In these days following the election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of Russia, the most revealing words on the American side are those repeated by diplomats and policymakers in the White House and the State Department: “He is a man we can do business with.”
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright already declared this in an online CNN interview in February, reflecting Margaret Thatcher’s first comments about Mikhail Gorbachev in l985. But do such words have much to do with reality?
For the idea behind them is that Vladimir Putin is essentially just another “average guy”–more-or-less powerful now, but at heart just as reachable and as reasonable as, say, the governors of Wisconsin or Utah. Oh, he’ll negotiate hard, as businessmen do, but he’ll also think things through and come around to our way of thinking when he realizes how “right” we are! (This is the heart of our diplomacy’s currently popular idea of a win-win world without genuine cultural differences that have evolved through the different experiences of peoples, and indeed without conflicts of national interests.)
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But remember, “business,” under Western capitalism, is not only the trading of goods, but an advanced economic way of life that rests upon rules and regulations worked out in northern Europe over the span of four centuries. It interweaves with our political and social institutions; and it also rests upon the assumption that the other business partner to a reasonable degree accepts the rules of the game–and that’s where the problem comes in.
The new Russian president is enough of a pragmatist and realist to recognize that some form of capitalism is the only game in town — but he doesn’t accept the rules, much less really know them. Indeed, he now faces ruling a Russia in which the law is impotent before, as Martin Wolf wrote this week in the Financial Times, “plunder masquerading as free enterprise,” the “de-monetization of the economy” and a “resentful country and a suspicious elite presiding over a dysfunctional state and a distorted economy.”
Despite the sunny judgments of him and of his potential here, President Putin, Wolf avers, “is the elected czar of a paper empire.”
Instead of hammering out a policy based on this kind of realistic analysis, officials in the diplomatic corridors of Washington are formulating the same policy that worked so disastrously with former President Boris Yeltsin. Support Yeltsin, the cry went. He’s our man! So what if he wiped out Chechnya? Pretend that it’s a civil war and that the long-oppressed Chechens are all “terrorists” threatening Russia. Lives are small potatoes compared to arms control. Pour in billions of International Monetary Fund again, even though they’ve wasted or absconded with most of it. And always remember that at heart, we are the supermen who can save Russia.
The pity and the irony of it is that, with this election of Vladimir Putin, the United States and Europe have a rare second chance. We could begin anew, putting all of those disastrous policy mistakes of the last seven years behind us. We could stand back, be courteous but tough-minded, forget personalities and deal with the development and the strengthening of institutions in Russia, put off any encouragement of foreign investment until they get a legal system going and some laws on the books, and discourage Putin from claiming more autocratic control over the regions.
We should make clear that we would someday welcome them into NATO–but not so long as its real policy is Russian transmogrification of the military alliance into a neutralized political institution. We should tell Putin without undue courtesy that Moscow’s continued attempt to compare Kosovo to Chechnya is ludicrous, and that its cynical ongoing attempts to destroy the Kosovo mission are transparent and unacceptable. Above all, we should make it clear that the brutish Russian acts in Chechnya–reminiscent of the worst days of the czars in the l9th Century and of the most heinous acts of the Stalin era–are profoundly condemned by us, and that our approval of Moscow’s acts there will never be cynically traded for arms control agreements or anything else.
Robert B. Zoellick, a foreign policy adviser to George W. Bush, wrote cogently about what our policy could now be in The Wall Street Journal this week. “Instead of rushing to embrace Mr. Putin,” he wrote, “the West should proceed deliberately, letting him demonstrate both his policies at home and willingness to cooperate. The Clinton administration should accord Russia respect, but state clearly and firmly which policies will lead to conflict and which actions will draw us closer.”
But this is not happening.
Rather than helping to build toward a democratic Russia, which would mean a complex strategy of carrots and sticks, we are once again serving to encourage Russia’s worst propensities. And that is why the whole business analogy is so wrong.
Rather than continuing to embrace these ambiguous post-Cold War Russian leaders as just like us, the West would do far better to realize that these Russians don’t want to be “friends.” They want to be themselves.
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