Russian-American relations in the post-Cold War world

James W. Peterson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781526105790
• eBook ISBN: 9781526105806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why did the Russian take-over of Crimea come as a surprise to so many observers in the academic, practitioner and global-citizen arenas? The answer presented in this textbook is a complex one, rooted in late-Cold War dualities but also in the variegated policy patterns of the two powers after 1991. The 2014 crisis was provoked by conflicting perspectives over the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, the expansion of NATO to include former communist allies of Russia as well as three of its former republics, the American decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and the Russian move to invade Georgia in 2008. This book uses a number of key theories in political science to create a framework for analysis and to outline policy options for the future. It is vital that the attentive public confront the questions raised in these pages in order to control the reflexive and knee-jerk reactions to all points of conflict that emerge on a regular basis between America and Russia.

1
Theoretical approaches: models of power, systems theory, critical junctures, legacies, realism, and realism revised

In light of the eruption of American–Russian hostility during the Ukrainian–Crimean Crisis of 2014 and after, it might seem an unusual step to launch the analysis with the presentation of a multiplicity of analytical approaches. However, that is precisely what the situation requires. All parties to the conflict comprehend how searing and all-encompassing was the Cold War struggle between East and West. Although in that conflict there were interludes of understanding if not mutual respect between the two superpowers, for the most part it was a riveting and never-ending avalanche of worry for most participants in the international community. The collapse of communism was the phenomenon that brought it to an end, rather than the collective wisdom of the two nations' leaders over four decades in time. All the while, observer nations sat quietly on the sidelines and had little control over the comings and goings of the two superpowers. Why would it not have been possible to break up the political permafrost in the middle of the Cold War? Why did analysts not develop theoretical models that could have pointed the way to a new direction with more positive outcomes, instead of simply trying to explain the source and nature of the enmity? It is with this concern in mind that the center of attention in the opening chapter of this book is con­sideration of theoretical perspectives that can outline a path from Crimea to stability.

Cold War models of American–Soviet conflicts

The Balance of Power Model

First and foremost in interpreting the current relationship between Russia and America is the Balance of Power Model (Kissinger 1969, 5–6). Rooted in the Austrian response to the overreaching power of Napoleonic France in the early years of the nineteenth century, this model can serve as both explanation and antidote to the current power drives of Russia and the United States.

A genuine balance entails a co-equal distribution of power between two nations or sets of nations. In the nineteenth-century case cited above, the Austrian foreign minister Metternich stitched together changing coalitions of nations with the objective of preventing any one country from dominating the continent as France had under Napoleon. There were no permanent enemies or friends in this changing coalition, for the objective was to prevent an imbalance of power. In many ways, the balance held for three decades, until a series of revolutions in 1848 awakened new aspirations among subject peoples against the monarchs who held sway in the key European empires.

Such a balance of co-equal forces did not emerge in later situations of major conflict. Following the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, a new power emerged that would surpass Napoleon in the havoc that it caused on the European continent. Although the European nations collectively stumbled into war in 1914, the key problem was checking the Central Powers and eventually defeating them. Only with the introduction of American forces in 1917 did the tide of battle begin to undo the imbalance of power and pave the way for the defeat of Germany and its allies. It would be difficult to describe the interwar period as one of stasis, for key powers such as the United States withdrew into renewed isolationism, while new nations such as Poland struggled to maintain their fledgling democracies. An effective League of Nations might have been a deterrent to an aroused Germany, but it proved toothless without the involvement of America. The onward march of Nazi Germany in Europe and a militarized Japan in Asia required years of strategy making and military mobilization in order to restore some sense of equilibrium by the end of 1945.

Had the participants in the Yalta Alliance of February 1945, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the United States, held together in any meaningful way, the restoration of a balance of power might have held for the immediate future. America hosted the founding of the United Nations (UN) in San Francisco, joined it with little hesitation, and agreed to host it permanently in New York City. Following the return or reemergence of their leaders who had been in hiding, the new states of Central Europe reestablished their youthful democratic frameworks. However, the break-up of the victorious World War II coalition led to the outbreak of the Cold War and the destruction of all key wartime hopes for a renewed balance of power that might have emulated the one established in Europe after the exile of Napoleon.

However, in the twenty-first century some analysts have shown renewed interest in adopting features of the traditional balance-of-power system. Andrei Tsygankov (Tsygankov 2014, 526) notes that Russia seeks equal treatment by the American leadership, a status that the latter has not accorded since the end of the Cold War. Prospects may exist for a “limited partnership” in which the two balance one another on key issues of global importance. It may also be the case that the emphasis on a “reset” of relationships at the beginning of the Obama administration incorporated a view of the balance of power that might underpin mutual actions on selected crisis areas. With continued emphasis on the importance of the state, Russian leaders also pursue western acceptance of “a Russian sphere of influence in former Soviet space” (Kotkin 2016). Their actions in Georgia and Ukraine reinforce that perception.

