TOWARDS A NEW RUSSIA POLICY

Stephen J. Blank

February 2008

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ISBN 1-58487-343-4
iii

FOREWORD

It is obvious that U.S.-Russian relations and EastWest relations more broadly have recently deteriorated. 

Yet analyses of why this is the case have often been 

confined to American policy. The author of this 

monograph, Dr. Stephen Blank, seeks to analyze some 

of the key strategic issues at stake in this relationship 

and trace that decline to Russian factors which have 

been overlooked or neglected. At the same time, he has 

devoted considerable time to recording some of the 

shortcomings of U.S. policy and recommending a way 

out of the growing impasse confronting both sides.

This analysis, originally presented at the annual 

Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) strategy conference of 

2007, was part of a panel that engaged the strategic 

challenges confronting the United States from Russia. 

As such, it was part of the conference’s larger theme of 

analyzing regional strategic challenges to U.S. interests 

and policy across the globe. As the conference pointed 

out, these challenges are many, diverse, and growing 

in number, if not intensity. Therefore the need for 

informed and critical discussion of the issues raised 

by these challenges, a constant mission of SSI, is ever 

more necessary. We offer this monograph to help meet 

that need for our readers.

 

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

STEPHEN J. BLANK has served as the Strategic Studies 

Institute’s expert on the Soviet bloc and the postSoviet world since 1989. Prior to that he was Associate 

Professor of Soviet Studies at the Center for Aerospace 

Doctrine, Research, and Education, Maxwell Air 

Force Base, and taught at the University of Texas, San 

Antonio, and at the University of California, Riverside. 

Dr. Blank is the editor of Imperial Decline: Russia’s 

Changing Position in Asia, coeditor of Soviet Military 

and the Future, and author of The Sorcerer as Apprentice: 

Stalin’s Commissariat of Nationalities, 1917-1924. He has 

also written many articles and conference papers on 

Russian, Commonwealth of Independent States, and 

Eastern European security issues. Dr. Blank’s current 

research deals with proliferation and the revolution 

in military affairs, and energy and security in Eurasia. 

His two most recent books are Russo-Chinese Energy 

Relations: Politics in Command, London: Global Markets 

Briefing, 2006 and Natural Allies?: Regional Security in 

Asia and Prospects for Indo-American Strategic Cooperation, 

Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. 

Army War College, 2005. He holds a B.A. in History 

from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. and 

Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.
v

SUMMARY

East-West relations have noticeably deteriorated, 

and Russia’s behavior has become commensurately 

more self-assertive. Key arms control achievements are 

in jeopardy, and Russia claims to be facing an array of 

growing threats, most prominently from America. In 

fact, Russia demands more respect from and equality 

with Washington and a free hand in world politics. In 

key respects, Moscow’s new foreign policy grows out 

of the logic of its ever more autocratic and neo-imperial 

political structure. As analyzed in the monograph, this 

structure reinforces the long-standing Russian tendency 

to view other states as being inherently adversarial, 

i.e., it has a disposition to see world politics in terms 

of a presupposition of a priori enemies. Thus it views 

arms control issues from the standpoint of deterring 

enemies not working with strategic partners.

The danger of a foreign policy that relies on truculent 

rhetoric, inflated and aggressive threat assessments, 

and an autocratic and neo-imperial political structure 

based on the ideology of Russia’s desire for a free hand 

in world politics and ingrained belief that others are 

inherently the same is that it will stimulate precisely 

the adversarial behavior in Washington that it claims 

to see. There are already growing signs that certain 

sectors of the policymaking community are increasingly 

inclined to view Russia as a question mark, if not a 

rival of American policy. This is particularly the case 

regarding issues of arms control and nuclear policy. 

Thus the current rhetorical belligerence seen in Russian 

policy and the increasing amount of interest in higher 

defense spending and inflated threat assessments 

could bring about exactly what Russian elites already 

claim to observe.
vi

Accordingly, it is necessary for the United States to 

understand the scope of the challenge posed by Russia 

and to take steps towards reformulating its policies so 

that they are more coherent and unified, more deeply 

engaged with Russia across a wide spectrum of issues, 

and also more coordinated with our European allies. 

This means that we must forego the idea that good 

relations between presidents suffice, or that we have 

no leverage on Russia, or that human rights should not 

be a major part of our concern. While Russian interests 

and concerns must be engaged with seriousness and 

respect, they cannot be allowed to overshadow our 

own interests and concerns. The need for permanent 

ongoing bureaucratic engagement with Russia remains 

a challenge for Washington, but it is one that can and 

must be met by means of a long-term strategically 

conceived policy. And that policy must engage Moscow 

across all the issues of topical concern to Washington.
1

TOWARDS A NEW RUSSIA POLICY

INTRODUCTION: THE ADVERSARIAL EASTWEST RELATIONSHIP

Today speculation about a new cold war or arms 

race between Moscow and Washington is rampant, 

easy to come by, and even permeates official discourse. 

Indeed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov 

characterized Russo-American relations as “alarming” 

in June 2007.1

 Similarly, at least some senior officials 

in the Bush administration now believe that, far from 

merely craving respect (although that certainly is the 

case), Russia has provided “overwhelming evidence” 

that it seeks to weaken America. Thus “wherever 

possible internationally,” they say, “Moscow will work 

to stop America from achieving success.”2

 And at the 

same time North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 

Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Sheffer is calling on 

Moscow to clarify its views on ties with NATO, and 

there are moves afoot in both Moscow and Washington 

to restrict foreign investment in their economies by 

tightening national security reviews of such proposed 

investments.3

Although Lavrov and Deputy Prime Minister (and 

former Defense Minister) Sergei Ivanov both explicitly 

rule out “Cold War” as a label for Russo-American 

relations, their subordinates are not so soothing.4

Thus Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr’ Losyukov, 

speaking in Tehran, said that Washington was using 

Korea and Iran’s prolfieration as an issue to consolidate 

its global strategic position, i.e., invoking those two 

states to justify its missile defense program. If this issue 

cannot be resolved by diplomatic means, he warned, 

Russia will carry out a series of military acts to balance 
2

and establish security. And this could prompt an arms 

race.5 This frosty warning, rather than the calculated, 

insincere, and misleading efforts to invoke RussoAmerican partnership, more accurately characterizes 

the present state of Russo-American relations even if 

they are far from the Cold War. 

Recent Russian actions include two overflights of 

Great Britain, Finland, and Norway; flights to Guam of 

Tu-95s; the resumption of armed aerial patrols; repeated 

overflights and bombings of Georgia; suspension of 

compliance with the Conventional Forces in Europe 

(CFE) Treaty; threats to renounce the Intermediate 

nuclear Forces in Europe (INF) Treaty; threats to target 

the Czech Republic and Poland if missile defense 

installations are placed there; announcement of plans to 

refurbish the Navy’s Mediterranean squadron; calls for 

a gas cartel; continuing regression towards ever more 

authoritarian political practices; arms sales to Iran and 

Syria, and recognition of Hamas; and the launching of 

an information war attack against Estonia for removing 

a Soviet war monument in Tallinn. All these imply the 

consolidation of a fundamentally adversarial position 

towards the West, not just the United States.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speeches to the 

Munich Wehrkunde Conference in February 2007 and 

to the Russian Federal Assembly in April highlighted 

this trend and outlined many of Russia’s grievances 

against the West and Washington in particular.6

Subsequently in his V-E day speech on May 9, 2007, he 

explicitly compared the United States to Nazi Germany.7

In the speech to the Federal Assembly, he confirmed 

that adversarial quality of bilateral relations when 

he announced the suspension of Russia’s compliance 

with the CFE Treaty.8

 Indeed, Russian Chief of Staff 

General Yuri N. Baluyevsky subsequently warned that 
3

this treaty is on the verge of collapse.9 Since that treaty 

has no provisions for a moratorium, Baluyevsky’s 

warning probably presages Russia’s withdrawal from 

the CFE treaty.10 Thus Putin’s decree of July 14, 2007, 

suspending Russian participation in the treaty, should 

not have surprised us, although apparently it did 

surprise some in Washington.11

We and the West as a whole were clearly surprised 

as well by Putin’s speech at Munich and by many 

other recent Russian policies. This complacency 

and unpreparedness is unwarranted as Russian 

unhappiness with U.S. policy has been growing since 

2002-03. Neither should we be so complacent as to 

think that some high-level meetings, like presidential 

summits, can paper over this rift. Such meetings cannot 

substitute for a sound strategy and/or policy even 

when officials claim that Presidents Putin and Bush 

are confident that enough has been done to keep the 

positive momentum of the relationship going.12 Russian 

analysts certainly do not make this mistake. Instead, 

they rightly point to the issue at stake, i.e., Moscow’s 

insistence upon Russia’s standing or status as a great 

power that demands Washington take its interests into 

account. Thus Ivan Safranchuk of Moscow’s Office of 

the Center for Defense Information told U.S. reporters 

that,

In the United States there is an underestimation of how 

serious Putin and his team are. This team is ready to 

spoil relations with the United States as far as necessary. 

There are no limitations. Putin is doing this not because 

he wants a new Cold War, but because he wants the Russian state to be seriously revived.13

This demand lies at the heart of the issue because 

Moscow at the very least believes that the West as a 
4

whole, and particularly America, do not take it or its 

interests seriously enough. And, as suggested above 

by a U.S. official, it is possible that we have an outright 

rivalry over the entire or most of the two states’ bilateral 

political agendas whereby Russia’s purpose is simply 

to fight American policy. Thus what is at stake in the 

Russo-American relationship is Russia’s resentment 

of American power and the way it is displayed, 

particularly in regions that Moscow wants to dominate. 

In other words, Russia, like the late comedian Rodney 

Dangerfield, constantly laments that it doesn’t get any 

or enough respect from America. Putin’s presidential 

envoy for relations with the European Union (EU), 

Sergei Yastrzhembskiy, stated that this was Russia’s 

main objection to recent developments in world 

politics.14 Similarly Russian Ambassador to America 

Yuri Ushakov recently echoed that statement.15

So while East-West relations have become 

essentially adversarial, the most visible stresses are 

in Russo-American relations. Baluyevsky said that 

cooperation with the West has not helped Russia; 

instead the situation has become more difficult. In 

fact, “the U.S. military leadership’s course aimed at 

maintaining its global leadership and expanding its 

economic, political, and military presence in Russia’s 

traditional zones of influence” is a top threat to its 

national security.16 However, rhetoric aside, there is 

no tangible military threat to Russia.17 Yet Moscow has 

issued endless complaints that America does not take 

Russia sufficiently seriously, i.e., at Moscow’s own 

self-serving and inflated valuation of itself. 

What Russia wants, though, is clear enough—

enhanced status and a completely free hand vis-à-vis 

Washington and Europe on issues vital to it. Lavrov, 

in a televised address denounced U.S. unilateralism 
5

and demanded “total equality, including equality 

in the analysis of threats, in finding solutions, and 

making decisions.” Likewise, Russia sees itself (or at 

least professes to see itself) as a sovereign, i.e., wholly 

independent, actor in world politics that should be 

regarded as a superpower equal to America and be 

able to constrain its policies while remaining free from 

such constraints on what matters most to it, i.e., the 

Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Indeed, 

Putin at this Munich speech (and even earlier as well) 

called for a new “architecture of global security” and his 

actions before and after that speech indicate that Russia 

is acting to bring such a structure—which it deems to 

be a multipolar one—into being.18 Alternatively Russia 

argues that a multipolar world where Russia is a free 

standing independent actor is already taking shape.

Lavrov has also presented an elaborate assessment 

of America’s declining power and moral standing in 

the world as indicating and justifying the failure of 

the unipolar project.19 Thus Washington’s hoped for 

unipolar world cannot be achieved. Yastrzhembskiy 

echoed this by claiming that Washington faces growing 

international isolation due to the growing disparity 

between its views and those of other governments.20

Putin’s litany of complaints in speeches going back 

to 2006 specified Russia’s complaints in greater detail. 

Putin specifically charged that,

• America is a unipolar hegemon which 

conducts world affairs or aspires to do so in an 

undemocratic way (i.e., it does not take Russian 

interests into account).

• America has unilaterally gone to war in Iraq, 

disregarding the United Nations (UN) Charter, 

and demonstrating an “unconstrained hyper 

use of force” that is plunging the world into an 
6

abyss. It has therefore become impossible to find 

solutions to conflicts. (In other words, American 

unilateralism actually makes it harder to end 

the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—hardly an 

incontestable proposition.) Because America 

seeks to decide all issues unilaterally to suit its 

own interests in disregard of others, “no one 

feels safe” and this policy stimulates an arms 

race and proliferation of weapons of mass 

destruction (WMD).

• Therefore we need a new structure of world 

politics, i.e., multipolarity and nonintervention 

in the affairs of others. Here Putin cited Russia’s 

example of a peaceful transition to democracy! 

Of course, Russia hardly has a spotless record 

with regard to nonintervention as Estonia, 

Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia illustrate.

• Putin expressed concern that the Moscow 

Strategic Offensive Arms Reduction Treaty 

of 2002 (SORT) may be violated or at least 

undermined by America which is holding back 

several hundred superfluous nuclear weapons 

for either political or military use. America 

is also creating new destabilizing high-tech 

weapons, including space weapons.

• Meanwhile the CFE treaty is not being ratified, 

even though Russian forces are leaving Georgia 

and only carrying out peacekeeping operations 

in Moldova. Similarly, U.S. bases are turning 

up “on our border.” (Here Putin revealed that 

for him the border of Russia is, in fact, the old 

Soviet border since Russia no longer borders 

either on Romania or Poland.)

• America is also extending missile defenses to 

Central and Eastern Europe even though no 
7

threat exists that would justify this. In regard to 

this program, Putin replied to a question at the 

Wehrkunde Conference by saying that,

The United States is actively developing and 

already strengthening an anti-missile defense 

system. Today this system is ineffective but we 

do not know exactly whether it will one day be 

effective. But in theory it is being created for that 

purpose. So, hypothetically, we recognize that 

when this moment arrives, the possible threat from 

our nuclear forces will be completely neutralized. 

Russia’s present capabilities, that is. The balance 

of powers will be absolutely destroyed and one 

of the parties will benefit from the feeling of 

complete security. That means that its hands will 

be free not only in local but eventually also in 

global conflicts.21

 Thus he has bought the General staff’s habit 

of thinking exclusively in terms of worst-case 

scenarios to justify a policy of threats and 

military buildup. Moreover, Baluyevsky and 

the General Staff all regularly argue that because 

there is allegedly no threat from Iran, these 

missile defenses can only be aimed at Russia 

and at threatening to neutralize its deterrent.22

• NATO expansion (the Russian term in 

opposition to the Western word enlargement) 

therefore bears no relationship to European 

security but is an attempt to divide Europe and 

threaten Russia.

• Finally, America seeks to turn the Organization 

for Security and Cooperation in Europe 

(OSCE) into an anti-Russian organization, and 

nongovernment organizations (NGOs) are 

also being used by individual governments 
8

for such purposes despite their so called 

formal independence. Thus, revolutions in 

CIS countries are fomented from abroad, and 

elections there often are masquerades whereby 

the West intervenes in their internal affairs.23

Obviously this view projects Russia’s own 

politics and policies of interference in these 

elections (e.g., the $300 million it spent and the 

efforts of Putin’s “spin doctors” in Ukraine in 

2004) onto Western governments and wholly 

dismisses the sovereign internal mainsprings 

of political action in those countries, another 

unconscious manifestation of the imperial 

mentality that grips Russian political thinking 

and action.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Russian 

commentators regularly say that “Russia’s strategic 

worldview is fundamentally at odds with the American 

one and perhaps with American perspectives on 

international security.”24 Indeed, Lavrov recently 

stated that the United States was perhaps Moscow’s 

“most difficult” partner and should learn from its 

mistakes in world politics.25 In that context, Russia’s 

independence is the primary achievement of Russian 

foreign and defense policy.26 Lavrov also observed 

in 2005 that “We can come to the conclusion that the 

whole complex of our [foreign] relations, the weight 

of existing military and strategic links between Russia 

and the [United States] . . . will be constantly declining. 

