Isolate or Engage
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Isolate or Engage

Adversarial States, US Foreign Policy, and Public Diplomacy

Geoffrey Wiseman, Geoffrey Wiseman

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Isolate or Engage

Adversarial States, US Foreign Policy, and Public Diplomacy

Geoffrey Wiseman, Geoffrey Wiseman

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The U.S. government has essentially two choices when dealing with adversarial states: isolate them or engage them. Isolate or Engage systematically examines the challenges to and opportunities for U.S. diplomatic relations with nine intensely adversarial states—China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, U.S.S.R./Russia, Syria, Venezuela, and Vietnam: states where the situation is short of conventional war and where the U.S. maintains limited or no formal diplomatic relations with the government.In such circumstances, "public diplomacy"—the means by which the U.S. engages with citizens in other countries so they will push their own governments to adopt less hostile and more favorable views of U.S. foreign policies—becomes extremely important for shaping the context within which the adversarial government makes important decisions affecting U.S. national security interests. At a time when the norm of not talking to the enemy is a matter of public debate, the book examines the role of both traditional and public diplomacy with adversarial states and reviews the costs and benefits of U.S. diplomatic engagement with the publics of these countries. It concludes that while public diplomacy is not a panacea for easing conflict in interstate relations, it is one of many productive channels that a government can use in order to stay informed about the status of its relations with an adversarial state, and to seek to improve those relations.

