian Editions D. Jacob, 1992); Sylvia Woodby, Go rbachev and the Decline of Ideology in Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989). 6 Andrew Kuchins, “The Soviet ‘Sick Man’ of Asia: The Sources and Legacy of the New Political Thinking,” in Russia and Japan: An Unresolved Dilemma Between Distant Neighbors, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Jonathan Haslam, Andrew Kuchins, eds., (Berkeley, Calif.: International and Area Studies, 1993), pp. 343–363. 7 Leon Aron, “The Foreign Policy Doctrine of Russia and its Domestic Context,” in The New Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Michael Mandelbaum, (Washington D.C.: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1998), p. 31. 4 The Russian Federation and Asian Security Federation and other leading countries, one can draw the following conclusion - Russia is virtually not threatened with all-out aggression in the foreseeable future.” Currently Russia evaluates near-term security threats in a manner close to the U.S. vision, that is, in hotbeds of local wars and armed conflicts, proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism. An expected controversy with major powers is conceived not in terms of a direct military threat, but as a possibility of “other countries resorting to power policies for the sake of competing with Russia.”8 Although much was made of the pro-Western leanings of Yeltsin’s first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, and the supposed differences with his successor, Evgenii Primakov, who took over in January of 1996, the brief “honeymoon” period for Russia in the West was already coming to a close in 1992.9 Whether Russia had unrealistic hopes about assistance from the West or whether the West was too self-absorbed and miserly in its support for the transition in Russia, a growing consensus emerged in the Russian foreign policy community that Moscow needed to strengthen its ties with a broader set of foreign partners including key regional powers such as China, India, and Iran both for intrinsic reasons of mutual benefit as well as to gain some leverage in its dealings with the West. In Moscow circles, the failure to prevent NATO expansion in Europe, for example, has been interpreted as a colossal failure that exposed the inadequacies of Russia’s broader strategy of integration with the West. As Coit Blacker has recently suggested, the long-term strategy of greater integration with the West as the main objective was right, but the tactics of neglecting relations with other countries and regions were wrong.

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