We will never separate, but drifting away from each 

other could have irreversible consequences.”27

But beyond that, Lavrov contended that while 

America seeks to secure its global leadership status 

based on military power, it lacks the financial, trade, 
9

economic, “and—last but not least—moral resources 

to do so. [Thus], the West is losing the monopoly on 

establishing rules of the game.”28 So, aligned to this 

adversarial relationship is Russia’s growing belief that 

its star is ascending, while the West and America are in 

steady decline. Consequently, Russia is, or should be, 

taking part in the formation of a new architecture of 

international relations and playing a role as a “system 

forming” power.29 Yet, simultaneously, Russia’s ruling 

elite regime paradoxically regards itself and Russia as 

being under constant threat from within and without 

despite this ascent. This marriage of paranoia and 

truculent boastfulness is unfortunately a Soviet, if not 

tsarist, heritage of Russian diplomacy, especially when 

things are going well for Moscow, and contains more 

than a little imperial arrogance.30

Neither is this expectation of tension in the 

bilateral relationship a uniquely Russian one. Russian 

truculence towards America increases the likelihood of 

comparable U.S. reactions over a broad range of issues. 

Director of National Intelligence Vice Admiral John 

McConnell (U.S. Navy Ret.), recently told the Senate 

Armed Services Committee that,

Russian assertiveness will continue to inject elements of 

rivalry and antagonism into U.S. dealings with Moscow, 

particularly our interactions in the former Soviet Union, 

and will dampen our ability to cooperate with Russia on 

issues ranging from counterterrorism and nonproliferation to energy and democracy promotion in the Middle 

East. As the Litvinenko murder demonstrates, the steady 

accumulation of problems and irritants threatens to harm 

Russia’s relations with the West more broadly.31

Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary Robert Gates’ 

testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 
10

February 2007 about “the uncertain paths of China and 

Russia, which are both pursuing sophisticated military 

modernization programs” and Putin’s overly alarmist 

reply to it at Munich, already reflects the danger of 

this element of rivalry and of reciprocal irritation that 

McConnell warned about.32

Moscow’s argument that Russia does not get 

enough respect, whatever its validity, also omits those 

elements of Russian policy which have caused its 

image to suffer in the West. Putin’s speeches omitted 

mentioning the state-sponsored decline of Russian 

democratic tendencies and institutions; Chechnya; 

Russian intervention in Ukraine’s election in 2004; 

its habitual use of the energy weapon to intervene in 

Baltic, CIS, and East European governments’ policies, 

threaten Transcaucasian regimes, and limit Central 

Asian sovereignty; the fact that the expansion of the 

U.S. military presence in Europe and missile defenses 

were briefed extensively to Moscow since 2004-05; the 

fact that Russia has tested intercontinental ballistic 

missiles (ICBMs) (both the stationary and mobile 

version of the Topol-M or SS-27, as well as the shortrange Iskander missile) that, according to Putin and 

Former Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, can beat any 

missile defense; and the fact that these missiles are 

now being mass produced.33 These Russian charges 

also omit Moscow’s military intervention in Georgia’s 

ethnic conflicts, Moldova, and Nagorno-Karabakh; and 

its arms sales and nuclear technology transfer to states 

like China, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.34

Perhaps worse and more disheartening is that 

Putin’s speeches and those of his subordinates 

reflect that they still have a woefully incomplete and 

distorted understanding of the West despite 15 years 

of supposed democracy and freedom. Indeed, they are 
11

prone to accept the worst-case scenarios of Russian 

intelligence services and elites who are notorious for 

presenting distorted and utterly mendacious threat 

and policy assessments. Either that or they share a 

wholly cynical, materialistic, virtually exclusively 

self-referential, and misconceived notion of Western 

weakness, Russophobia, and disunity. To partisans 

of this mindset, America does not count anymore as a 

partner because Iraq has distracted it and diverted its 

interest from Russia.35 It also is quite probably the case, 

as defense correspondent Pavel Felgenhauer reports, 

that,

Russia has a Prussian-style all-powerful General Staff 

that controls all the different armed services and is more 

or less independent of outside political constraints. Russian military intelligence—GRU, as big in size as the former KGB and spread over all continents—is an integral 

part of the General Staff. Through GRU, the General 

Staff controls the supply of vital information to all other 

decision-makers in all matters concerning defense procurement, threat assessment, and so on. High-ranking 

former GRU officers have told me that in Soviet times 

the General Staff used the GRU to grossly, deliberately, 

and constantly mislead the Kremlin about the magnitude and gravity of the military threat posed by the West 

in order to help inflate military expenditure. There are 

serious indications that at present the same foul practice 

is continuing.36

For example, Putin complained that American 

politicians are invoking a nonexistent Russian threat 

to get more money for military campaigns in Iraq 

and Afghanistan. Putin’s remarks represent a wholly 

fabricated analysis of Secretary Gates’ testimony to 

Congress, but signify that he wants to believe the worst 

about American intentions as do the General Staff, 

intelligence agencies, and like-minded Russian political 
12

leaders.37 For example, in his press conference before 

the annual G-8 conference in Heiligendam, Germany 

in June 2007, Putin told reporters that Russia and the 

West were returning to the Cold War and added that, 

Of course, we will return to those times. And it is clear 

that if part of the U.S. nuclear capability is situated in 

Europe and that our military experts consider that they 

represent a potential threat, then we will have to take 

appropriate retaliatory steps. What steps? Of course, we 

must have new targets in Europe. And determining precisely which means will be used to destroy the installations that our experts believe represent a potential threat 

for the Russian Federation is a matter of technology. Ballistic or cruise missiles or a completely new system. I repeat that it is a matter of technology.38

Similarly, despite dozens of statements and briefings 

to the contrary, Russian generals and politicians 

insist that 10 missile defense radars and interceptors 

stationed in the Czech Republic and Poland represent 

a strategic threat to Russia and its nuclear deterrent 

not because of what they are but because of what they 

might be, just as Putin said above.39 Russia also charges 

that rotational deployments of no more than 5,000 

army and air force troops in Bulgaria and Romania 

represents an imminent threat to deploy forces to the 

Caucasus.40 Russian spokesmen view these new bases 

and potential new missions of U.S. and NATO forces, 

including missile defense and power projection into 

the Caucasus or Central Asia, as anti-Russian threats, 

especially as NATO has stated that it takes issues like 

pipeline security in the Caucasus and its members’ 

energy security increasingly seriously.41 Yet actually 

U.S. “bases” in Romania and Bulgaria are nothing more 

than periodic rotational deployments of a small number 

of Army and Air forces whose mission is primarily the 
13

training of the forces of their host countries. They are 

anything but a permanent base for strike forces in the 

CIS and Moscow knows it.42 Indeed, in 2004 Defense 

Minister Sergei Ivanov publicly accepted the reasons 

behind America’s realignment of its forces and global 

basing structure and did not find it alarming.43

No less consequential than the observation about 

returning to the Cold War is that Putin’s statements 

indicate his full acceptance of the General Staff’s vision 

and version of ubiquitous a priori American and 

Western threats expressed in a worst-case scenario. 

Worse yet, he openly conceded their power to define 

and formulate those threats and on that basis formulate 

requirements for defense policy and strategy. Indeed, 

here he openly invited the General Staff—these military 

experts—to determine Russia’s threat assessment and 

announced that the government would accept it. These 

actions seriously jeopardize any hope for effective 

civilian, not to mention, democratic control over the 

armed forces. 

Since Moscow neither faces an urgent or imminent 

strategic or military threat nor does it claim to face 

one, the threat it perceives is psychological, one of 

influence and diminished status abroad. Thus when 

Putin proposed in June 2007 that Washington share 

the Russian radar at Gabala, Azerbaijan, with it as a 

compromise, Yastrzhembskiy stated that, “We consider 

this issue not a military question, but a political one.”44

Similarly the so-called threat from NATO enlargement, 

for all the Russian complaints about it, was and 

remains a psychological rather than strategic issue. The 

innumerable statements by Russian generals that their 

weapons could beat any missile defense confirm this 

point. This gap between rhetoric and reality suggests 

not just a desire to ratchet up threat assessments for 
14

political and economic benefits for the military and 

political elites doing so within Russia, or a search 

for foreign policy gains, but also a deliberate mis or 

disinformation of the leadership and the population as 

Felgenhauer suggests. 

Certainly Russian charges that there is no Iranian 

missile threat are unsustainable because Moscow’s 

own analysts and Russian officials like Ivanov and 

Baluyevsky acknowledge it.45 Commenting on Iran’s 

launch in early 2007 of a suborbital weather rocket, 

Lieutenant General Leonid Sazhin stated that “Iran’s 

launch of a weather rocket shows that Tehran has 

not given up efforts to achieve two goals—create its 

own carrier rocket to take spacecraft to orbit and real 

medium-range combat missiles capable of hitting 

targets 3,000-5,000 miles away.”46 Although he argued 

that this capability would not fully materialize for 3-5 

years, it would also take that long to test and deploy 

the American missile defenses that are at issue. Equally 

significantly, Major-General Vitaly Dubrovin, a Russian 

space defense expert, said flatly “now Tehran has a 

medium-range ballistic missile, capable of carrying a 

warhead.”47 Naturally, both men decried the fact that 

Iran appears intent on validating American threat 

assessments.48

Arguably Russia has accepted a threat perception 

for which ultimately there is no solution but an arms 

race. To take Russia at its own inflated self-valuation 

means to privilege its interests and security above 

those of every other state with which it either interacts 

or with which it has a border. While Moscow obviously 

wants that outcome, it is equally obvious that it would 

have strongly negative consequences for many issues 

in international affairs. Certainly doing so reinforces 

Russian temptations towards autocracy and neo-
15

imperial foreign policies for as the Russian philosopher 

Sergei Gavrov writes,

The threats are utopian, the probability of their implementation is negligible, but their emergence is a sign. 

This sign—a message to “the city and the world”—surely lends itself to decoding and interpretation: we will 

defend from Western claims our ancient right to use our 

imperial (authoritarian and totalitarian) domestic sociocultural traditions within which power does not exist to 

serve people but people exist to serve power.49

Taking these inflated threat assessments at Russia’s 

self-valuation and acting accordingly would therefore 

have calamitous consequences throughout Eurasia. 

Doing so only stimulates still more aggressive and 

overbearing Russian behavior, while not getting 

anything in return. This does not mean disrespecting 

or gratuitously provoking Russia, but it does mean 

that we should understand that its threat perceptions 

and pretensions are greatly inflated, and we should 

therefore defend our legitimate ground. While there 

are actual areas where Russia might legitimately feel 

that its interests are adversely affected by U.S. policies 

and that such an assessment might be justified (see 

below), most of what we have recently heard about 

threats should not be included among them. 

Indeed, numerous commentators have observed 

that for some time Russia has cast itself as a “besieged 

fortress,” charging Washington with imperialism, 

launching an arms race, interfering in the domestic 

policies of CIS states (including Russia), expanding 

NATO, unilateralism, disregard for international 

law when it comes to using force, and resorting to 

military threats against Russian interests, etc.50 This 

wide-ranging threat perception also embraces Russia’s 
16

domestic politics as well. Regime spokesmen, e.g. 

Vladislav Surkov, also openly state that Russia must 

take national control of all the key sectors of the economy 

lest it be threatened by hostile foreign economic forces 

and so called “offshore aristocrats.”51 In other words, 

this threat perception links both internal and external 

threats in a seamless whole (as did Leninism) and 

represents the perception that Western democracy as 

such is a threat to Russia. Therefore U.S. and Western 

military power, even if it is not actually a threat, is a 

priori perceived as such.

Thus the problem is not that Russia is insufficiently 

respected abroad but rather that it defines its interests 

in ways that postulate an intrinsically adversarial 

relationship with the West, particularly Washington. 

Russian policy operates, as the German philosopher 

Carl Schmitt would have said, on the basis of the 

“presupposition of enemies.” Consequently, Moscow 

cannot accept that its problem lies not in Washington 

or in the stars but in itself as much, if not more than, 

in American policy. Indeed, the student of the Russian 

press would have no trouble discerning this besieged 

fortress mentality that permeates it and that can only be 

triggered from above.52 As in the Soviet past, Moscow, 

like Washington, remains wholly ethnocentric and 

self-absorbed in its attitudes and relationship to the 

external world. Russia’s single-minded pursuit of its 

own concept of its interests also shows little respect for 

or understanding of the reality of other governments’ 

policies or their opinions. Much of this syndrome is 

traceable not to American policy, but to the nature 

of the Russian political system. Hence the growing 

standoff with Washington.
17

Potential Consequences.

While (rightly or wrongly) nobody expects a 

resurrection of the intense Cold War global geopolitical, 

military, and ideological rivalry replete with the everpresent specter of nuclear war, the consequences of 

this rift are profound. First, this rift has already begun 

to stimulate renewed strategic arms buildups by both 

sides. Second, this rift highlights the failure to transcend 

the traditional agenda of past efforts at Russo-American 

(or Soviet-American) partnership—i.e., international 

security, strategic arms control, nonproliferation of 

WMD, and energy cooperation—to a true strategic 

partnership.53 Therefore issues of regional security 

in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have become 

enmeshed with horizontal or vertical proliferation 

threats in these regions, making them more intractable 

and complicating the situation within which Eurasian 

governments must operate. 

At the same time, issues of regional security 

throughout the CIS borderlands and in areas like the 

Black Sea have also become a subject of Russo-American, if not East-West, contention. Some commentators, 

like American conservative Bruce Jackson, proclaim that 

Russia wages a “soft war” against Western influence in 

Eastern Europe, including the Black Sea zone.54 But the 

soft war also partakes of a classical geopolitical EastWest rivalry, e.g., Moscow’s attacks on the Amer-ican 

military presence in and around the Black Sea and 

concern about Bulgaria’s and Romania’s overall proWestern foreign and defense policies. Similar rivalries 

occur throughout the entire post-Soviet periphery, the 

Middle East, and Northeast Asia. 

Finally, there is a significant ideological dimension 

to this struggle. If it is not as intense as the Cold War 

was, it is still a meaningful struggle over the issue of 
18

democracy and its expansion. This “values gap” is 

expressed in Russian attacks on the OSCE and NGOs, 

and in the deliberately widely-disseminated official 

belief that Washington somehow is or was behind all 

the color revolutions and is now seeking to undermine 

other CIS governments, including Russia’s. As Robert 

Kagan has recently noted, “If two of the world’s largest 

powers [Russia and China-author] share a common 

commitment to autocratic government, autocracy is 

not dead as an ideology.”55

The consequences of this adversarial relationship go 

beyond America, Russia, and their bilateral relations. 

They also encompass ties with other parties in Europe, 

the CIS, the Middle East, and Northeast Asia. Therefore 

this growing antagonism has significant global 

implications. And as it takes place in a less structured 

world than during the Cold War where both sides, 

to survive, had to acknowledge the other’s red lines, 

today neither side needs each other. As the natural 

deterring factors of the Cold War have evaporated, the 

resulting situation is potentially more volatile, if not 

dangerous.56 Moreover, as this adversarial relationship 

grows in scope and in its multiple dimensions, those 

consequences are already making themselves felt among 

Russia’s neighbors, interlocutors, and peripheries: 

Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Therefore, this rift 

possesses potentially significant strategic implications 

for both Russia and the United States.

One view of these frictions is that they are tactical 

not strategic. Consequently,

It is not that Moscow and Washington have strategic interests that are directly opposed to one another. In fact, 

leaders in both capitals see eye-to-eye on the pressing 

issues of nuclear proliferation and terrorism, and on 

more long-term goals, such as managing a peaceful rise 

of China. The problems seem to lie more in the tactics 
19

of achieving these strategic aims. Russian leaders have 

a hard time conceding global leadership to Washington; 

likewise many in the United States still harbor ingrained 

prejudices against the longtime adversary in Moscow.57

However, that viewpoint clashes with the fact 

that the repercussions of the bilateral tensions in this 

relationship encompass so much of today’s global 

security agenda. Second, this line of analysis plays 

down the truly serious differences between the parties 

and actually condescends towards Russian demands. 

After all, it is precisely American leadership that 

Russia is challenging. Third, this view also clashes 

with the fact that the differences between both states 

are not only strategic ones, they are also growing. 

