Financial Times article purportedly calls for a
resumption of dialogue with Russia but in fact exposes the deep seated
anti-Russian prejudice of the US foreign policy establishment.
The article from the Financial Times we attach below is attracting a great deal of attention.
The writer of the article, Thomas Graham, is a former senior director for Russia on the staff of the U.S. National Security Council.
He presumably carries weight in the inner counsels of the U.S. government and has had a key role formulating U.S. policy towards Russia.
Judging from the recommendations he makes in his article, he is probably a good representative of what might be called the “realists” in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
The article does indeed make recommendations that can be called “realist”.
It calls for a resumption of the political dialogue between the U.S. and Russia. It recognises that the breakdown of that dialogue which has happened since the start of the Ukrainian conflict is in no one’s interest.
It also, rather grudgingly, recognises that Russia’s cooperation is essential both for the stabilisation of the situation of Ukraine (supposedly needed “as a barrier to Russia’s assault on European norms and unity”) and for the maintenance of peace in Europe and the world generally.
The article also tries to get beyond the tired cliche that everything is the fault of Vladimir Putin and that if he is removed from power or replaced (something the writer clearly doesn’t think will happen soon) all will be well.
In every other respect however the article is massively disappointing and is a good illustration of why relations between Russia and the U.S. have become as bad as they have.
The article makes no admission of any fault or error on the part of the U.S..
Instead it blames everything on a supposed “Russia problem”, caused by the emergence of a “values gap” in the 19th century between a “democratising West” seeking peace through “balance” and a perennially insecure and aggressive Russia, stuck in autocracy.
The article speaks of this “Russia problem” having afflicted Europe for the last 200 years – to be precise since the end of the Napoleonic wars.
Europe supposedly has had to be protected — or has had to protect itself — from this “alien” and aggressive Russia, which seeks security not as other European powers do through “balance”, but through “depth”, i.e., through constant expansion of its borders until it comes into collision with other powers equally or more powerful than itself.
It needs to be said clearly that this is all total nonsense.
Whether a “values gap” ever emerged or existed between Western Europe and Russia in the 19th century is open to doubt. However of one thing there is no doubt, and that is that Russia never posed any sort of threat to Europe at any time in the 19th century, whether before or after the Napoleonic wars, and was never during this period the sort of expansionist and disruptive power the writer alleges.
There is no case of Russia attacking, or of planning to attack, any European power at any time in the 19th century.
Russia did occupy during this period Georgia, Armenia, parts of Poland and what are now the Baltic States, and was in a dynastic union with Finland, but these territories were acquired by Russia either before the Napoleonic wars ended or immediately after, as a direct result of them.
Russia’s expansion in the 19th century in the Caucasus and Central Europe was utterly eclipsed by the immeasurably vaster and far more bloody expansion of the European colonial empires and of the U.S. in North America during this same period .
Russia did send its army to suppress a revolt in Hungary that broke out in 1848, but this was done to support Hungary’s Habsburg government, and not to acquire territory there.
Russia did also fight a series of wars against the Ottoman empire, but this is presumably not part of the West the writer is talking about. Certainly if one is talking about a “values gap”, the “values gap” between the Ottoman empire and Western Europe in the 19th century was far greater than any “values gap” between Western Europe and Russia.
As it happens, though Russia was consistently successful in the wars it fought against the Ottomans, it never expanded its territory into former Ottoman territory in Europe after the conquest of Bessarabia in 1812. It never conquered territory in the Balkans, and there is no evidence — outside the fantasies of conquering
Constantinople indulged in by a few Orthodox Christian publicists, which after the death of Catherine II and the start of the First World War were never adopted by the tsarist government — that it ever seriously sought to do so.
As a matter of fact the only war Russia fought with any European power or powers between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the start of the First World War was the Crimean War, which Russia fought on its own territory because it was invaded by Britain and France.
In fact all the great wars fought between Russia and the great European powers since the Peace of Tilsit of 1807 have involved invasions of Russia by those powers, not invasions of those powers by Russia.
This has included the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, the Anglo-French invasion of 1854 and the German attacks on Russia of 1914 and 1941.
