Americans as the Russian Vice Versa

The future and current relations of Russia with the West give no peace — either to Russians or to foreigners. This is being discussed in Beijing, Washington, Tbilisi, Sukhimi, Delhi and Brasilia. Everyone wants to understand what is causing the rises and falls in Moscow’s relations with its Western partners, how to guide these fluctuations (if possible) and how to better adjust to them. Finding answers is more difficult than recording observations.

The first paradox: democracy and authoritarianism. The MacArthur Foundation and International Trends magazine conducted an international conference in Moscow recently, in which American and Russian top figures participated, regarding the cyclical rises and falls in Russia’s relations with the West. The results of the brainstorming session showed that Moscow and the U.S. more often drew together not during years of general peace and a rise of liberalism in Russia, but rather against a backdrop of regional wars and the hardening of Russian political power. This pattern was partially disturbed only once: Russia and the U.S. drew together in the beginning of the 1990s alongside an outbreak of regional conflicts in Europe and Asia, but against a backdrop of liberal swings in Russia itself. In all other cases the backdrop of improving relations was “conservative stabilization.”

Whether relations improve or cool off is no longer dependent on which party is in power in Washington. The countries have drawn together both under Republicans and under Democrats. The rises and falls, now as before, are not related to the economic fueling of relations between the countries. Trade and investment connections remain at a minimum and do not hold promise for growth.

The second paradox is that the cycles of growing closer and further apart are not interconnected with the improvement or cooling off of Russia’s relations with China. Western and Russian authors are announcing with one voice the fact that China is the single and primary alternative to the West in political, ideological and cultural relations. But this does not convert to actual changes on the policy level. Russians write a lot about the Chinese alternative for Russia, but the signs that such an alternative exists have not been manifested in diplomatic practice. Everything begins and ends with tiresome televised debates. In practice, Moscow is developing relations with the U.S. and China separately, in autonomous conditions, evidently not having intentions to play around with diplomatic reorientation.

The third paradox is the historical explanation for the sense of reduction in tensions in Moscow-Washington relations. Relying on the analysis of Russian scholar Aleksei Fenenko, Russia and the U.S. entered into negotiations for arms control not during the years of maximal threat of world war but whenever a period of modernization of military capabilities for each side began. Peace was the accompanying result of preparations to conduct war at a more up-to-date level.

Such an approach sheds light on the question of what causes the regular downfalls of all of the tension reductions well-known to historians. As soon as the sides reached mutual understanding regarding regulations of military collaboration for the next specified term, they lost interest in negotiations and tension began to build. That is how it has been since the end of the 1960s. The politicians stopped caring about the formation of a favorable climate in relations, and the sides returned to habitual stereotypes. Americans retrieved stories about Russian expansionism from the dust, and we retrieved customary offenses regarding American arrogance and the ambition to remake the whole world in its image and likeness.

There is a fairly unpleasant observation in light of the sense of what is happening today. The modernization of defense capability has been brewing for a long time in our country. Americans are not hiding their similar plans. All of this is cause for alarm. But at the same time you think about something else. If the modernization of military capabilities is a condition of future cycles of negotiations and tension reductions, does that mean that military building (in a long-term perspective) is nothing other than an instrument of stabilization for Russian-American relations?

Russian-American relations are not so much what exists in reality as much as what people think exists or does not exist. With an insufficient economic factor in Russia-U.S. relations, the military-political component plays a disproportionately large role. But it is this very role that is most difficult for the average person to independently evaluate. He cannot realistically establish his opinion about it distinct from the quality of goods on the counter. That is why in the coming years in Russian-Western relations, the situation will be defined by the management of informational sources. Manipulation of information is the primary instrument for regulating relations between Russian and the U.S. — and with the West as a whole. It is in the midst of this situation that a new American ambassador is scheduled to arrive in Moscow, whose own fellow nationals more than once have pointed out to him his excessive dedication to democracy promotion. Not a simple moment.