Thus there is a hardening conviction among Russian 

elites that American policy in many of its dimensions, 

both strategic and ideological—i.e., its rhetoric of 

democratization—represents a fundamental threat 

to the integrity and sovereignty of Russia. Or at least 

they believe that no improvement in those relations is 

possible in the foreseeable future.58

While we may regard such talk as an unmerited 

manifestation of a well-developed and long-cultivated 

Russian paranoia, Russia’s elite increasingly professes 

that America resents Russia’s recovery, and attempts 

to weaken it in order to ultimately undermine it. This 

pervasive and unfounded view in Moscow triggers 

the well-developed and long-cultivated psychological 

armory of Russian responses, including the growing 

truculence and resort to bullying of its neighbors 

that we have seen in the Soviet, if not Imperial, past. 

However, psychoanalyzing this relationship should 

not lead us to discount the profound and immediately 

tangible consequences of this rift for Russia’s neighbors 

or interlocutors. 
20

For example, in 2005 Lithuanian Foreign Minister 

Antanas Valionis observed that the issue of Russia’s 

democratization was connected with key issues like 

the provision of energy supplies to the Baltic states as 

a whole; the inclusion of new members, e.g., Ukraine, 

in NATO; and, most of all, with security throughout 

the region. He stated that,

Finally, the strengthening or weakening of democracy 

in Russia itself will have a pivotal influence on the region. If Russia is democratic, Lithuania will find itself 

in the epicenter of very interesting events. If Russia will 

be non-democratic, it is possible that after a certain time 

period, something resembling the iron curtain will be 

recreated. If we do not succeed in preventing that, we 

will end up on the periphery of events. That is the essence of things—to make sure that the gas pipeline is not 

exchanged for silence about human rights and democracy in Russia. Finally, the geopolitical fate of the world 

in 15 to 20 years depends upon the question of Russia’s 

democratization.59

Similarly, Walter Slocombe, Under Secretary of 

Defense for Policy during the Clinton Administration, 

testified to Congress in 1995 that “Russia’s development, both internal and external, is perhaps the central 

factor in determining the overall fate and future of European security.”60 However, this argument’s validity is 

not confined to one man, or one government, or even 

to one continent—Europe—alone. What is true for the 

Baltic littoral pertains with equal force throughout 

Eurasia: As stated by Dr. Andrew Michta of the 

Marshall Center in Garmisch, i.e., “the extent to which 

regional security will balance between old and new 

tasks will hinge on domestic political developments in 

Russia as well as the progress of the current Russian 

military modernization program to be completed in 

2010.”61
21

The intersection of numerous and overlapping 

global developments and crises—the war on terrorism, 

Iraq, the energy crisis, and the rise of China and India 

in Asia—enhances the significance of geostrategic 

trends in Russia and its peripheries. And these trends 

certainly include regression towards autocracy for it 

encourages and allows the aggressive tendencies so 

visible in contemporary Russian foreign policy. As 

Kagan observes, 

It certainly would be a strategic error to allow Putin and 

any possible successor to strengthen their grip on power 

without outside pressures for reform, for the consolidation of autocracy at home will free the Russian leadership to pursue greater nationalist ambitions abroad. In 

these and other autocracies, including Iran, promoting 

democracy and human rights exacerbates internal political contradictions and can have the effect of blunting 

external ambitions as leaders tend to more dangerous 

threats from within.62

The common thread of perceiving America as a 

threat in both geopolitical and ideological terms has 

also united Moscow and Beijing in a common cause.63

Already in the 1990s, prominent analysts of world 

politics like Richard Betts and Robert Jervis, and then 

subsequent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) studies, 

postulated that the greatest security threat to American 

interests would be a Russian-Chinese alliance.64

Arguably, that is happening now and occurs under 

conditions of the energy crisis that magnifies Russia’s 

importance to China beyond providing diplomatic 

support, cover for China’s strategic rear, and arms 

sales.65

Several analysts of trends in East Asia see the 

confluence of the energy and other current international 

crises contributing to a Russo-Chinese alliance that 
22

has already formed in opposition to American power 

and ideas. That alliance would encompass points of 

friction with Washington: strategic resistance to U.S. 

interests in Central and Northeast Asia; resistance 

to antiproliferation and pressures upon the regimes 

in Iran and North Korea; an energy alliance; an 

ideological counteroffensive against U.S. support for 

democratization abroad; and the rearming of both 

Russia and China, if not their proxies and allies, with 

a view towards conflict with America.66 South Korean 

columnist Kim Yo’ng Hu’i wrote in 2005 that, 

China and Russia are reviving their past strategic partnership to face their strongest rival, the United States. 

A structure of strategic competition and confrontation 

between the United States and India on the one side, and 

Russia and China on the other is unfolding in the eastern 

half of the Eurasian continent including the Korean peninsula. Such a situation will definitely bring a huge wave 

of shock to the Korean peninsula, directly dealing with 

the strategic flexibility of U.S. forces in Korea. If China 

and Russia train their military forces together in the sea 

off the coast of China’s Liaodong Peninsula, it will also 

have an effect on the 21st century strategic plan of Korea. We will now need to think of Northeast Asia on a 

much broader scale. The eastern half of Eurasia, including Central Asia, has to be included in our strategic plan 

for the future.67

Since then, Lyle Goldstein and Vitaly Kozyrev have 

similarly written that, 

If the Kremlin favors Beijing, the resulting Sino-Russian 

energy nexus—joining the world’s fastest growing energy consumer with one of the world’s fastest growing producers—would support China’s growing claim 

to regional preeminence. From Beijing’s point of view, 

this relationship would promise a relatively secure and 

stable foundation for one of history’s most extraordinary 
23

economic transformations. At stake are energy reserves 

in eastern Russia that far exceed those in the entire Caspian basin. Moreover, according to Chinese strategists, 

robust Sino-Russian energy links would decrease the 

vulnerability of Beijing’s sea lines of communication to 

forms of “external pressure” in case of a crisis concerning Taiwan or the South China Sea. From the standpoint 

of global politics, the formation of the Sino-Russian energy nexus would represent a strong consolidation of an 

emergent bipolar structure in East Asia, with one pole 

led by China (and including Russia) and one led by the 

United States (and including Japan).68

Russia’s tie to China certainly expresses a deep 

strategic identity or congruence of interests on a host 

of issues from Korea to Central Asia and could have 

significant military implications. Those implications 

are not just due to Russian arms sales to China which 

are clearly tied to an anti-American military scenario, 

most probably connected with Taiwan. They also 

include the possibility of joint military action in 

response to a regime crisis in the Democratic People’s 

Republic of Korea (DPRK) as suggested by the joint 

maneuvers of the Russian and Chinese militaries in 

2005 and 2007.69 Thus we could be on the verge of a 

new strategic bipolarity that bifurcates Europe and 

Asia and places Washington and Moscow on opposite 

sides in both peacetime and times of crises.70 Equally 

disquieting is that many analysts in both Russia and 

America expect bilateral relations to worsen in the 

foreseeable future, not least because Russian observers 

expect the current Congress to be more anti-Russian 

than its predecessor.71

Despite occasional U.S. and European efforts to 

soften the rhetoric, chances are that this forecast of 

worsening relations will actually materialize. Even 
24

though Putin has stated that the United States is a 

major, if not the only, partner for Russia on issues of 

disarmament and global security, nonproliferation, 

global health, combating poverty, and trade, and that 

this partnership could soon expand in ways not yet 

foreseen, Putin’s visible contempt for Western policy at 

the 2006 G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg and afterwards, 

has manifested itself in even more sarcastic fashion 

than was previously the case.72 And the systematic 

flooding of the Russian media with anti-American 

propaganda certainly adds to the likelihood of longterm estrangement. 

Since Russia is now experiencing a succession 

scenario which is the achilles heel of its political system 

but which will also drive all Russian politics even further 

in an anti-Western direction, Russian elites have every 

incentive to keep stoking this fire. But they and we must 

remember that the consequences of intensifying this 

adversarial quality of the bilateral relationship could 

be very negative for international security. In previous 

cases, Russian rulers have resorted to violence and 

fomented crises so as to secure domestic popularity 

and legitimacy, e.g., Yeltsin’s war with Chechnya in 

1994.73 Likewise, several Western scholars, including 

this author, believe that the 1999 succession crisis was 

managed in such a way as to tie Putin’s ascension to 

power to the incitement of the war in Chechnya.74 The 

seizure of Yukos and the arrest of its chief executives, 

Platon Lebedev and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in 2003-

04 represent another example of the resort to direct 

force and the fomenting of a crisis to further narrow 

the possibilities for democratization and strike at 

Westernizing forces in Russia.75 It is entirely possible, 

then, that this discernibly enhanced aggressiveness and 

threat-mongering are intended, as Gavrov and many 
25

other Russian analysts suggest, to create a favorable 

domestic environment for the succession.76

Under the most favorable explanation for recent 

political violence and assassinations directed against 

regime critics like Anna Politkovskaya and Alexnader 

Litvinenko, alleged “rogue elements” of the FSB are 

trying to impose one or another’s political scenario 

upon Russia and destabilize the Putin regime. If this is 

true, it hardly furnishes evidence of Russia’s reliability 

or stability with regard to world politics. And if the 

state committed those assassinations, then we are 

dealing with what truly is a criminalized and rogue 

state. This last charge is not as surprising as it may 

seem, for Russian and foreign observers have long 

pointed to the integration of criminal elements with 

the energy, intelligence, and defense industrial sectors 

of the economy.77

Second, every succession since 1991 has been the 

result of violence or electoral fraud, if not both phenomena.78 Consequently Russia’s importance as a major 

energy and military (and recovering military) power, its 

function as the sponsor of anti-democratic movements 

or trends and alibi of last resort throughout the CIS for 

such tendencies, its ability to block nonproliferation 

or to provide arms, nuclear reactors, know how, and 

substantial political support for anti-Western and antiAmerican regimes, e.g., Iran and Myanmar, and even 

for terrorist movements, and, finally, the link between 

its fundamental domestic instability and its foreign 

policy, leads it to figure prominently in many different 

potential threat scenarios. As one recent American 

assessment observes, 

The central puzzle of Russian politics is that 15 years after the collapse of the USSR, the country still lacks any 
26

stable and legitimate form of state order. The result is 

continuing pervasive political and social uncertainty—

concretized in the palpable official fear that independent 

civil society organizations might promote additional 

“color revolutions” in Russia or other post-Soviet states 

and the endless rumors about various unconstitutional 

or semi constitutional schemes Putin might employ to 

stay in power after his formal second term ends in March 

2008. Bearing in mind that Russia remains the world’s 

largest country by territory and still possesses thousands 

of nuclear warheads as well as large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, such 

uncertainty could quickly become a major international 

problem as well.79

These political conditions duly represent some of the 

reasons why even Russian analysts admit that Russia 

remains “a risk factor” in world politics, not the reliable 

pole of world politics that it claims to be.80

Although some, including U.S. officials, may 

believe that Russia’s hostile rhetoric is connected with 

the upcoming succession to Putin, at best that is only 

partly the case.81 Russia’s adversarial posture towards 

America and the West is not just a ploy to mobilize 

support for the regime, though it is that. Rather, this 

policy is intrinsically linked to and grows out of 

Russia’s regression towards a police state, where the 

police rule through the state and the state enforces a 

stifling tutelage over the citizenry.82 In other words, as 

both foreign and domestic observers have written, this 

systematically inculcated authoritarian, anti-American 

line and gravitation towards China are systemically 

and structurally driven.83 Or, as Lilya Shevtsova has 

written, anti-Westernism is the new national idea.84 

Thus Vladimir Shlapentokh has shown that an essential 

component of the Kremlin’s ideological campaign 

to maintain the Putin regime in power and extend it 
27

(albeit under new leadership) past the elections of 2008 

is anti-Americanism. As he wrote, 

The core of the Kremlin’s ideological strategy is to convince the public that any revolution in Russia will be 

sponsored by the United States. Putin is presented as a 

bulwark of Russian patriotism, as the single leader able 

to confront America’s intervention in Russian domestic 

life and protect what is left of the imperial heritage. This 

propaganda is addressed mostly to the elites (particularly elites in the military and FSB) who sizzle with hatred 

and envy of America.85

Similarly, Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for 

International Peace observes that, 

The rapid improvement in ties and growing cooperation 

between China and Russia owes, to a great extent, not to 

any Chinese new initiative, but to Russia’s changing relationship with the West under Vladimir Putin’s rule. As 

President Putin became increasingly authoritarian, he 

needed China as an ally in counterbalancing the West. 

The net strategic effect of Russia’s reorientation of its 

policy toward the West has been tremendously positive 

for China.86

Russia’s threat perceptions are either oriented 

towards terrorism from the south, as was generally 

the case even until 2006, or more recently primarily 

to the West.87 Key Russian officials now proclaim that 

the greatest threats to Russia come from the West, 

supposedly in the form of NATO’s enlargement 

(although NATO is a shadow of its past military 

strength); American military power in both its 

conventional and nuclear aspects; or as President Bush 

himself has now recognized, in the form of demands 

for greater democratization.88 Recently Putin himself, 

stated that, 
28

You know, I think that the problem in international relations today is that there is increasingly less respect for 

the basic principles of international law. There is an ever 

growing desire to resolve this or that issue based on the 

political considerations and expediency of the moment. 

This is very dangerous, and it is precisely this that leads 

to small countries not feeling secure. It is also this that 

fuels the arms race in large countries.89

Lavrov has duly echoed this assessment.90 It is 

unlikely, though, that either he or Putin had Russian 

policy towards Chechnya, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, 

Moldova, the Baltic states, or Russian domestic policy 

in mind when they made these statements.

Military and Nuclear Issues.

The repercussions of this rift with the West are 

particularly visible in Russian military policy. Indeed, 

in the military, we find the threat assessments claiming 

that Russia faces a threat situation comparable to that 

of the 1930s America stated in Ministry of Defense and 

General Staff journals as a matter of course.91

Obviously this argument invokes the traditional 

specter of a large-scale continental or even intercontinental war and Western invasion of Russia to 

elicit more resources from the government. Yet it is 

not an inaccurate representation of Russian defense 

thinking. Putin’s statements above (and below), as 

well as those by other key spokesmen and/or analysts, 

display the growing belief in a Western threat. 

Russian political and military literature abounds 

with charges that Washington seeks to “crush” 

Russia and is organizing secret plans to undermine 

or overthrow the Russian government by fomenting 
29

new “color revolutions” to follow Georgia, Ukraine, 

and Kyrgyzstan.92 Neither are these apprehensions 

intended only for domestic consumption because they 

influence policy and force deployments in Russia and 

possibly in the United States as well, especially with 

regard to nuclear weapons. For example, Russian 

officials have blocked discussions of reducing tactical 

nuclear weapons (TNW) in Europe, not least because 

they see them as weapons to stop a NATO or American 

conventional offensive and restore intrawar stability 

and escalation control.93 Thus Ivanov’s remarks about 

Russia’s capability to launch mass production of 

missiles apply to them as well.94

Regarding strategic nuclear weapons and missile 

defenses, the situation is no better. Moscow regards 

Washington’s policies of leaving the Antiballistic Missile 

(ABM) treaty, building missile defenses in Poland 

and the Czech Republic, seeking to militarize space, 

and conventional and nuclear force modernization as 

posing a combination of threats to it. Thus beyond its 

own urgent, long overdue, and ongoing conventional 

modernization, it has announced plans for qualitative 

modernization of its strategic and tactical nuclear 

systems through 2020.95 Evidently Moscow expects 

a confrontation involving the threat or even use of 

nuclear or space weapons and a concomitant urgent 

necessity of rebuilding its conventional and nuclear 

forces.96 The program outlined below, according to 

Ivanov, will allow Russia to replace 45 percent of its 

existing arsenals with modern weapons by 2015.

Thus, Ivanov has recently unveiled plans to build by 

that date: 50 new Topol-M ICBM complexes on mobile 

launchers, 34 new silo-based Topol-M missiles and 

control units, 50 new bombers, 31 ships; and to fully 

rearm 40 tank, 97 infantry, and 50 parachute battalions. 

Forty Topol-M silo-based missiles have already been 
30

deployed. In 2007 alone, the military would get 17 new 

ballistic missiles rather than 4 a year, as has recently 

been the case, and 4 spacecraft and booster rockets. 