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1
SOVIET UNION/RUSSIA
US Diplomacy with the Russian “Adversary”
Robert D. English
THE ISSUES THAT THIS CHAPTER ADDRESSES—THE historical lessons of US diplomacy with Russia—are surely more complex than those of other adversarial states. This is because there is no self-evident single adversary in these relations, nor are we even dealing with a single state. Russia is not North Korea, a unitary, uniform regime that for some six decades has maintained a deeply hostile posture toward the West and its political norms. The revolutionary-era Leninist state differed significantly from that of the 1920s, including in opportunities for diplomatic engagement with the West, just as the possibilities of such interchange varied considerably from the Stalinist 1930s through the years of the World War II alliance and up to the early Cold War. Arguably even more significant were political and social changes—and improved diplomatic prospects—from the “thaw” era through the late Cold War, and from the epoch of perestroika through communism’s collapse and aftermath. We are dealing with at least three qualitatively different political regimes, and sweeping socioeconomic transformation over nearly a century of tumultuous international change in which any presumption of consistent US probity or diplomatic “correctness—and Russian hostility or adversariness—simply does not hold.
This chapter will examine the practice and prospects of US diplomacy with Russia, beginning with the period before and during the 1917 Revolution; through several distinct phases of relations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from the revolution until 1991; and subsequent relations with Russia after the demise of the USSR. One key lesson can be stressed at the outset, which is to endorse the general proposition or “norm” that this book advances: the importance of active, multifaceted diplomatic engagement even in periods, and with regimes, of greatest hostility. A lack of such engagement has led to stereotypes and ignorance—and consequent lost opportunities—while its presence contributed much to the most momentous diplomatic breakthrough of the twentieth century, namely the Cold War’s end. One underappreciated facet of that engagement has been public diplomacy, which I see as outreach—partly though not exclusively orchestrated during the Cold War by the US State Department, and implemented by the US embassy in Moscow—to elites and citizens beyond the rarified diplomatic corps in Moscow. This view is essentially but by no means exclusively consistent with the traditional “State Department” approach to public diplomacy outlined in the book’s Introduction. As will be seen, such outreach even in times of hostility has borne vital fruit in subsequent periods of relative openness. Sadly, at a time of greatest receptivity at the outset of relations with post–Soviet Russia, it fared poorly, in part due to clumsy “salesmanship,” but even more because the “product” proved disappointing.
I will use a “Princeton lens” to analyze the various phases of Soviet-Russian diplomatic history by focusing on the epoch-spanning experience of three distinguished Princeton scholar-diplomats: the venerable George Kennan, longtime dean of American Russian experts, who died in 2005; his onetime diplomatic protĂ©gĂ© and later renowned Sovietologist Robert Tucker, who passed away in 2010; and Jack Matlock, the “US ambassador to perestroika,” who is still active as a scholar and analyst of Russian affairs. Kennan specialized in Russia from the outset of his diplomatic career in the 1920s. He was posted to Moscow when relations were established with the USSR in 1933, serving through World War II and the early Cold War years, then returning as ambassador in 1952. He was also a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study for nearly fifty years. Tucker, who served in Moscow from 1942 to 1953, was later a professor at Princeton University for more than forty years. Matlock, who retired from the Foreign Service after his remarkable 1987–1991 Moscow ambassadorship, was from 1996 to 2001 the Kennan Professor of Diplomatic History at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as a visiting professor at Princeton University. Given the rare experience of these three individuals—and the necessity of employing some narrowing lens if this is not to be a multivolume chronicle—the insights of these three Princetonians offers a splendid perspective for our limited purposes.
US-Russian Relations during the Bolshevik Revolution
Historians have long debated whether the Bolsheviks triumphed as the result of popular revolution or merely a well-executed putsch, and whether their victory reflected the will of a majority of Russians or the opportunism and ruthlessness of a determined minority. They agree, however, on the crucial point that it was Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War I that strained the old order beyond its breaking point and thus was a proximate cause of both the February and October 1917 revolutions (the first ended tsarist rule; the second brought the Bolsheviks to power). And it was, in turn, the World War I allies’ single-minded and shortsighted insistence on Russia’s continued involvement in the disastrous war against Germany that contributed mightily to the revolutions in the first place. Here we turn to Kennan, highly singular as a US diplomat for both the broad historical context of his views and his intimate understanding of Russian and German societies:
Had they [Western statesmen] looked carefully at the Russian scene at that moment, they could have discerned in it the dilemma that was to be basic to their problem of policy toward Russia throughout the following two years . . . that not only had Russia become involved in a great internal political crisis, but she had lost in the process her real ability to make war. The internal crisis was of such gravity that there was no chance for a healthy and constructive solution to it unless the war effort could be terminated at once and the attention and resources of the country concentrated on domestic issues. The army was tired. The country was tired. People had no further stomach for war. To try to drive them to it was to provide grist to the mill of the agitator and the fanatic: the last people one would have wished to encourage at such a dangerous moment. (Kennan 1961, 14)
Germany itself was not far from collapse—the United States was soon to enter the war on the Triple Entente side—and even basic knowledge of Russia’s domestic crisis in 1917 revealed the mortal danger of continued involvement in a ruinous war. Yet two key failings blinded the Western allies. One was the failure of their statesmen and foreign ministries to heed the warnings of their own well-informed ambassadors to Russia, such as France’s Maurice Paleologue and Britain’s George Buchanan, about the imminence of domestic collapse. This followed from a more fundamental problem, namely the allies’ unshakable commitment to Germany’s unconditional surrender, a fanatical anti-Germanness that Kennan saw as largely the result of the extreme demonization of enemies that democracies fall prey to in mobilizing domestic support for war.
To the extent they took note of the disturbing signs of disintegration in Russia’s capacity to make war and of the growing crisis of the dynasty, they tended to attribute these phenomena primarily to German influence. The Germans, as they saw it, had to be the source of all evil; nothing bad could happen that was not attributable to the German hand. From this fixation flowed the stubborn conviction in Paris and London that the troubles in Petrograd . . . were merely the result of German influence and intrigue at the Russian court. Allied statesmen were unable to understand that it was not German intrigue, but precisely the strain of war against Germany, which had brought Russia to this deplorable state. (Kennan 1961, 13)
All this ostensibly concerns prerevolutionary Russia, not the early Bolshevik years that are the main focus of this section. Yet the lessons of late prerevolutionary relations with Russia are crucial in several respects: the twin diplomatic pathologies of ignorance born of limited engagement and demonization of adversaries would continue in the Soviet era; and, more immediately, Western actions on the eve of revolution would strongly influence still-malleable Bolshevik attitudes toward the West.