To speak therefore of a perennial threat to Europe from Russia that has supposedly lasted 200 years, and of Europe having a “Russia problem” that has lasted throughout that period, is to talk nonsense.
It is also pernicious nonsense that connects the writer to a stream of Western Russophobic writing that extends all the way back to the forgery in the 18th century of the fraudulent Last Testament of Peter the Great.
That such Russophobia finds a place in a newspaper like the Financial Times is alarming enough. That it is actually being peddled — and is presumably believed — by someone who has enjoyed a high position in the U.S. government, and who doubtless once advised the U.S. president, is deeply concerning, especially when that person puts himself forward as a “realist”.
Suffice to say that so long as such grotesquely bigoted views about Russia continue to enjoy common currency in the West — and continue to be held by senior policy makers there — a genuine rapprochement between Russia and the West is impossible.
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From the Financial Times
The west acts as if it had a Vladimir Putin problem. In fact it has a Russia problem. The Russian president stands within a long tradition of Russian thinking. His departure would fix nothing. Any plausible successor would pursue a similar course, if perhaps with a little less machismo.
The Russia problem is not new. It emerged 200 years ago, at the end of the Napoleonic period, with the opening up of what we would today call a values gap. In the 19th century Russia maintained an autocratic regime as Europe moved towards liberal democracy.
Yet Russia remained a great power, essential to European security. How to protect Europe in the presence of a powerful state that is alien in worldview? That was the problem then, as now.
European states seek security in balance; Russia seeks it in strategic depth. That view grows out of its location on the vast, nearly featureless great Eurasian plain, across which armies have moved with ease.
Historically, Russia has pushed its borders outward, as far away as possible from its heartland. It did not stop when it reached defensible physical borders, but only when it ran into powerful countervailing states. Where the west saw imperialism, Moscow saw the erection of defences.
Over time, resistance from the Germanic powers in the west, Great Britain and then the U.S. in the south, and China and Japan in the east, came to define Russia’s zone of security as north central Eurasia, the former Soviet space.
For Moscow, states there face a choice not between independence and Russian domination, but between domination by Russia or a rival. That struggle, Moscow believes, is playing out in Ukraine.
Also out of security concerns, Russia has opposed the domination of Europe by a single power and remains uncomfortable with greater European unity. The reason is easy to grasp: Russia can be the equal of Great Britain, France, or Germany, but it can never be the equal of a united Europe, which in population, wealth, and power would dwarf it as the U.S. does today. Driving wedges between European states, and between Europe and the U.S., might forestall the emergence of a serious threat.
Russia’s fears are amplified by a sense of vulnerability. Its economy is stagnating, its technology is no longer cutting-edge, and outside forces — China, the west and radical Islam — are challenging it in the former Soviet space. The temptation is to act tough to cover up the doubts by, for example, flaunting nuclear capabilities.
After more than 20 years of hope that Russia could be brought into the west-led international order, the re-emergence of the Russia problem has shocked the west. But the threat is limited. This is not a rising revolutionary force but a declining state seeking to restore its power.
It can be managed. One way is to revitalise the European project. That means dealing vigorously with the issues fuelling anti-EU forces — the democratic deficit, immigration and inequality.
To be sure, steps such as a Nato presence in the Baltics and robust planning for hybrid-war contingencies are necessary, but the west needs to avoid over-militarising its response to what is largely a political challenge.
At the same time, more should be done to help Ukraine repair its economy and build a competent state as a barrier to Russia’s assault on European norms and unity.
Yet containment will not work in our globalised, increasingly multipolar world , as it did during the cold war. The west cannot contain one of the world’s largest economies, and it is geopolitical malfeasance to weaken unduly a power critical to the equilibrium we hope to create out of today’s turbulence, particularly in Asia.
The hard truth is that Ukraine cannot be rebuilt without Russia. It is simply too reliant on Russia economically, and Russia has too many levers of influence inside Ukraine, for it to be otherwise.
Containment has to be leavened with accommodation. Finding the right balance is the challenge.
Source: Russia
Insider 03-06-2015