It would overhaul a long-range aviation squadron, 6 

helicopter and combat aviation squadrons, and 7 tank 

and 13 motor rifle battalions. In 2007 alone, 11 billion 

dollars will be spent on new weapons, and 31 new ships 

will be commissioned, including 8 fleet ballistic missile 

submarines (SSBNs) carrying ICBMs (presumably the 

forthcoming Bulava missile). And in 2009-10, Russia 

will decide whether or not to build a new shipyard 

for the construction of aircraft carriers, and 50 Tu-160 

Blackjack and Tu-95 Bear Strategic Bombers will operate 

over this period as well. Doctrinally, Russia will also 

retain its right of launching preemptive strikes.97

In and of itself, this program does not necessarily 

revive the Cold War confrontation or an inherently antiAmerican program of arms racing; the modernization 

of Russia’s weapons is desperately needed. But this 

program does betray a heightened threat assessment 

and the growing strategic importance and even 

utility attached by Moscow to nuclear weapons. The 

latter point, of course, is one for which America is 

often blamed, but has figured prominently in official 

Russian doctrine and strategy at least since 1993.98

Indeed, it appears that Russia has unilaterally violated 

President Boris Yeltsin’s commitment for disarmament 

of Russian attack or multipurpose submarines so that 

they would not carry tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) 

and is deploying these weapons on attack submarines 

“on combat patrols.”99 Moscow now advocates a 

legally binding treaty saying that U.S. and Russian 

nuclear arsenals do not target each other in order to 

dispel this alleged threat.100 This request appears to 

be purely propagandistic since Presidents Yeltsin 
31

and Clinton agreed to this over a decade ago, and the 

required computer programs for targeting could be 

reinstated at a moment’s notice. So it appears that we 

will see what Putin calls an “asymmetrical but highly 

efficient” Russian response, perhaps in its new Bulava

or Topol missiles that supposedly can avoid or spoof 

missile defenses.101 But this reply also suggests the 

potential return of the competitive procurement spiral 

that featured so prominently during the Cold War.

This intensified threat assessment contradicts 

earlier statements by Ivanov and Putin dating back 

to 2001 that the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty 

may have been a mistake but not a threat to Russia. 

Alarmist threat briefings that these missile defenses, 

America’s conventional force modernization, or its 

nuclear programs reflect an urgent and growing threat, 

display either a misunderstanding (whether deliberate 

or unintentional) of U.S. policy or an apprehension 

that the cherished dream of a closed bloc in the former 

Soviet Union and great power status are at risk.102

Thus the outbreak of this rhetoric reflects deeper 

political exigencies that drive Russian policy, not 

some major change in what the Soviets used to call 

the correlation of forces. For example, the Strategic 

Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) of 2002, also 

known as the Moscow treaty, essentially uncoupled 

U.S. and Russian strategic force modernization 

programs from each other. The treaty stipulated that 

both sides can build whatever nuclear forces they 

need within the treaty’s limits without referring to 

the other side’s programs or directly countering them 

in their own force building programs.103 However, 

thanks to the controversy on missile defense, Russia 

now insists that if the United States unilaterally installs 

missile defenses in Eastern Europe, it will affect Russo-
32

NATO relations, create confrontations in Europe, and 

in general end civilization as we know it. Therefore, 

Washington must first involve Russia before it makes 

any such deployment.104 At the same time, Putin and 

his minions say that if America accepts his proposals 

for missile defense cooperation based on the system 

at Gabala or alternatively on a new one being built 

at Armavir in the North Caucasus, then the bilateral 

relationship can become once again a strategic one and 

lead to a “revolution” in world politics. But if we do 

not accept this, then, of course, the regression to a neoCold War situation is implicit in those statements.105

As part of this recent proposal for use of the Gabala 

installation and in the overall controversy over missile 

defense, Russia evidently again wants a veto or at least 

a “droit de regard” (right of regard) over U.S. and 

NATO military programs, particularly ones within 

what Russia calls the vicinity of its borders or interests. 

But these demands also show that with regard to 

Washington, Moscow operates its policies from the 

presupposition of enemies.

Given the several years of briefings and 

consultations involved among all the parties including 

Russia, American unilateralism is not the issue here. 

Rather, it is an attempt by Russia to force America to 

give Russia a veto over its policies and trigger further 

dissension in NATO. Thus Baluyevsky argued that “In 

our opinion, military activity by the alliance close to 

Russia’s borders should be comprehensible to Russia 

and commensurate with the new challenges and 

threats that are rising. At the same time Russia has an 

interest in having a predictable partner in the shape 

of NATO.”106 This demand is, in fact, a tried, tested, 

but also tired Soviet and post-Soviet refrain. Obviously 

this is unacceptable to Washington, NATO, and its 

members. 
33

Even though there is no military threat as Russian 

military men admit, and as did Putin in 2001, Russia, 

especially its armed forces and political leaders, cannot 

relinquish the belief in NATO and America as an a priori 

enemy. They are still tied to the presupposition of an 

enemy and to a relationship based on the expectation 

of a threat, i.e., a relationship of deterrence rather than 

of defense. Lavrov recently underscored this point. He 

told an interviewer for Rossiyskaya Gazeta that, 

Our main criterion is ensuring the Russian Federation’s 

security and maintaining strategic stability as much as 

possible. . . . We have started such consultations already. 

I am convinced that we need a substantive discussion on 

how those lethal weapons could be curbed on the basis 

of mutual trust and balance of forces and interests. We 

will insist particularly on this approach. We do not need 

just the talk that we are no longer enemies and therefore 

we should not have restrictions for each other. This is 

not the right approach. It is fraught with an arms race, in 

fact, because, it is very unlikely that either of us will be 

ready to lag behind a lot.107

Thus he emphasized that in an atmosphere of political 

mistrust and where both sides’ deployments are still 

based on the philosophy of deterrence and mutual 

assured destruction, strategic unilateralism is both 

unacceptable and indeed dangerous to all because it 

stimulates arms races across the world. In other words, 

American unilateralism is inherently a threat to Russia 

wherever it appears because Russia cannot but proceed 

from the a priori assumption of hostile American 

interest, i.e., the presupposition of an enemy.

Thus the problem and the threats that we face as 

this relationship erodes are not due to Russia’s military 

modernization but rather to the overall deterioration 

of Russo-American relations or to the failure to break 
34

out of past cognitive paradigms. And here Russia, 

precisely because it has reverted to previous policies, 

structures, and mentalities, is as much to blame as is 

the United States. Whereas the United States is moving 

or has sought to move toward a strategic relationship 

based on partnership with Russia, defense against and 

dissuasion of enemies, and lessened reliance on nuclear 

weapons and deterrence vis-à-vis Russia and other 

states, Russia cannot overcome the past.108 It remains 

committed to a strategy and posture of deterrence 

that postulates an inherently adversarial relationship 

with the United States. Russian analysts recognize 

the continuing conformity of Russian policy with 

Schmitt’s notion of the presupposition of the enemy 

as an approach to national security policy in Russia.109

That failure to break out of past paradigms, however 

it is understood, inevitably heightens the impact of 

geostrategic rivalry across the entire Russo-American 

agenda and in international relations more broadly. 

Thus Lavrov complains that “we are being called 

upon to fight a hypothetical threat (i.e., intermediate 

range missiles from Iran that could hit Europe) while a 

real threat to our security is looming.” This statement 

falsely negates what Russian military men and Lavrov 

know to be a real and growing threat from Iran’s missile, 

nuclear, and space programs.110 But the threat that 

really alarms Lavrov here, a nonmilitary one it should 

be noted, is one that has frightened Russian statesmen 

for centuries, namely the idea of a unified Europe from 

which it is isolated. So Lavrov went on to warn that 

NATO, the OSCE, and the CFE Treaty, the pillars of the 

European security system, are being converted into a 

bloc policy which would fold up the reform of Europe’s 

security architecture that Russia desires and bifurcate 

Europe.111 That Moscow’s policy toward Europe 
35

aspires to strategic bipolarity throughout Eurasia, as 

described below, seems to have eluded Lavrov here, 

but underscores the fundamentally psychological 

resentment of lost power and craving for status with 

America that drives Russian policy.

Potential U.S. Threats to Russia and Inflated Russian 

Threat Perceptions.

To say this is not to deny that possible changes in 

U.S. force structures and deployments could provide 

a threat or threats to Russia. Indeed, the best available 

studies of American nuclear policies, including 

modernization of those weapons, highlight the fact that 

these policies, including the introduction into practice 

of new concepts like dissuasion and preemptive, if not 

preventive, war, could, if they have not already done 

so, develop into perceived potential threats to Russia 

in the near future.112 Oddly enough, though, these 

potential threats are hardly ever mentioned in Russian 

commentary. This suggests, once again, that it is internal 

Russian perceptions as much as actual realities that are 

driving policy. As an example of these potential threats, 

although the United States has upgraded its naval and 

other strategic forces and is gradually shifting them 

to the Pacific Ocean largely to meet potential North 

Korean or Chinese contingencies, those deployments 

also could threaten Russian forces.113 But Moscow has 

said little or nothing about these forces.

A second, equally negative possible outcome is that 

American policymakers will come to perceive Russia 

not just as a recalcitrant independent actor that does 

not want to cooperate with America, but as a potential 

or even active threat in its own right. As this potential 

inheres primarily in Russia’s nuclear capability, the 
36

developments cited here are already creating a climate 

among government circles in which Russia can quickly 

come to be seen as a potential military threat due to 

its political differences with America. For example, 

the recent Report of the Defense Science Board on 

Nuclear Capabilities stated openly that nuclear 

reductions agreed to in the Moscow treaty of 2002 and 

recommended in the Nuclear Posture Review of 2001 

pointed to a new and benign strategic relationship with 

Russia after the end of the Cold War and the desire 

to forge a new bilateral strategic relationship that no 

longer was based on the principles of Mutual Assured 

Destruction. 

Today, the Report observes, that presumption 

of a new benign strategic relationship with Russia is 

increasingly open to doubt. This is because, “Although 

United States relations with Russia are considered 

relatively benign at the moment [December 2006], 

Russia retains the capacity to destroy the United 

States in 30 minutes or less.” Moreover, its reliance 

on nuclear weapons to compensate for a weakened 

conventional military has led it to emphasize nuclear 

weapons for purposes of maintaining superpower 

status, deterrence, and potentially warfighting. Russia’s 

regression from democracy, and rivalry with America 

over Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia [other issues may well 

be added since then to the mix—author], suggest that 

the assessment of 2003 that nothing had changed since 

2001 to justify revising the Nuclear Posture Review’s 

(NPR) presumption of a benign strategic relationship 

with Russia needs to be revised.114 Therefore, the Report 

recommends the creation of a permanently standing 

assessment “Red Team” “to continuously assess the 

range of emerging and plausible nuclear capabilities 

that can threaten the United States and its allies and 
37

friends with potentially catastrophic consequences.”115 

This team would monitor Russian, Chinese, and North 

Korean developments because, 

Despite the desire for improved relations with Russia, 

the direction, scope, and pace of the evolution of U.S. 

capabilities must be based on a realistic recognition that 

the United States and Russia are not yet the reliable, 

trusted friends needed for the United States to depart 

from a commitment to a robust nuclear deterrent. Intentions can change overnight; capabilities cannot.”116

Other examples of a growing wariness about 

Russian intentions can also be cited.117 Thus there is a 

real danger that these perceptions can grow on both 

sides into self-fulfilling threat perceptions that will 

drive conventional and nuclear defense acquisitions 

and foreign policy decisions as well until they influence 

formal doctrinal and strategic pronouncements. Some 

Russian military observers have already openly 

postulated that Russia and America (or NATO) are 

still enemies. For example, Colonel Anatoly Tsyganok, 

a noted military commentator speaking about the 

increase in large-scale and regular Russian military 

exercises, observed that apart from the need to conduct 

such exercises as part of the Army’s regular routine, 

they are necessary to respond to American deployments 

in places like Hungary and Bulgaria. Both sides, he 

says, remain enemies, and these exercises are hardly 

antiterrorist ones but rather something else (i.e., he hints 

at their being intended to be anti-NATO).118 Certainly 

and similarly, the so-called “Ivanov doctrine” of 2003, 

formalized in a Russian white paper that did not name 

NATO, was oriented nonetheless to the primacy of a 

NATO/American threat.119
38

Nevertheless for such threats to be actualized and 

formalized in official state papers like defense doctrines, 

the political climate between Moscow and Washington 

would have to decline still further. Consequently, while 

we should not rush to restore the Cold War, the present 

trends on both sides are disturbing and destabilizing, 

not only for what they mean to each other but also 

because of their impact on regional security throughout 

Eurasia and how they affect the calculations of other 

nuclear states or states that seek nuclear weapons like 

Iran and North Korea. In other words, these tensions 

cannot be confined to discussions of bilateral strategy 

and politics but deeply impinge upon the problems of 

regional security, global proliferation, and deterrence.

In fact, in the context of charges raised in 2006 

that the United States now has and has been striving 

for a usable first-strike nuclear capability against 

Russian forces—an argument that ignited a firestorm 

of polemics in Russia-–such interactive Russian and 

American deployments of both conventional and 

nuclear forces do, in fact, raise the prospect of real 

as opposed to notional threats of an arms race where 

Washington seems to move for a supposed first-strike 

capability in both Russian and Western strategic 

analyses.120 Thus David McDonough’s analysis of U.S. 

nuclear deployments in the Pacific Ocean states that, 

The increased deployment of hard-target kill weapons in 

the Pacific could only aggravate Russian concerns over 

the survivability of its own nuclear arsenal. These silobusters would be ideal to destroy the few hundred ICBM 

silos and Russia’s infamously hardened command-andcontrol facilities as well as help reduce any warning 

time for Russian strategic forces, given their possible 

deployment and depressed trajectory. This is critical 

for a decapitation mission, due to the highly centralized 

command-and-control structure of the Russian posture, 
39

as well as to preempt any possible retaliation from the 

most on-alert Russian strategic forces. The Pacific also 

has a unique feature in that it is an area where gaps in 

Russian early-warning radar and the continued deterioration of its early-warning satellite coverage have made 

it effectively blind to any attack from this theatre. This 

open-attack corridor would make any increase in Pacific-deployed SLBMs appear especially threatening.121

Similarly, already in 2003 when the first reports of 

the Pentagon’s interest in new low-yield and bunkerbusting nuclear weapons became public, Russian 

analysts warned that even if such programs are merely 

in a research stage, they would add to the hostile 

drift of Russo-American relations.122 Events since 

then have only confirmed this assessment and their 

warning. Meanwhile, the trend continues towards 

increasing Russian reliance upon nuclear weapons 

against a perceived growing American threat. This 

threat perception and reliance upon nuclear weapons 

takes place despite American assertions that charges 

of excessive U.S. reliance on nuclear forces; that the 

United States is either not reducing nuclear forces or 

doing so fast enough; that the United States is building 

new and more dangerous nuclear weapons; that the 

United States is lowering the threshold for nuclear 

weapons use by emphasizing preemption; and that 

these alleged failures and the supposed failure to sign 

new arms control treaties are encouraging proliferation 

are myths.123 So if we may paraphrase a famous movie 

line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate,” 

while both sides appear to be sinking deeper into their 

self-justifying perceptions.

For example, even less plausibly, Russian spokesmen 

regularly and increasingly decry the U.S. intention to 

build missile defenses bases in Poland and in the Czech 
40

Republic as threats to Russian security because they 

will really be used, so they say, against Russia, and 

not Iran, so as to render Russia’s first or second strike 

capability impotent or to threaten such outcomes.124

The ensuing nuclear blackmail would allegedly then 

be used to further reduce Russia’s foreign policy and 

military capabilities, standing, and security. Lavrov 

and other officials have now frequently reiterated that 

“the military presence of the United States in Europe is 

becoming a strategic factor.”125 

Baluyevsky too attacked this deployment because 

it could touch off an arms race in many countries (the 

hidden idea being that Russia could not keep up with 

the pace of America and China), and that these defenses 

are not needed because neither Iran nor North Korea 

has the capability to strike at Europe or America. Thus 

these missile defenses are there to threaten Russia and 

deprive it of access to key zones along its frontier—

perhaps the real threat in political terms. Missile 

launchers could be converted to interceptors that 

strike throughout European Russia; the missiles will 

not actually defend against all incoming attacks (which 

is strange since he said there were no attacks to be 

expected); they create possible ecological nightmares 

or even wars in Europe, etc.126 These rhetorical salvos 

are coming fast and furious even though dispassionate 

and thorough Russian analyses, e.g., by Alexei Arbatov 

of the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, demonstrate 

that these missile defenses cannot possibly threaten 

Russia.127 Hence the demand for more American 

transparency concerning those missiles and their 

purpose as well as some kind of binding agreement that 

Russia cannot be and is not a target of those missiles.128 

Furthermore, the internal contradictions among them, 

e.g., that Iran simultaneously is and is not a threat or 
41

that Russian missiles could spoof defenses, etc., indicate 

just how seriously these threat assessments should be 

taken.