There are additional perspectives that would add new labels to the traditional balance-of-power concept in the current period. Perhaps a “Concert-balance” would be a more accurate description of a situation in which the “global primacism” of American policy in the first two decades of the post-Cold War period yields to a kind of concert of great powers who check one another through a realist focus on national interests (Naughton 2013, 675–677). Others describe the emergence of a new “multifaceted power balancing structure” whose fault lines coincide with the clash of civilizations concept initially presented by Samuel P. Huntington. In fact, economic and cultural variables may play a stronger role than military ones in this emerging balance of power (Ovie-D'Leone 2010, 72–86). Huntington (Huntington 1997, 19) himself anticipated the need for balancing in his analysis of emerging conflict among the world's powerful civilizations such as Judeo-Christian, Russian Orthodox, and Muslim. Thus, cultural splits may have the power to supplant political and military divisions. At the same time, others contend that the concept of balance of power has “declining relevance” in the current century, in the sense that the fears of people and leaders are no longer as state based as they once were (Mansbach 2005, 142).

The Bipolar Model

In the early Cold War a second model emerged that bore some resemblance to balance of power but had an edge and global sweep that were distinctive. For at least two decades, and perhaps longer, many observers used the term “bipolarity” to characterize the structure of relations that had emerged within the global community. It was common to describe the Soviet Union as leading one pole of power and the U.S. another, and the assumption was that other nations linked themselves with either Moscow or Washington (Brown 1988, 91–92). The timing of all of this had a larger-than-expected impact, for so many new states had emerged in Asia and Africa during post-World War II decolonization. Each of the new states felt considerable pressure to join one team or the other, and the two superpowers embarked upon a race to recruit them through economic assistance that often included military equipment. There was a tendency to conclude that it was imperative that each state in the global community should be part of one camp or the other.

A number of policy clashes and decisions reinforced this new concept of bipolarity (Ulam 1968, 409). World War II had ended in Asia with use of atomic weapons, a very new capability that both the U.S. and Soviet Union were pursuing during the latter stages of World War II. In fact, it was not until the late 1960s that a situation of parity developed, with both nations having approximately equal nuclear capabilities. By 1955 both camps had their own defensive and deterring military alliances. The West struck first in this regard with the setting-up of NATO in 1949. However, the admission of West Germany to that alliance was followed very quickly by creation in the East of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. While NATO rationalized its existence in the early days on the basis of a feared Soviet or Warsaw Pact on the other side of the imagined Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union's leaders brought up the old fear of western or capitalist encirclement, a concern buttressed in part by the number of American bases in Europe and Turkey that were close to their border.

The vulnerable situation of the city of West Berlin also lent itself to bipolar images, especially when the Soviet leaders limited access to it from West Germany. Similarly, Cuba became a vortex of the dynamics of bipolarity on numerous equations. The standoff between the Soviet Union and United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was startling and acted as a kind of glue that solidified the two camps, at least in the heat of the crisis. Conflicts between the two powerful nations over Iran, Guatemala, and the Korean Peninsula bore all the hallmarks of ambitious, well-armed nations seeking power and influence in any corner of the globe that they could. Bipolarity was the lens through which much of the world perceived these early Cold War struggles.

Within certain regions, bipolarity may still play a role in helping to define the root of conflict. For example, Eurasia is one region in which such tendencies are apparent to certain observers. With the Russian military build-up there, as well as in Syria, perhaps “European security by 2014 again became bipolar” (Trenin 2016). It is likely, too, that a continuing Russian focus in the near future will be the “vast neighborhood in Eurasia” (Trenin 2016). The Russian military strengthening of the enclave of Kaliningrad was also part of an effort to defend against both the United States and NATO. In fact, the Russian National Security Strategy for 2016 reflected the concept that American policy towards Russia was rooted in a new containment doctrine (Trenin 2016, 26–28). In that geographic area, then, bipolarity may again be a reasonable way of defining the situation between America and Russia.

The Unipolar Model

A third model is that of unipolarity, a conceptual apparatus that posits one power as having the preponderance of power and the corresponding ability to impose its will on key policy issues and conflicts. Such a model carries considerable weight when one considers the aforementioned eras of Napoleon and Hitler, for their authoritarian leadership enabled their nations to go unchallenged for a number of years. During the early Cold War, within the framework of bipolarity, there were instances and some evidence of unipolar power balances in several key issues. The Soviet Union was first to put a person in space, and held the edge in that scientific and policy arena that had important implications for the military balance of power. Similarly, the Americans had the advantage in nuclear capabilities for the first two decades of the Cold War, and that advantage may have been one reason why Khrushchev backed down in the Cuban Missile Crisis and withdrew the emplaced weapons from that critical island nation. Near to the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, it later became clear that the economic weaknesses of the Soviet Union were overwhelming, and this had much to do with Gorbachev's pullback of troops from so many locations, as well as his domestic reforms. In a sense, the U.S. had a unipolar advantage without knowing it. With the American emphasis on “New World Order” after 1991, there was a hope of preserving that near-unipolar structure of power (Hutchings 1997, 145–149).