But were Bolshevik attitudes, steeped as they were in a Marxist ideology that saw the West as inherently hostile toward socialism (due to the nature of the capitalist system), really malleable even at the outset of the new era? Kennan himself seems of two minds on this question. In some reflective analyses of Russia’s relations with the West he emphasized the new Soviet leaders’ cynicism, duplicity, and consequent unsuitability as partners in any “normal” sort of enduring cooperation. But elsewhere, especially in chronicling the particulars of these early relations, Kennan seemed to emphasize instead the mistakes and lost opportunities for a better initial relationship between Soviet Russia and the West. The key to this apparent contradiction (paralleling the misunderstanding that still dogs Kennan’s post–World War II call for “containment” of the USSR) is that he sought a middle ground between the extremes of liberal illusions about the USSR and reactionary demonization-militarization of the “Soviet threat.”
[J]ust because the leaders of another regime were hostile and provocative and insulting . . . did not mean that one could afford the luxury of having no dealings whatsoever with them or that there was nothing to be gained by meeting them face to face and talking about this question or that. . . . We cannot divide our external environment neatly and completely into friends and enemies . . . there must be a certain relativism about enmity, as I suppose there must be about friendship—we must learn to recognize a certain duality in our relationship to all the rest of mankind, even those who hate us most. (Kennan 1961, 63)
The problem was that, after the first 1917 revolution, Western policy continued to focus on keeping Russia in the war with Germany and, even after the Bolshevik triumph, on supporting those groups in Russia who promised to renew the war effort while spurning those forces (i.e., the new Soviet government) that wanted to bow to the inevitable and seek a separate peace. Ambassadors’ warnings were ignored, while special emissaries, such as the elderly former Secretary of State Elihu Root, “returned to the United States breathing sweetness and light, confidence and reassurance, about the situation in Russia” (Kennan 1961, 26). When the Bolsheviks made good on their promise in the Decree on Peace and subsequent Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany, they were simply ignored.1 At the allies’ conference in Paris in late November 1917, British ambassador (to Petrograd) Buchanan argued:
The Allied governments, instead of protesting the Bolshevik action, should release Russia from her formal bond and accept the inevitable with some semblance of good grace. But this was wholly unacceptable to [French Premier] Clemenceau, who declared that “if . . . all the celestial powers asked him to give Russia back her word, he would refuse.” (Kennan 1961, 44)
The French were especially incensed over a new issue: the Bolsheviks’ repudiation of tsarist debts, which struck French bondholders particularly hard. Nonrecognition of the new Soviet government was soon compounded by a secret Anglo-French agreement for financing prowar (and anti-Bolshevik) forces in the Caucasus and Ukraine. Thus was sown “the seed of subsequent Allied intervention” in the coming Russian Civil War (Kennan 1961, 47).
Before full-fledged military intervention was launched, however, 1918 saw a last-ditch effort to establish relations with the new Bolshevik regime on a positive footing. As experienced and clear-headed prerevolutionary Western ambassadors were recalled or resigned, exhausted and discouraged, day-today contacts with the new government fell to various ad hoc arrangements with lower-level officials: Jacques Sadoul, attachĂ© to the French Military Mission in Petrograd; Bruce Lockhart, British consul general in Moscow; and Raymond Robins, head of the US Wartime Red Cross Commission in Russia. Perhaps owing to their personal experience and insight, as well as to a certain freedom from the shackles (and anti-German blinders) of their respective governments’ policies, these three “unofficial” ambassadors independently came to a similar position toward the new Soviet regime. They each endorsed proposals for Western support of the Bolsheviks, partly as the only hope of restoring a Russian effort against Germany, but chiefly as a realistic policy for engaging the country’s new leaders. Kennan was deeply skeptical about the former (Germany in any event was soon to collapse in its own revolution) and impatient with the “mythology” of a lost chance for good relations with the Soviet regime. But he was simultaneously admiring of these attachĂ©s’ experience and knowledge of Russia; their frequent meetings with Lenin, Trotsky, and other top Bolshevik officials; and their open-minded and clear-eyed assessment of the country’s domestic prospects.
They saw the Soviet leaders not as ogres or monsters of sorts, but as human beings, and in many ways impressive human beings at that. It was a startling experience for these men—after long immersion in the Western society of that day, where the accent was so extensively on individualism, on personal vanity, on social rivalry and snobbishness—to encounter men who had a burning social faith, and were relentless and incorruptible in the pursuit of it. . . . These [envoys] were not socialists, but were pressed by what they had seen into taking a larger view of Soviet power than was taken by a great many of their compatriots. Their firsthand knowledge could not fail to make them impatient of the stupid and prejudiced views about Russian Communism that were beginning to find currency in Western officialdom and respectable Western opinion. It fell largely to them to combat such silly and ineradicable legends as the belief that the Bolsheviki were paid German agents or that they had nationalized women. In their effort to combat these impressions, Robins and Lockhart ran the risk of sounding like Communist apologists. (Kennan 1961,: 61–62; see also Mayers 1995, 75–89)
Indeed, in an atmosphere redolent of the McCarthyism with which Kennan would later contend, Robins sought in congressional hearings to make the senators understand the difference between a partiality to the Soviet ideology and a desire to learn the truth about it. He said, “I would like to tell the truth about men and about movements, without passion and without resentment . . . I believe that when we understand what [the Russian Revolution] is, when we know the facts behind it, when we do not libel it nor slander it or do not lose our heads and become its advocates and defenders, and really know what the thing is, and then move forward to it, then we will serve our country and our time” (Kennan 1961, 62–63). But such efforts were largely in vain. Far from extending recognition to the Soviet government, the United States was drawn into the fiasco of French- and British-led efforts to mount a major military intervention in Russia.
This tragic episode is too well known to require detailed recounting here. With Kennan again as our guide, it suffices to summarize the essentials. The Allied intervention of 1918–1920 was driven by the dual chimeras of restoring an anti-German offensive in Russia (or at least saving stocks of allied-supplied munitions from falling into German hands) and restoring Russia’s commitment to honor its extensive debts; a later goal was rescuing the Czech corps stranded in Siberia. These missions were crucially encouraged by the Americans’ lack of accurate and timely information on the real prospects in Russia (which stemmed in large measure from Washington’s, like Paris and London’s, diplomatic short-sightedness) and by US President Woodrow Wilson’s greater concern for the Paris Peace Conference (and need of allied support for his projected League of Nations). The intervention failed to achieve any of its goals. Instead, it served ultimately to galvanize ordinary Russians’ support for the Bolsheviks, providing the Soviet leaders with a propaganda coup and apparent proof of the capitalist world’s abiding hostility to socialism, and thus poisoned Soviet-Western relations at this critical early juncture.2
Kennan, again, had no patience with Soviet (and some Western) views that exaggerated the military impact of the intervention, or attributed it more to a grand antisocialist design than to mistakes, misjudgments, and misinformation. But one byproduct of the intervention was to compound the self-inflicted blindness of the allies:
The result was that by the end of 1918 there was no longer any official repre...

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