Thus, this demand for suspending the program, 

along with multiple complaints that Washington 

has not answered Russia’s questions, etc., are one 

large bluff inasmuch as Russia also received over 10 

technical briefings on this program.129 The artificiality, 

not to mention systematic mendacity, of this campaign 

is all too redolent of Soviet tactics and suggests 

another attempt to divide Washington and Europe 

from each other by frightening the latter even as it 

reflects the abiding status insecurity that underlies so 

much of Russian foreign policy. And, of course, the 

other critical goal of this campaign is to prevent any 

American military presence in the former Warsaw Pact 

states, not to mention the former Soviet Union, so as to 

leave open the possibility of their remaining a Russian 

sphere of influence. 

At the same time, this campaign also illustrates the 

Russian military-political elite’s inability to reconcile 

themselves to a diminished budget and status, and 

finally their consistent belief that America and NATO 

are enemies of Russia. As Nikolai Sokov recently 

wrote, in regard to the study by Keir Lieber and Daryl 

Press about U.S. strategic capabilities that generated so 

much heat in Russia,130

The reason why hardliners in Russia pay so much attention to the state of the U.S.-Russian strategic balance 

(and why they continue to discuss it in terms of “parity” 

rather than retaliatory capability) is that they conceive of 

U.S.-Russian relations today in the same terms as during 

the Cold War. The underlying unspoken assumption of 

the Lieber-Press study is that a systematic fundamental 

conflict either exists or could emerge in the future; this 

assumption is not lost on Russian hardliners.131
42

Other implications of the growing antagonism 

between Washington and Moscow have also made 

themselves felt in military affairs. Coordination with 

NATO has turned out to be much less than what was 

hoped for once it began in 2002.132 Indeed, Sergei Ivanov 

admitted that Russo-NATO cooperation in fighting 

terrorism has not reached the desired level, and that 

development of medium-term plans for cooperation in 

countering security threats in general is needed. Thus 

the NATO-Russia Council has been only a political 

factor with limited effectiveness in shaping military 

outcomes or a fundamental change in international 

relations.133 Similarly U.S.-Russian and NATO-Russian 

planned exercises in Russia were suddenly cancelled 

just before they were supposed to start in September 

2006.134

Russian military writers likewise regularly inveigh 

against what they consider to be NATO and American 

plans to encircle Russia with both conventional and 

nuclear weapons at bases either in the Baltic, Poland, 

and Eastern Europe, or from attempts to place U.S. 

military bases within the CIS.135 Lavrov, for example, 

warned that the failure of NATO members and the 

Baltic states to ratify the CFE treaty (which they will 

not do because of Russian deployments in Moldova 

and Georgia in violation of the OSCE’s Istanbul accords 

of 1999) plus the enlargement of NATO, the resulting 

conventional imbalance, and the U.S. military presence 

in Europe all constitute a strategic factor, i.e., threats to 

Russia.136 In addition,

Perceived foreign threats also include military buildup(s) changing the balance near the borders of Russia 

and its allies, anti-Russian policies of certain neighboring governments, and the US withdrawal from 

the 1972 ABM Treaty announced by the G. W. Bush 

[Administration].137
43

As we have seen above, these so-called threats do not 

exist. Indeed, Sergei Ivanov as Defense Minister said as 

much in 2004.138 Therefore these claims are essentially 

phantoms for justifying Russia’s foreign and domestic 

policy goals as well as the military’s campaign for more 

money and high-tech weapons against NATO and 

America. But because the real threats facing Russia are 

internal in nature, this perception of Russia as a besieged 

fortress and the primary global counterpole to America 

and the West demonstrate that Moscow’s inability to 

find a point of domestic stability and legitimacy carries 

over into its foreign and defense policies. These facts 

also suggest that a fundamental problem in the RussoNATO relationship is the unyielding opposition of the 

MOD and the government to genuine defense reform 

and strategic cooperation which would entail, among 

other things, eliminating the ingrained presupposition 

of enemies and policies deriving from that posture.139

All these trends highlight an increasing Russian 

ambivalence about the arms control treaties of the 

1980s and 1990s like the CFE Treaty of Paris of 1990 

and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Washington 

Treaty of 1987. Ivanov has frequently called all of these 

treaties, including the START I Treaty, relics of the Cold 

War.140 Since then Lavrov, Baluyevsky, and Putin have 

threatened to withdraw from the CFE treaty, called 

it meaningless, and blamed NATO for not ratifying 

it (even though Moscow refuses to pull its forces out 

of Moldova) and for deploying forces in the states 

of new members.141 Clearly, the Russian debate over 

these treaties is closely linked to the issue of NATO’s 

enlargement and their impact and continuation are 

seen in the context of that expansion. This debate also 

reveals the persistence of Cold War thinking in Moscow. 

But this debate over existing arms treaties also reveals 

that Moscow is unwilling to reveal or confront its true 
44

threat perceptions and instead blames Washington for 

its failure to take Russian interests into account. 

Much evidence also suggests that various political 

forces in Russia, particularly in the military community, 

are urging withdrawal from those treaties, not least 

because of NATO enlargement towards the CIS and 

U.S. foreign and military policy in those areas. In March 

2005 Sergei Ivanov raised the question of withdrawal 

from the INF Treaty with the Pentagon.142 More 

recently, Ivanov has stated that the INF treaty was a 

mistake.143 And since then Baluyevsky followed suit, 

threatening to pull out of the treaty unless Washington 

ceased its missile defense plans.144

Indeed, withdrawal from the INF treaty makes no 

sense unless one believes that Russia is genuinely—

and more importantly—imminently threatened by 

NATO, or Iran and China, but most of all by U.S. 

superior conventional military power, and cannot 

meet or deter that threat except by returning to the 

classic Cold War strategy of holding Europe hostage 

to nuclear attack to deter Washington and NATO. 

Similarly with regard to China and Iran, absent a 

missile defense, the only applicable strategy would be 

to use nuclear weapons to deter them, but this means 

admitting that these supposed partners of Russia 

actually constitute a growing threat to it. Since it is by 

no means clear that Russia can or should reply to any 

such threat by producing intermediate range ballistic 

missiles (IRBMs), the desire to leave the INF treaty 

and reactivate missile production of IRBMs represents 

only the interests of the defense and defense industrial 

sectors, not necessarily Russia’s state interest. 

As part of this debate, General Vladimir Vasilenko 

also raised the issue of withdrawal from the treaty 

after Ivanov did so in 2005, though it is difficult to see 
45

what Russia gains from withdrawal from that treaty.145

Vasilenko, anticipating Baluyevsky, also stated that 

the nature and composition of any future U.S./NATO 

missile defense would determine the nature and 

number of future Russian missile forces and systems 

even though admittedly any such missile defense 

systems could only defend against a few missiles at a 

time. Therefore, 

Russia should give priority to high-survivable mobile 

ground and naval missile systems when planning the 

development of the force in the near and far future. . . . 

The quality of the strategic nuclear forces of Russia will 

have to be significantly improved in terms of adding to 

their capability of penetrating [missile defense] barriers 

and increasing the survivability of combat elements and 

enhancing the properties of surveillance and control systems.146

Obviously such advocacy represents a transparent 

demand for new, vast, and unaffordable military 

programs, similar to the demand for reactivating 

production of IRBMs regardless of consequences. But 

in that case, Russia’s government and military, are, as 

Sokov suggested, thereby postulating an inherent EastWest enmity that is only partially and incompletely 

buttressed by mutual deterrence.147 That posture makes 

no sense in today’s strategic climate, especially when 

virtually every Russian military leader repeatedly 

proclaims, as did Baluyevsky through 2006, that no 

plan for war with NATO is under consideration, and 

that the main threat to Russia is terrorism, not NATO 

and not America.148 At the same time, that posture 

also is an open sign to Beijing and Tehran of Russian 

suspicions concerning their ambitions and capabilities. 

Still, Russian generals do not raise these issues unless 

told to do so. 
46

Thus it would appear, as it does to Secretary Gates, 

that the real threat is the rise of neighboring states’ short 

and medium-range missile capabilities, e.g., Iran and 

China.149 This is a fine irony inasmuch as Russia was 

instrumental in providing the wherewithal for these 

states’ military development. If Moscow withdrew from 

the INF treaty, that would allow NATO to station INF 

missiles in the Baltic and Poland as well as lead China 

and Iran to step up their production of intermediate 

range missiles as well. Furthermore, it is by no means 

clear that Moscow could regenerate production for 

both intermediate and ICBMs as their plant for such 

production systematically misses production goals. 

Thus withdrawal from the treaty could actually 

further diminish Russian security, not enhance it.150

Yet Moscow dare not admit that the enemy of America 

is also its enemy lest its domestically based foreign and 

defense policy that postulates partnership with China 

and Iran be seen to be inherently contradictory and 

even dangerous.

Russia’s Evolving Threat Assessment.

Under the circumstances, we should not be surprised that Putin’s and Ivanov’s recent threat assessments suggest that Washington and NATO or their 

policies are becoming a growing if not the main threat.151

Similarly, every account of Russia’s forthcoming new 

defense doctrine similarly suggests that America and 

NATO are the main enemies and threats to Russia.152

Putin’s remarks to the Federal Assembly in his annual 

speech on May 10, 2006, presaged his remarks in 

Munich and merit extensive citation for they indicate 

the evolving threat assessment, on the basis of which 

he likely has given his defense and foreign policy team 
47

new strategic guidance towards postulating the source 

of threats to Russia and its interests. 

Putin began this speech by stating that, as has been 

the case since 2001, the terrorist threat is the main one, 

but he then seamlessly linked it to what he perceives 

as a defining characteristic of much American foreign 

policy, i.e., the notion stated above that key American 

elites want to keep Russia tied down and weak. 

The terrorist threat remains very real. Local conflicts 

remain a fertile breeding ground for terrorists, a source 

of their arms and a field upon which they can test their 

strength in practice. These conflicts often arise on ethnic grounds, often with inter-religious conflict thrown 

in, which is artificially fomented and manipulated by 

extremists of all shades. I know that there are those out 

there who would like to see Russia become so mired in 

these problems that it will not be able to resolve its own 

problems and achieve full development.153

Putin then invoked the threat of nuclear proliferation, 

particularly to terrorists. Thus,

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction also 

represents a serious danger. If these weapons were to 

fall into the hands of terrorists, and they pursue this aim, 

the consequences would be simply disastrous. I stress 

that we unambiguously support strengthening the nonproliferation regime, without any exceptions, on the 

basis of international law. We know that strong-arm 

methods rarely achieve the desired result and that their 

consequences can even be more terrible than the original 

threat.154

He then went on to berate Washington for abandoning 

arms control and raising the threat of using nuclear 

weapons against Russia: 

I would like to raise another important issue today. Dis-
48

armament was an important part of international politics 

for decades. Our country made an immense contribution 

to maintaining strategic stability in the world. But with 

the acute threat of international terrorism now on everyone’s minds the key disarmament issues are all but off 

the international agenda, and yet it is too early to speak 

of an end to the arms race. What’s more, the arms race 

has entered a new spiral today with the achievement 

of new levels of technology that raise the danger of the 

emergence of a whole arsenal of so-called destabilizing 

weapons. There are still no clear guarantees that weapons, including nuclear weapons, will not be deployed in 

outer space. There is the potential threat of the creation 

and proliferation of small capacity nuclear charges. Furthermore, the media and expert circles are already discussing plans to use intercontinental ballistic missiles to 

carry non-nuclear warheads. The launch of such a missile could provoke an inappropriate response from one 

of the nuclear powers, could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.155

Finally, he concluded his threat assessment with an 

attack on the anti-Russian thrust of American foreign 

policy:

And, meanwhile, far from everyone in the world has 

abandoned the old bloc mentality and the prejudices inherited from the era of global confrontation despite the 

great changes that have taken place. This is also a great 

hindrance in working together to find suitable responses 

to the common problems we face.156

This kind of threat assessment has several 

critical consequences. First, it closely resembles the 

assessment published by the Chinese government in 

its White Papers of 2004 and 2006 on Defense.157 Thus 

the shared perception of both the location and nature 

of the common threats they face helps cement an antiAmerican Russo-Chinese alliance on a host of issues in 

the contemporary agenda of world politics. Second, the 
49

results of this growing sense of threat from the West 

have not only restored the need for Russia to rearm with 

both conventional and nuclear weapons, they have all 

but undone the hopes for Russo-NATO cooperation 

after 9/11. As of 2003, the General Staff made clear 

its opposition to joint Russian-NATO exercises 

allegedly on the grounds of NATO enlargement and 

the improvement of missiles.158 At the same time, 

both Ivanov and Baluyevsky made clear that if NATO 

remained a military organization, this could force 

Russia to make changes in its overall military doctrine 

and nuclear policies.159 Baluyevsky went even farther 

by stating that “If the anti-terrorist direction of NATO 

continues, the threshold for using nuclear weapons 

will become lower and this will require a change of the 

principle for military planning of the Russian armed 

forces, including a change of military strategy.”160

Since the military had already stated in 1999 that 

circumstances (among them NATO’s Kosovo operation) had led Russia to argue for lowering the threshold for nuclear use and broaden the circumstances 

under which tactical nuclear weapons might be used 

against purely conventional attacks, such remarks 

must be taken quite seriously.161 In fact, the military’s 

enmity to NATO is not due to its policies but rather 

to the fact of its existence. As the Ministry of Defense 

stated in the so called Ivanov doctrine or White Paper 

of October, 2003, 

Russia . . . expects NATO member states to put a complete end to direct and indirect elements of its anti-Russian policy, both from military planning and from the 

political declarations of NATO member states.... Should 

NATO remain a military alliance with its current offensive military doctrine, a fundamental reassessment 

of Russia’s military planning and arms procurement is 
50

needed, including a change in Russia’s nuclear strategy.162

Therefore, it is not surprising that first Moscow 

has tried, and recently with some success, to interest 

Washington in negotiating what would in effect be 

a START III treaty to reduce nuclear weapons on 

both sides.163 Neither should we be surprised that 

Putin and his subordinates see a deteriorating threat 

situation that is drawing ever closer to Russia. Putin, 

in his speech to the Foreign Ministry on June 27, 2006, 

emphasized the increasingly threatening nature of the 

international system, the unilateral American use of 

force and supposedly indiscriminate attacks on Islam, 

and the possibility of proliferation as major threats 

coming closer to Russia. Thus he said that, 

We need to be fully aware that, despite all our efforts, 

the potential for conflict in the world continues to grow. 

After the collapse of the bi-polar world order there exists 

a lot of unpredictability in global development. Perhaps 

this is why we continue to hear talk of an unavoidable 

conflict of civilizations that could become a long-term 

confrontation on the lines of the Cold War. I am convinced that we have reached a point today where the 

entire global security architecture is indeed undergoing 

modernization, and you have probably noticed this for 

yourselves. If we let old views and approaches continue 

to hold sway, the world will be doomed to further futile confrontation. We need to reverse these dangerous 

trends and this requires new ideas and approaches. Russia does not want confrontation of any kind. And we will 

not take part in any kind of “holy alliance.” . . . I must 

say, too, that the causes fuelling the desire of a number 

of countries to acquire weapons of mass destruction and 

carry out other military programs include not just national ambitions but also the overblown importance given to force in international relations that is being foisted 

on us all. In this respect, the stagnation we see today in 
51

the area of disarmament is of particular concern. Russia 

is not responsible for this situation. We support renewed 

dialogue on the main disarmament issues. Above all, we 

propose to our American partners that we launch negotiations to replace the START Treaty, which expires in 

2009.164

Again, Lavrov echoed this position.165 

Arms Control and European Security.