If one looks beyond a pure focus on the variable of military preponderance, then there may be episodes of unipolarity in selected situations. For instance, ideological unipolarity may exist outside of exclusively power-politics situations (Haas 2014, Abstract). In that regard, the Russian effort to counter the West with aggressive actions in the Ukraine and Syria may have been rooted in an assumption that the United States had been exploiting a vacuum of power in an ideological effort to preserve its dominance within a unipolar framework (Lukyanov 2016, 31). While that theory may not have been the hallmark definition of the era, it may have explained certain policy assumptions and may have partly justified some policy decisions.

The Multipolar Model

Fourth, multi-polarity was a highly attractive model in the last two decades of the Cold War, and it was one which practitioners such as National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger shared. In some respects, that model was a reaction to the visible erosion of bipolarity in the 1960s and 1970s. Multi-polarity was a consequence of the lessened control of both the Soviet Union and the United States over their allies and the independent emergence of new regional powers that acted in a quite independent fashion (Brown 1988, 92–93).

For example, Moscow in the early 1950s had considerable control over nations in the communist camp, and challenges to its leadership were unthinkable. The Chinese leaders publicly declared the Soviet Union to be the sun around which all the others rotated. In the 1960s and 1970s this pattern was clearly no longer the case. The so-called Sino-Soviet split emerged in the early 1960s. It was partly based on the more ideologically committed Maoist leadership's having concluded that the post-Stalin era was replete with a pragmatism that compromised the original messianic messages that had accompanied the rise of the communist regimes in the twentieth century. Further, Tito in Yugoslavia had begun to carve out an independent path even in the 1950s. This was perhaps not so surprising, given that the Yugoslav leader and his forces had liberated their territory without Soviet assistance and had made an effort to be a regional player even in the late 1940s. Further, the Poles and Hungarians challenged Soviet primacy in 1956, while the Czechs repeated a similar process of revolt in their Prague Spring of 1968. While the Soviet-led bloc did not exactly unravel, the unquestioned dominance of Moscow could no longer be taken for granted.

Allies in the West were bold enough to challenge American leadership in quite different ways during the second half of the Cold War. While there had been incredible solidarity behind American policy during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, very soon the French challenged both the United States and NATO. They requested that all alliance bases in France be dismantled, and in other ways they decoupled themselves from NATO without totally withdrawing. America's long involvement in and prosecution of the War in Southeast Asia led to many questions about both the motivation and goals of that struggle. It was much more difficult for presidents Johnson and Nixon to locate supportive and participative allies in that struggle than it had ever been in the Korean War in the early 1950s. All of this evidence of the weakening position of the United States' leadership of its allies was compounded by that country's international behavior following their departure from Southeast Asia in March 1973. In a faint echo of post-World War I isolationism, American leaders were very reluctant to take any bold stands on foreign-policy challenges for nearly a decade.

Multi-polarity was also in evidence as new regional powers burst onto the scene. Some were nation-states that had strengthened their global power position, while others were new alliances. In the first category, both China and Japan in the Asian theater achieved significant levels of regional strength in the 1970s and 1980s. China adopted some princ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Two anthems
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: from the Cold War to the Crimea: a bumpy road
• 1 Theoretical approaches: models of power, systems theory, critical junctures, legacies, realism, and realism revised
• 2 The Cold War root of post-Cold War tension: duality of détente in the 1970s and neo-Cold War in the 1980s
• 3 The imbalance of power in 1991: collapse of the Soviet Union and allied victory in the Persian Gulf War
• 4 Making different choices in the Balkan wars of the 1990s: Bosnia in 1992–95 and Kosovo in 1999
• 5 The admission of twelve former communist states and republics into NATO and the bitter Russian reaction, 1999–2009
• 6 Russia and America confront terrorism, 1994–2004: a foundation of understanding
• 7 The wars in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), and Georgia (2008): a mixed set of perceptions
• 8 The Missile Shield proposal by the U.S. in 2007–9 and the Arab Spring of 2011: contrasting priorities
• 9 America and Russia pivot towards Asia: political differences yield to economic rivalry
• 10 The Ukrainian crisis to the center of the stage in 2014 and after: a game-changing earthquake in the relationship
• Conclusion: theoretical approaches and a path from the Crimea to stability
• Postscript: two eagles
• References
• Index