These strategic military issues extend as well into 

the conventional sphere and have direct impact on 

European security. We have already discussed the INF 

treaty above. The foundation stones of European and 

Eurasian security are the series of treaties beginning 

with the Helsinki treaty of 1975, its extension at Moscow 

in 1991, the 1987 Washington INF Treaty, the 1990 CFE 

Treaty, extended in 1999, the Paris and Rome treaties 

between NATO and Russia in 1997 and 2002, and the 

START and SORT treaties from 1991-2002. However, 

as noted above, some, if not all, of these treaties are 

apparently at risk. 

Apart from Russian ambivalence about the INF 

treaty, we see the same thing happening with regard 

to the CFE treaty. Even before Putin suspended it and 

Baluyevsky warned that it might collapse, Ivanov and 

his subordinates said that Russia might withdraw 

from the CFE Treaty or that it might die a natural 

death.166 Russia has claimed that the Baltic States’ 

failure to ratify this treaty makes the Baltic a “gray 

zone” from which potential threats to Russian security 

could come even though they also admit that NATO’s 

token forces there hardly represent a current threat.167

Russia has also raised the question as to whether the 

projected American restructuring of its basing posture 
52

in Europe, moving its forces to new bases in Romania 

and Bulgaria, violates the CFE treaty as well as the 

1997 NATO-Russia agreement on the terms of NATO 

expansion.168

The West’s reply is first that these new U.S. bases 

do not violate either of those accords:

The Russia-NATO pact forbids the development of 

new bases in the territories of newly absorbed NATO 

members. However, the pact has no stipulations concerning the possibility of improving and expanding 

the existing military bases and infrastructures of new 

members, which is what the Pentagon is proposing to 

do. Additionally, the Pact limits the stationing of large 

military forces in new member countries, but Washington intends only to preposition equipment and rotate 

brigade-strength units (3,000 to 5,000 troops) through 

the bases. The planned basing of light forces, rather than 

heavy armor, also strengthens the Pentagon’s argument 

that it is operating within the bounds of the CFE, which 

imposes limitations only on the amount of heavy military hardware and armor a state may possess. Therefore 

Washington has strong grounds to argue that its rebasing proposals are within the bounds of the established 

treaty framework.169

In addition, Western officials argue that at the 

Istanbul 1999 OSCE conference they stated that the 

Baltic States would ratify this treaty when Russia 

withdraws its forces from Moldova and Georgia as 

it promised to do then. Russia has since then refused 

either to withdraw the forces from Moldova or accept 

that it had any legal or political obligation to do so. Thus 

a standoff ensued. Recently, thanks partly to Western 

pressure, Russia agreed with Georgia that it would 

withdraw from its bases there by 2008. But meanwhile 

it refuses to leave Moldova. Indeed, it seeks a 20-year 

lease on a base there to perpetuate its intervention on 
53

behalf of a separatist and visibly criminalized Russian 

faction across the Dniester River.170 Russian officials also 

talk of launching political gambits to formalize Russia’s 

incorporation of Georgia’s breakaway province South 

Ossetia into Russia. 

These actions not only violate Russia’s 1999 

agreement, putting the lie to claims that Russia has no 

juridical obligation to leave Moldova and Georgia, they 

also would shatter the basis of European security as 

outlined in the aforementioned treaties. Incorporation 

of South Ossetia, Abkhazia, or Transnistria by force 

not only invokes Soviet and Tsarist precedents, those 

actions violate the Helsinki and Moscow treaties and 

the Istanbul accords, and shatter the post-Cold War 

accords with NATO. Like Moscow’s 2004 and 2006 

intervention in Ukrainian elections, such actions 

betray Russia’s continuing inability to accept the end 

of empire in Eurasia even though a Russian empire 

there inherently threatens Eurasian and even Russian 

security. 

The efforts to withdraw from the INF and CFE 

treaties are also connected to Russian fears that Western 

military-political pressure will be used to consolidate 

post-Soviet states’ membership in NATO and/or the 

EU or to compel democratizing reforms in Russia or 

elsewhere in the CIS where Moscow supports the 

reigning authoritarians. Since Russia cannot compete 

militarily with the United States, let alone NATO, it 

has openly discussed using its strategic and/or tactical 

(or so-called nonstrategic) nuclear weapons in a first 

strike mode in the event of a threat by either of those 

parties against it or its interests in the CIS.171 And Sergei 

Ivanov wrote in 2006 that Russia regards threats to the 

constitutional order of CIS regimes as the main threat 

to its security.172 But it is hard to see how “the threat of 
54

democracy” or even of revolution in a CIS state is easily 

amenable to military reprisals from Moscow other than 

the use of Russian forces in a power projection and 

counterinsurgency mode. Even so, Moscow has tried 

to assert its unilateral security umbrella over the CIS. 

Indeed, it long ago gratuitously extended its nuclear 

umbrella to the CIS. 

Accordingly, Russian military planners envision all 

kinds of potential military scenarios in Eurasia due to 

NATO’s enlargement that would force Russia to rearm 

or retaliate, if necessary with nuclear weapons. For 

example, in July 2005 Konstantin Sivkov of the General 

Staff’s Center of Military Strategic Studies stated that, 

The Alliance has achieved strategic depth of operations 

in Russia. U.S. tactical aircraft operating from NATO airfields may now reach Moscow, Tula, Kursk, and other 

cities of Central European Russia. This is an important 

factor from a geostrategic point of view. . . . It means that 

there are no more strategic barriers between Russia and 

NATO. What may it lead to? It may lead to escalation of 

border disputes with NATO countries (say because of 

certain territorial claims, or problems with oil production at sea, and fishing matters) into armed conflicts. 

Dangers of this sort exist in the Baltic region (Estonia 

claims the Pyatlov District of the Pskov Region) and in 

North Europe. . . . the situation is such that a local conflict may promptly become international. When it happens, it will be the alliance as such or the United States 

that will be putting forth demands, not the initiator of 

the conflict. Weapons may be used if Russia refuses to 

make concessions—space weapons first and foremost.173

Alternatively, informational weapons that were 

once thought of as science fiction weapons but are 

now usable might be deployed.174 In any case, Russia 

must be prepared for what its sees as the threats to 

overturn the constitutional order in CIS states as its 

biggest threat and those efforts, pace Sivkov, could 
55

then escalate.175 Not surprisingly, Ivanov demands full 

transparency from NATO about its actions and plans 

and raised the issue (or had his subordinates raise the 

issue) of withdrawal for these arms control treaties.176

Contingency planning for these kinds of threats could 

only truly be taken to its logical culmination if Moscow 

frees itself from these two treaties that are pillars of 

arms control and security in Europe, and renounces its 

interest in European security.

However, such an outcome reignites an arms race in 

Europe and around the CIS that, as Putin and Company 

know, Russia cannot afford and which is in nobody’s 

interest.177 Ironically, Russia actually depends for its 

security on the restraints imposed by those treaties 

upon NATO’s members including Washington. 

Moreover, it depends on them for subsidies like those 

through the Nunn-Lugar Act or Comprehensive 

Threat Reduction program to gain control over its 

nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons arsenals. 

Without that funding, the recent visible regeneration 

of the Russian armed forces would have been greatly 

impeded because at least some of those funds would 

have had to go to maintain or destroy decaying 

nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Russia also 

needs Western, and especially American help against 

terrorism emanating from Afghanistan, or Iranian and 

North Korean nuclearization, and is still interested, 

as recent agreements show, in curtailing those states 

or terrorists’ access to these materials.178 Therefore 

these efforts to withdraw from the relevant treaties are 

quite misguided even though Moscow’s legal right to 

withdraw from a treaty is not at issue. But if Moscow 

persists in these gambits to weaken, eviscerate, or even 

leave these treaties, what does that signify concerning 

its goals and what then is the future of European and 

Eurasian security?
56

Therefore, an appropriate American response 

should be to maintain the validity of both the CFE and 

INF treaties, insist upon fulfillment of the former, and 

state U.S. willingness to reaffirm or extend the latter 

which is supposed to expire in 2009. Nobody, least of 

all Russia, benefits from a new arms race in a Europe 

that should be a model of security practices, not a case 

of a model gone bad. And Russia’s announced desire 

to renegotiate the START I Treaty that is to expire in 

2009 was rightly taken up as a new opportunity for 

further reducing the likelihood of nuclear weapons use 

or threats to use them among the two leading nuclear 

states.179

Still, despite the agreement to renegotiate nuclear 

arms reductions, there appears to be a fundamental 

difference in approach to these negotiations between 

Moscow and Washington. Hitherto the Bush 

administration has evaded getting into a negotiation, 

claiming it does not want to return to the Cold War 

relationship where both sides’ nuclear arsenals were the 

defining factor in their relationship. In other words, the 

Bush administration is still chasing the will of the wisp 

of strategic unilateralism in nuclear matters.180 Even if it 

has accepted in principle the idea of negotiating a new 

arms control treaty, it is likely to adhere as far as possible 

to its previous thinking on verification and arms control 

treaties, including thinking of Russia more as a partner 

than as a nuclear enemy. Lavrov’s approach, cited 

above, shows that while the administration is and has 

been prepared to move beyond deterrence with regard 

to Russia, Moscow cannot move beyond its inherited 

anti-Western strategic paradigm that sees America as 

the main enemy. Therefore it can only contemplate 

a deterrence relationship with Washington which 

inherently, protestations of friendship aside, is based 
57

on Schmitt’s concept of the presupposition of enemies. 

Thus unilateralism on one side encounters a posture 

grounded in that presupposition on the other that 

remains frozen in a hostile and deterrence posture. The 

results should not have been difficult to foresee. 

Meanwhile, Russia’s posture on other arms control 

treaties like the INF treaty, is no less dangerous. 

However, Washington’s perceived quest for ever more 

credible options for deterrence, dissuasion, and even 

nuclear warfighting scenarios only stimulates everyone 

else’s insecurities and desire to achieve their own means 

of deterring or dissuading America.181 Doing so would 

also further stimulate the trend toward greater reliance 

on nuclear weapons as warfighting instruments that 

have been in effect at least since 2000, and also possibly 

enhance the attractiveness of such weapons to wouldbe proliferators.182

To say this however, is not to abandon the need 

to put pressure on Russia to fulfill the treaties it has 

signed whether they deal with nuclear arms control or 

conventional weapons and Eurasian security. Indeed, 

such a strategy is all the more necessary for our policy 

toward Russia because just as we seek to achieve our 

immediate defense and security goals by advocating 

democratization and the rule of law—albeit by chasing 

rhetorical abstractions or theological categories 

of good and evil and regime change vis-à-vis Iran 

and North Korea—so must we do so with regard to 

Russia. But we must not do so on the grounds that 

are commonly asserted, i.e., theological and liberal 

political universalism as interpreted by the particular 

administration in power at any given time. Rather, 

whatever our private beliefs might be about the 

justification for such pressure for reform, in political 

terms it is only sustainable on the grounds that the 
58

treaties to which Russia is party explicitly invoke 

these values and processes and thus represent Russia’s 

solemn commitments as well as the constitutional 

foundation of our present world order from which 

Moscow as well as Washington benefit.183 Abandoning 

those treaties therefore undermines world order 

and directly counters both American and Russian 

interests.

The Domestic Basis of Estrangement.

This increasing mutual estrangement grows out of 

both American and Russian domestic trends. Certainly 

the rhetoric, posture, policies, and activities of the 

Bush administration and of its domestic coalition, 

or the spokesmen thereof, reinforce long-standing 

Russian and other perceptions of a rogue American 

power unfettered by concern or respect for its interests 

or international institutions, and threatening both the 

integrity and the vital foundations of the Russian state, 

i.e., its pretensions to great power status. Similarly 

America’s unilateral invasion of Iraq clearly and 

conclusively convinced many Russian policymakers 

that partnership with Washington led nowhere and 

that America was itself a kind of rogue elephant in 

international politics that had to be restrained by 

countervailing power.184

More recently there is an increasing belief that efforts 

to be America’s partner are inherently unavailing 

because of America’s fixed hostile position and that, 

in any case, America is in decline as Lavrov has now 

repeatedly stated.185 The mounting Russian perception 

of increased military threats from America and NATO 

also plays no small role in this litany of grievances 

against Washington and the West.
59

While there is obviously no lack of foreign or 

domestic criticism of the Bush administration’s policies 

or reasons for engaging in that practice, it is equally 

obvious that the administration now is hamstrung and 

isolated, largely due to Iraq and its repercussions. The 

outcome of a policy aiming to leave Washington with 

a free hand to act as it pleases in world affairs is that 

its hands are full, while its energies and legitimacy 

are depleted. This condition applies to U.S. policy in 

dealing either with North Korea, Iran, the Middle East 

in general, or, for that matter, Russia. 

But the same relationship between domestic 

and foreign policy whereby the former profoundly 

conditions the latter in America holds true for Russian 

policy as well. Russian foreign policy grows out of the 

need to validate or legitimate both a revived autocracy 

and the accompanying neo-imperial pretext for it, and 

the mystique attached to the latter. Psychologically, it 

evidently is imperative for the Russian elite not only to 

believe that Russia is always a great power regardless 

of the actual reality, but apparently to internalize 

the belief of Soviet leaders dating back at least to 

Lenin that all world politics revolve around Russia 

and its trajectory.186 Therefore foreign observers like 

Hryhoriy Nemyria, Director of the Kiev based Center 

for European and International Studies, has accurately 

stated that, “A significant part of Putin’s legitimacy lies 

in his ability to control developments in Russia’s near 

abroad.”187 The continuing existence of this and other 

associated convictions discussed below, is inextricably 

connected to the fact that the structure of the Russian 

state increasingly resembles that of late Tsarism with 

some Soviet or contemporary innovations.188

As Russian succession struggles illustrate, the 

recurrence of corruption, subversion, and force 
60

deployed against internal “enemies” is among the 

most important indicators that Russia’s elite refuses 

to be bound by or account to any system of laws or 

of legal-political institutions.189 Western diplomats, 

including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have 

publicly expressed concern that Putin observe the 

terms of the constitution and not succeed himself in 

2008.190 This kind of injunction need not be directed at 

a truly self-confident and legitimate state. In Russia, 

autocracy logically entails empire, an autarchic and 

patrimonial concept of a Russian state that is owned 

by the Tsar, controlled by his servitors, and which can 

only survive by expansion.191 Therefore Nemyria’s 

observations are perfectly consonant with the internal 

logic of the regime.192 Similarly it is equally noteworthy 

that Russia now defines energy security as denoting 

its companies’, i.e., the state’s, access to Western firms 

while restricting Western access to its own firms. While 

Russia’s main weapon is energy, it apparently is toying 

with enlarging its territory at Georgia’s expense by 

fabricating grounds for annexing Abkhazia and South 

Ossetia, if not the Transnistrian Republic that it seized 

from Moldova.193

It logically follows that such a regime will have 

difficulty accepting the conventions of international 

life, including solemn treaties that it finds burdensome. 

Beyond that, just as autocracy means that the autocrat 

is not bound by or answerable to any institution or 

principle at home, it also means that in foreign policy, 

as often happened under the tsars, Russia feels free not 

to be bound by its own prior treaties and agreements.194

As Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment for 

International Peace in Moscow observes, 

It is impossible not to see that Russia’s foreign policy 

is the hostage of Russian internal systemic problems. 
61

Growing authoritarianism, redistribution of property, 

attempts to destroy political alternatives—all these elements result in Moscow’s zig-zagging foreign policy. 

Quasi-democracy and quasi-market go hand in hand 

with Russia’s quasi-partnership with the West. Attempts 

to preserve Russia’s traditional system which strives to 

look modern, are likely to exhaust political pragmatism 

and increase the danger of unpredictability, especially 

when Russia discovers that the raw materials potential 

is more a weakness, than a source of power. The West, 

in turn, will have to decide what its partnership with 

Russia really means—an incentive to modernization or 

international legitimization of its slide towards traditionalism.195

But this point about the “autocratic” nature of Russian 

foreign policy is profoundly true in a more general 

sense. German analyst Heinrich Vogel has formulated 

this point in a deeper way, namely,

Continuity of the kind [of leadership] described above 

also implies increasing volatility as the leadership has 

full sway in shifting political priorities in the agenda of 

foreign relations. Freed from any substantive balances 

or restrictions at home, Russian foreign policy is open in 

more than one direction.196

This insight has immediate ramifications in East-West 

relations. For example, Vogel also observes that, 

The partnership between [the] EU and Russia is shaped 

by the perceptions and ambitions of political elites on 

both sides who do not see eye to eye. Geopolitical analysts in Russia now even claim a chance to recoup political territory which was lost over the last 10 years. Any 

dialogue about a “common strategic vision” will therefore be particularly difficult if the leadership of one side, 

unconstrained by institutional balances, is hedging unclear or outright incompatible ideas about the rules of 

cooperation and competition in Europe. This is the case 
62

with Russian policies of “liberal imperialism”: and the 

prevailing hegemonial approach of coaching and defending autocratic regimes in Belarus, Moldova, and Central 

Asia against any outside criticism. The unconditional 

support for antidemocratic practices and trends in Russia’s near abroad dovetails with a distinct trend toward 

authoritarian regime justified by the Russian elites of all 

political shades as the “Russian way to democracy.”197

Russia and the Policy of the Free Hand. 

There can be little doubt that Russia pursues a 

policy of the free hand above all. In 2005 Lavrov 

announced that Russia refuses to be bound by foreign 

standards or conform to them.198 Lavrov also insists 

that the West respect Russian interests in the CIS but 

makes no reciprocal statement of respect for the treaties 

Russia has signed and violated.199 These statements 

and actions that comprise the actuality of Russian 

foreign policy confirm Trenin’s warnings that Russia 

really does not want to belong to a larger institutional 

grouping and most of all wants a free hand in world 

politics, especially, but not only, in the CIS.

Russian observers fully understand that the demand 

for a free hand in world politics, and for a closed antidemocratic bloc in the CIS, is directly traceable to 

Russia’s domestic politics. As Dmitry Furman wrote in 

2006, 

Our system’s democratic camouflage demands partnership with the West. However, the authoritarian, managed content of our system dictates the exact opposite. 

A safety zone for our system means a zone of political systems of the same kind of managed democracies 

that we are actively supporting in the CIS and, insofar 

as our forces allow, everywhere—in Serbia, the Middle 

East, even Venezuela. The Soviet Union’s policy might 

seem quixotic. Why spend so much money in the name 

of “proletarian internationalism”? But if you do not ex-
63

pand, you contract. The same could be said about our 

policy toward Lukashenko’s regime [in Belarus-author]. 

The system of managed democracy in Russia will perish 

if Russia is besieged on all sides by unmanaged democracies. Ultimately it will once again be a matter of survival. The West cannot fail to support the establishment 

of systems of the same type as the West’s, which means 

expanding its safety zone. We cannot fail to oppose this. 

Therefore the struggle inside the CIS countries is beginning to resemble the Russian-Western conflict.200

We should note here the explicit statement that 

spread of democracy in and of itself is a mortal 

threat to Russia’s rulers. Hence the demand for a 

free hand. But the demand for a free hand means 

an unconstrained foreign policy based wholly on 

power and the interests of the state conceived of in 

the most atavistic and unbridled form of realpolitik, 

another example of Schmitt’s presupposition of being 

encircled by enemies.201 The only limit to the exercise 

of that autocratic power, as in tsarist times, is the 

conscience of the tsar, and in Putin’s case, that is a 

weak reed. Unfortunately, Lavrov and Furman do not 

speak for themselves alone. Rather, they articulate a 

consolidated elite mentality that sees Russia as an 

independent, revisionist, even autarchic actor in world 

affairs which merits recognition as a self-sufficient 

pole, even empire, in Eurasia. Other analysts too have 

discerned the ideational elements of this stance in 

the peculiar but deep-rooted conviction that Russia 

is a separate civilization, neither wholly Western nor 

Eastern, and therefore it merits a special role in Eurasia 

as a great power. John Loewenhardt reported in 2000 

that despite the fact that this status as a leading pole in 

global affairs was then understood to be increasingly 

more rhetorical than real, 
64

In one of our interviews a former member of the Presidential Administration said that the perception of Russia as a great power “is a basic element of the self-perception of high bureaucrats.” If a political leader were to 

behave as if Russia was no longer a great power, there 

would be “a deeply rooted emotional reaction in the 

population.”202

Six years of Putin’s invigoration of authoritarianism 

and of Russia’s imperial mystique have inevitably 

strengthened those tendencies, making them even 

more prominent in officialdom’s mentality and selfreinforcing public propaganda.203 And this ideologicalpolitical reinforcement has also created the basis for the 

perception of a perpetual Western or at least American 

ideological and domestic threat to Russia’s integrity 

and form of government which are inextricably linked 

in both the elite and popular mind.204 Since Russia 

still cannot accept its reduced status, its militarypolitical elite still harbors unwarranted and unjustified 

assessments of Russia’s status in world affairs and 

equally unjustified demands for tangible benefits. For 

example, a 2005 article in the General Staff journal, 

Military Thought, says that, “Russia’s geopolitical 

situation enables it not only to effectively develop 

its own national economy but also to form a kind of 

geoeconomic region comprising the world’s largest 

nations—Japan, China, India, and other countries.”205

This concept also insists that none of the other 

former Soviet republics are genuinely capable of being 

self-standing truly independent states.206 Certainly 

numerous statements by Russian ambassadors to former Soviet satellites or CIS governments conclusively 

show that they do not really accept the full sovereignty 

and independence of the states to which they are 

accredited.207
65

Logically, then, any bloc including those states 

is a strategic as well as ideological threat to Russia 

and a stalking horse for NATO and the EU and their 

supposedly openly anti-Russian policy.208 The threat is 

not just to Russia’s great power and imperial ambitions, 

but to its existence not only as autocracy but even as 

a state. Hence the flourishing of democratic states on 

its frontier is a constant threat to the survival of the 

state in the only form that its servitors can recognize 

it, i.e., an autocracy. This is one reason why Russian 

policymakers have evinced such panic and hysteria 

(not too strong a set of words) when confronted 

by “color revolutions” which they cannot believe 

originated in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan due 

to their internal political developments. Hence much 

of Russian foreign policy has been directed toward 

preventing such revolutions, e.g., Russian intervention 

in Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election and its policies 

toward Belarus and Georgia.209

The idea that these states on Russia’s border or in 

its vicinity might choose NATO and the EU of their 

own volition or feel genuinely threatened by Russia’s 

heavy-handed and unsubtle policies is never even 

considered. Not surprisingly, Russian spokesmen decry 

the formation of any such blocs and state that without 

Russia they will inevitably fail. Alternatively, they 

look forward to the reunification of the former Soviet 

republics of the CIS under Moscow’s auspices.210

But what they always insist upon, i.e., their bottom 

line, is a unique and superior status for Russia above 

any kind of international political constraint. Thus 

Sergei Ivanov, Chizhov, and Yastrzhembskiy have 

publicly stated that Russia is economically, politically, 

and militarily self-sufficient and therefore really does 

not need partners.211 Chizhov, speaking about Europe, 

argued further that, 
66

Russia has full rights and counts on participation in European affairs as an equal partner. It should not be isolated from the remaining part of the continent by new 

dividing lines and should not be the object of “civilizing 

influence” on the part of other countries or their unions 

but should be equal among equals.212

Similarly, in 2002 the publisher Vitaly Tretiakov 

wrote an article for the journal of the Ministry of 

Foreign Affairs where he stated that, 

We want to be regarded and treated as an ally of the West 

in all spheres, including export of energy and, probably, 

in the production of armaments. Otherwise, relations 

will follow a different pattern. This should apply to the 

security sphere. We also expect to be treated as equals in 

the sphere of economy and in cases of extending aid to 

us in the way this is done among allies.213

In other words, treat us as equals or we will make 

endless trouble for you, while at the same time we insist 

upon a free hand for ourselves. Not surprisingly, this 

kind of policy amounts to extortion, or in other words 

to a protection racket. Close examination of much of 

Russian foreign policy reveals that such blackmail or 

intimidation tactics feature prominently in Russia’s 

diplomacy toward both the weaker states of the CIS 

and toward Europe and the United States. 

However, great power status cannot be conferred 

exclusively by virtue of unilateral assertion or by the 

threat of raising a ruckus if your demands go unheeded. 

To be recognized as a great or superpower—and many 

Russian analysts and political figures now argue that 

Russia is an energy superpower—a state must be able 

to project its power effectively into neighboring regions 

to create a legitimate and/or durable order and be 
67

recognized as such by its interlocutors. Inasmuch as 

all projections of power abroad are “injections” into 

the world order and efforts to reshape it, we can see 

the fundamentally revisionist thrust of Russia’s project 

from its activities in the near abroad or efforts to 

bully European states with regard to energy.214 It also 

habitually uses the energy revenues accruing to it to buy 

politicians and subvert regimes in its neighborhood.215

Russia’s attitude of imperial unilateralism might 

be a “post-imperial” mentality rather than an imperial 

one as Trenin argues.216 But this attitude’s practical 

implications as seen in ongoing demands for bases 

throughout the CIS; obstruction in CIS frozen conflicts; 

and the energy crises with Ukraine, Georgia, and 

Belarus in 2006-07, are unmistakably imperial in 

consequence and reflect a belief that Russia is an 

empire sufficient unto itself and thus above all of 

the other rules of international life; precisely what it 

attacks Washington for doing.217 Certainly, Russian 

scholars know full well that Russia’s elites have long 

continued to see the Russian state in imperial terms. 

As Alexei Malashenko observed in 2000, Russia’s 

war in Chechnya is logical only if Russia continues 

to regard itself as an empire.218 More recently Russian 

political scientist Egor Kholmogorov has observed that 

“‘Empire’ is the main category of any strategic political 

analysis in the Russian language. Whenever we start 

to ponder a full-scale, long-term construction of the 

Russian state, we begin to think of empire and in terms 

of empire. Russians are inherently imperialists.”219

If Russia is such an empire, then it becomes clear 

why EU or NATO membership becomes a threat to 

Russian sovereignty. For as Deputy Foreign Minister 

Ivan Ivanov stated in 1999, 
68

Our country is not in need of affiliation with the EU. 

This would entail loss of its unique Euro-Asian specifics, 

the role of the center of attraction of the re-integration 

of the CIS, independence in foreign economic and defense policies, and complete restructuring (once more) 

of all Russian statehood based on the requirements of 

the European Union. Finally great powers (and it is too 

soon to abandon calling ourselves such) do not dissolve 

in international unions—they create them around themselves.220

Not only does he here anticipate Trenin’s 

observations about a solar system around Russia, 

Ivanov also listed as a reason for not joining the EU 

the idea that empire preceded independence. Here 

he also implied or suggested the deeply rooted belief 

among Russian elites that if Russia is not an empire, 

it is not a state. But the quest for great power and 

empire is the fetish invoked by Russian statesman 

throughout the ages to ward off the nightmare of 

being marginalized and no longer being a great 

power. This nightmare haunts the imagination of 

Russia’s political elites and undoubtedly is one of the 

most primordial psychological and cognitive drivers 

of Russian foreign policy, even if it postulates only 

two possible outcomes for Russia—great or even 

superpower status, or oblivion and marginalization.221

Indeed, in pursuing this mirage of being a great power 

which can act unconstrained in world affairs, Putin has 

sought to copy the Bush administration’s doctrine of 

preemption or preventive war to justify its unlimited 

right to military intervention in the CIS with rather less 

justification than did President Bush, for there have 

been no foreign based attacks upon Russia.222
69

TOWARD AN AMERICAN RESPONSE: 

OVERCOMING WESTERN INTERNAL 

DIVISIONS

Notwithstanding these problems with Russia, it 

must be engaged, not ignored. Given the preoccupation 

with Iraq, it is by no means clear if our political class 

is paying sufficient attention to Russia. That the 

U.S. Government keeps being surprised by Putin 

is also a sign of insufficient attention to Russian 

issues or understanding of what is involved in them. 

Nevertheless as a recent study from the Congressional 

Research Office (CRO) observed, 

Yet developments in Russia are still important to the 

United States. Russia remains a nuclear superpower. It 

will play a major role in determining the national security environment in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. 

Russia has an important role in the future of arms control, nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, 

and the fight against terrorism. Such issues as the war 

on terrorism, the future of NATO, and the U.S. role in 

the world will all be affected by developments in Russia. Also, although Russia’s economy is distressed, it is 

recovering and potentially an important trading partner.223

Similar statements were also presented above, e.g., 

Slocombe’s testimony in 1995 and the observations 

by Andrew Michta of the Marshall Center concerning 

regional security.224 It should be noted that this balanced 

account by the CRO does not imply, as do many other 

statements on why Russia is important, that America’s 

need for Russian support on these issues outweighs 

Russia’s need for American support on these and 

many other issues. An essential requirement in getting 

Russia right, therefore, is a balance between what both 
70

sides need from the other and can reasonably expect of 

the other side.

For this reason, a policy that merely lectures Russia 

without credible counteractions to offensive (in both 

senses of the word) Russian policies or actions that 

advance American interests has no value. If U.S. policy 

is to advance towards the goals of defending U.S. 

security and then promoting a better world order, it 

must take account of the powers that be, not those that 

ought to be in a perfect world. Thus a credible Russia 

policy must aim to overcome these defects in Russian 

policy, but to do so, it must begin (but not end) by 

realizing where Russia currently is and sees itself.225

Even bearing this admonition in mind, an intelligent 

policy towards Russia cannot let Moscow’s objections 

deter American actions in support of the national 

interest where those objections undermine our ability 

to reach those interests. This should be the case even 

though we might have to pay a higher price for doing so. 

But intelligent policymaking towards Russia requires a 

fine judgment of what interests can or must be secured, 

at what costs, and finally unremitting attention to that 

end. It requires a deeper assessment of Russian realities 

and trends than the habitual American tendency (that 

began long before this administration) of indulging in 

the idea that personal relationships with the Russian 

leader are either substitutes for or the purpose of U.S. 

policy towards Moscow. 

Acknowledging Russian realities does not mean 

giving Moscow a veto on our policies or overlooking 

the intrinsicly self-seeking and opportunistic nature of 

the Russian regime that is structurally, not personally, 

determined. There are few “imagined” misdeeds in the 

record of the Putin government for which it is being 

attacked abroad. The Putin’s regime’s record is all too 
71

transparent in that regard. Rather, there are all too 

many real deeds that deserve consistent international 

censure. Instead, acknowledging Russian realities 

means that our calculation of interest and of the costs 

we can pay to reach them must be better than has 

hitherto been the case because on all too many issues, 

particularly those connected with the regression from 

democratization, we have given Russia a pass. 

Thus a sound American policy must also mean that 

Moscow must be made to acknowledge other realities 

besides its own self-interest. We must realize, and 

do so despite the critics at home, that Moscow needs 

American support far more than Washington needs 

its support. Second, to the degree that U.S. power is 

limited by other states’ interests, so must Russian power 

be limited accordingly. U.S. policy must see to it that 

Russia does not get a free hand to act as it pleases in 

world affairs or be allowed simply to make trouble so 

that its status or importance will then grow. Accepting 

Russia’s demands for a free hand, either actively or 

tacitly, or giving it a free hand, especially in the CIS, 

only leads to greater autocratic behavior at home and 

belligerence abroad. For example, precisely because 

it seeks a free hand in Eurasia and was not countered 

by effective action, it is now threatening to leave the 

CFE treaty and thus be free to do what it wants with 

its armed forces in Eurasia, thereby achieving a unique 

status among every other signatory of that treaty. 

While Russia cannot be ignored in American 

policymaking on the issues listed above, its negative 

impact can and should be countered and reduced. This 

applies equally to Russia’s domestic policies. Indeed, 

the strategy outlined below aims at integrating Russia 

over time into the Eurasian constitutional and political 

order and treaties that it has signed which govern both 
72

domestic and foreign policy practices. In other words, 

our strategy must aim at integrating Russia into a world 

order that it has voluntarily accepted, and gradually 

eroding the possibilities for it to realize a free hand 

abroad. To the extent that we succeed in doing so, 

Russian governments will also then not be able to act 

with a totally free hand at home. Rather, they will be 

bound by the treaties and conventions to which they 

are a party. Over time, only that kind of policy will 

work to counter the authoritarian impulses that are so 

deeply rooted in Russian politics and culture. It must 

be realized that this is a patient, long-term policy, not 

one that seeks immediate gratification or is motivated 

by evangelical and theological beliefs about the 

superiority of democracy masquerading as certainties. 

And it also means that U.S. policies must be governed 

and thus restrained by the same constitutional order 

whose validity we seek to uphold and extend.

To achieve those goals, however, we must first dispel 

several myths and obstacles that obstruct coherent U.S. 

and Western policymaking and then take appropriate 

policy actions. The first obstacle is the widely accepted 

myth that we or the West as a whole have little or 

no leverage upon Russian policy and therefore must 

adjust to it or tolerate it silently.226 This, of course, is a 

highly self-serving tactic when stated by Russians who 

love to insist that the United States or the West cannot 

sway their policies, and that foreign motives towards 

Russia are invariably hostile and self-serving. Or else 

they argue that such criticism is pushing to a return 

of the Cold War.227 In the West, this precept amounts 

to a self-denying ordnance that paralyzes efforts to 

advance Western political objectives when it has the 

stronger hand in every dimension of international 

power. Moreover, obtaining such a condition of 
73

Western paralysis or admission of defeat is actually the 

goal of all of the bad behavior displayed by Moscow 

in the hope that foreigners will assume nothing can be 

done. Therefore, the Russian media is all too happy to 

report frequently that the West “accepts” the nature of 

Russia’s “special democracy.”228 Indeed, at one point 

Lavrov even asserted that after a Putin-Bush summit 

meeting in 2004 “no concern was sounded” about the 

lack of democracy in Russia by the American side.229

But when uttered in the West, this observation 

represents a bizarre failure of applied political 

intelligence. We need not argue that American or 

Western power is unlimited or that its authority, 

legitimacy, and virtue are absolute—neither of which 

proposition is true—to realize that the strongest power 

in the world and the strongest alliance in the world do 

not lack the resources with which to influence Russian 

policy and that Russia has frequently adjusted to meet 

firm American policies. After all, George Kennan’s 

containment strategy was just such a strategy that 

sought to compel an eventual “mellowing” of Soviet 

domestic and foreign behavior by applying political and 

other external pressures abroad. Similarly, the judicious 

application of the total weight of the instruments of 

power available to the West in world politics would 

surely frustrate or at least blunt the imperial drive and 

the restoration of autocracy that underlies so much 

of today’s Russian foreign policy and force domestic 

changes as a result. As Vogel writes, 

This logic of “mutually assured dependency” (the political dimension of interdependence) implies a world of 

rational choices. In this world, the structural deficiencies 

of the Russian economy and its integration and interdependence with the international community restrict 

Moscow’s ability to be uncooperative or engage in spoilsport behavior in international crisis management.230
74

Arguing that we have no leverage is not only bizarrely 

misguided but also reduces the Western pursuit of a 

viable Russian policy to incoherence.

But beyond realizing that we have leverage 

and the right, if not the duty, to use it, both on our 

own and in tandem with our allies, to advance our 

interests, we need to overcome the second obstacle to 

a sound Russia policy. Namely, we must devise and 

implement a coherent strategy, first of all within our 

own government, and then together with our allies in 

order to deploy that leverage to its most efficacious 

use. This strategy must be implemented in regard to 

key issues: Iran; the Middle East; the Western presence 

in the CIS; the sanctity of treaties signed by Russia; 

energy; arms control; and Korea; to name only a few. 

Doing so requires, first, that we overcome the fact that 

on numerous key issues, including apparently policies 

toward Russia, and in regard to at least some of these 

aforementioned issues, our policy process has been and 

is still broken. Any attentive reader of the newspapers 

can quickly discern that there exist major divisions 

among the players in Washington that inhibit unified 

and coherent policy formulation and implementation.231

Until and unless we can overcome those problems, any 

approaches to our European and other allies regarding 

these issues will be compromised from the start. Of 

course, the EU has to overcome its own incoherence 

and internal divisions, but lectures from Washington 

on that particular subject can only go so far. The EU’s 

members themselves have to come to a consensus on 

what they see as their future demands upon Russia 

and Russia’s role in Eurasia for their own sake, not just 

ours. And it is now very clear to the EU that it must 

achieve its own internal consensus vis-à-vis its Russian 

agenda.232
75

There is no doubt that divisions within the topmost 

echelons of the U.S. policy process exist on whether or 

not to press Russia systematically on the issues of dispute 

in our common agenda, not least democratization.233

Second, U.S. policy toward Russia as it is now carried 

out suffers from several shortcomings that obstruct 

realization either of strategic or democratic aims. 

The first problem is the false dichotomy that has 

existed among many commentators and in many 

administrations, including this one, that in order to 

achieve strategic goals, e.g., Iranian or North Korean 

nonproliferation, we have to soft pedal or even sacrifice 

democracy promotion, or vice versa. It is very clear that 

the current administration has opted for a relationship 

with Moscow that emphasizes strategic goals over 

democratization, for all its ringing invocation of 

universal democratic values.234 And the results are 

hardly worth the neglect of Russian democratic issues 

or the effort invested in achieving coordination with 

Russia at the expense of those democratic issues. In 

fact, Michael McFaul’s assessment of U.S. democracy 

promotion policy towards Russia even calls it 

“anemic.”235

But aligned to that false dichotomy between 

promoting security objectives and democracy are 

procedural errors that impede realizing both strategic 

and democratic goals. As Dov Lynch of the European 

Union’s Institute for Security Studies observes, 

U.S. policy toward Russia has been heavily presidential. 

This has meant that only decisions agreed at the highest 

level were recognized as being important by Moscow. 

This did allow the White House to “use” Secretary Powell—in the words of one U.S. official—as a “bad cop” on 

a number of occasions in 2004, but it did not always provide for the best result. As developments inside Russia 

and in Russian foreign policy became more worrying, 
76

the U.S. administration faced the difficulty of seeking to 

revise the policy in some areas while maintaining others, all the while avoiding the image of a radical shift 

in relations. The appointment of Condoleezza Rice as 

Secretary of State in 2005 led to a discreet reassessment 

of U.S. policy. The priorities remain firm on counterproliferation and nonproliferation. However, the spread of 

democracy in Russia’s neighborhood has risen to the 

forefront, and the Administration has become more vocal in expressing its concerns about democracy and the 

rule of law inside Russia. Still, U.S. policy remains largely strategically-driven and its thrust is still minimalist in 

terms of seeking Russia’s transformation. Russia matters 

for the United States less for itself and more in terms of 

how it can affect U.S. interests in other policy areas.236

Lynch’s assessment subsumes within it as well the 

unwarranted emphasis on a personal relationship with 

Putin. As a result of the policy described by Lynch on 

both sides, there is little governmental implementation 

of agreements or progress on issues while the 

relationship stays focused on personalities rather than 

programs. This fact, unfortunately extends a wellestablished tradition, but also makes it harder for the 

Russian government to reform itself or ensure policy 

coordination and fulfillment when it does concur with 

the United States.

Therefore it is essential that the Bush administration, 

or failing that, its successor, undertake policy actions 

that will compel both our government and the Russian 

government to interact with each other on the basis of 

ongoing and constant mutual dialogue. Specifically, 

the administration or its successor should propose 

the recreation of a contemporary analogue of the 

Gore-Chernomyrdin commission that operated under 

President Clinton. As former Ambassador to Russia 

James Collins observes, doing so would obligate senior 
77

officials across a wide range of bureaucracies (not just 

the Pentagon and State Departments) to carry out 

serious projects that needed to be done. Second, this 

commission did and could again empower different 

ministry-department relationships that would force 

both the Russian and American bureaucracies to deal 

with each other on an intimate and permanent basis 

with a view to achieving real and constructive results.237

By having such a permanent structure in place, both 

governments would have to talk to each other more 

often, more frankly, across many venues, and at a 

lower level that could actually achieve positive actions. 

Otherwise we will have the same kind of bureaucratic 

drift that has characterized both sides’ policies for too 

long and in the American case helped contribute to the 

flaws in our policy that are outlined above.

A third case in which our policy toward Russia is 

in error is the absence of any sign of a truly coherent 

energy policy designed to reduce our or our allies’ 

dependence upon Russian supplies and potential 

blackmail. As Putin has gone on one successful 

offensive after another in 2006-07 to lock up Eurasian 

energy reserves and access, the EU has been divided, 

timorous, and incoherent, and Washington has always 

been too late in replying or in fashioning attractive 

counteroptions for interested parties. And while the 

EU wants to negotiate a deal with Moscow formalizing 

the bilateral energy relationship with Russia while it 

simultaneously seeks other sources of energy, it is very 

unclear if not unlikely that Moscow can currently be 

forced to accept its own agreements or refrain from 

trying to penetrate European economies and thus 

governments as it has sought to do throughout Eastern 

Europe and the CIS.238 Certainly Moscow has made it 

abundantly clear that it will not accept the EU’s energy 
78

charter anytime soon.239 Since energy is Moscow’s 

main weapon in its current foreign policy, this absence 

of a strategy or of a policy puts us and our allies at 

a grievous political disadvantage and also makes it 

more difficult to help CIS members who are being 

blackmailed in various ways by Russia on this point or 

being threatened by Russia with unrelieved economic 

warfare and even Cold War. 

This point is particularly urgent when we realize 

that due to the collapse of the Orange Revolution, 

Ukraine is approaching either a state of ungovernability 

or of enduring political stalemate which could allow 

Moscow to manipulate both the energy card and all the 

other resources of which its disposes in the Ukraine to 

destabilize that region or obstruct its democratization 

and Westernization. This also means that Ukraine’s 

energy situation is one that at present makes it 

perpetually vulnerable.240 Belarus too succumbed in 

early 2007 to Russian pressure and is now frantically 

seeking to diversify its sources. Other CIS states 

escaped this threat only because Iran or Azerbaijan 

provided them with energy. 

Energy security is not just a question of supplying 

Europe or Asia, or from Russia’s standpoint of ensuring 

its ability to meet foreign and domestic demand at a fair 

market price. Rather, it entails the basic security and 

opportunity for progress of the former Soviet states 

whether in Ukraine or in Central Asia.241 While it is in 

these states’ interests, and Russia’s, that their energy 

relationships be marketized rather than subsidized, 

there is little doubt that Moscow’s policies have been 

aimed at political results first, and Russia still charges 

differential prices to its customers in line with its 

political prerogatives.

Fourth, there are major divisions within the 

administration on how to deal with major proliferation 
79

issues like Korea which have led us to outsource our 

Northeast Asian policy to Beijing, which, in turn, allied 

increasingly with Moscow, aims to supplant American 

influence there, if not elsewhere.242 Fifth, on Iran, it is 

unclear how far we are prepared to go to stop Iranian 

proliferation, and it certainly is even more unclear 

how far our European allies will go toward the same 

objective. Indeed, numerous commentators and the 

former Foreign Minister of Great Britain Jack Straw 

have said that European participation in a war with 

Iran over its nuclear threat is “inconceivable.” But it 

is quite likely that without the threat of robust action, 

Iran will not acceded to demands to stop enrichment 

or its overall military nuclear program. Nor does 

the European response to the Lebanon crisis suggest 

any interest in playing a truly robust role in bringing 

peace to the Middle East either in part or in whole by 

disarming Hezbollah which is using Russian weapons 

supplied by Iran and Syria who bought them from 

Moscow.243

Certainly it is clear from the crisis generated by 

Hezbollah’s unprovoked attacks on Israel in July 2006 

that Moscow is not prepared to restrain Iran or its 

proxies. Indeed, even though the Foreign Ministers 

negotiating with Iran were finally driven by Tehran’s 

dilatory tactics to agree to bring its nuclear program to 

the Security Council with a threat of sanctions, Lavrov 

has firmly and consistently opposed any effort to 

impose sanctions on Russia’s arms trade with Iran.244

In addition, there have been leaks suggesting that 

despite tough rhetoric our officials inwardly accept the 

fact that at the end of the day, Iran will have a usable 

nuclear weapon.245 While much of this is due to the 

consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it also is the 

case that both Moscow and Beijing resolutely oppose 
80

doing anything that will injure Iranian interests or 

apparently impel Tehran (or Pyongyang, too) to stop 

building nuclear weapons even if they now recognize 

that Iran’s nuclear program has military purposes that 

can threaten them.246 If anything, they have aided Iran’s, 

Pakistan’s, and North Korea’s quest for nuclear energy 

and for conventional weapons, including missiles, and 

deterrence capabilities against the United States.247

Finally, there are major divisions within the 

administration even now on how to proceed to deal 

with the challenges facing us in Central Asia which 

are posed by both domestic conditions favoring 

dictatorship and foreign threats, not the least of which 

is the Russo-Chinese alliance against reform, and to 

suppress the foreign policy independence of those 

states.248 Furthermore, due to our own dilatoriness and 

overextension, Russia is gaining the upper hand in its 

efforts to marginalize American influence there, too.249

Until and unless those and other such differences 

among policymakers are overcome, no coherent Russian policy is possible, let alone imaginable. But overcoming our own internal divisions on these issues is only 

the beginning of wisdom. For any approach to Russia 

to succeed, it must not be merely a unilateral one, but 

rather one shared by and with our European allies on 

the basis of genuine consultation and consensus. And 

it must be attuned to both Russia’s domestic and its 

foreign policy behavior which are mutually reinforcing. 

Despite unity with the EU on Iran to date, it is by no 

means clear if the Transatlantic Alliance has achieved 

a truly significant recovery since the invasion of Iraq in 

2003 which shattered both the Transatlantic Alliance 

and any hope of a unified European common foreign 

and security policy. Thus after having edited another 

volume in the seemingly endless series of publications 
81

examining the troubled Transatlantic Alliance, Marcin 

Zaborowski concludes that,

It is clear that the greater congruence of policies between 

both sides of the Atlantic was not followed by the convergence of principles and ideologies. Most importantly, 

the EU and the United States continue to have fundamentally different views on the role and importance of 

international institutions and agreements. The legacy of 

this disagreement is not just ideological, but it affects 

transatlantic cooperation in some specific policy fields, 

most prominent in the Middle East.250

These same observations may be invoked 

concerning Western policy toward Russia for even 

where assessments of Russian developments converge, 

policy recommendations and outcomes currently 

diverge. Even if there is a unified American position, 

if it is not coordinated with and implemented by our 

European allies and Japan in the Far East, it will fail to 

register with full force in Moscow whether it is about 

human rights, the frozen conflicts in the CIS, Central 

Asia, or energy. So beyond the reestablishment of our 

own internal policy coherence, there must be close 

coordination and a united course of action with our 

allies regarding an agenda of East-West negotiation. 

As Lynch writes, 

Transatlantic coordination is crucial for ensuring that 

Russia remains a positive player on the world stage, an 

inclusive player in its neighborhood, and a state led by 

the rule of law. Whether the agenda is thick or thin, internal developments cannot be divorced for long from 

external behavior. What happens inside Russia impacts 

on the nature of Russia as a partner for the EU and the 

US. At a time when Europe and America have less leverage over Russia’s domestic development than they had, 

transatlantic cooperation becomes all the more vital. In 
82

this the EU and US should build on areas of overlap in 

their agendas, such as regional security questions in the 

Balkans and the Middle East, ensuring positive momentum in the former Soviet Union, and raising concerns 

with domestic developments in Russia.251

This also means that on occasion Washington will 

have to defer to the collective wisdom of its partners 

and even to China and Russia’s arguments. But it also 

means that the United States needs to stimulate NATO 

and the EU to do better than they have in coming 

up with coherent policies towards Russia as regards 

Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, energy issues, Central 

Asia, and democratization; for today the prevailing 

trend is towards incoherence and disunity within both 

organizations on these agenda issues.252

Strengthening Nonproliferation.

It should now be clear that we cannot achieve our 

basic and primary strategic aim of strengthening the 

nonproliferation regime by tying Iranian and North 

Korean nonproliferation to externally imposed regime 

change or the threat of it by unilateral American 

military action. Our power and understanding of what 

needs to be done over both the short and long term in 

such cases are both limited thanks to our experience 

in Iraq. Moreover any such efforts, in the absence of 

forceful provocation by those or other states, will enjoy 

no support anywhere, further overtaxing the resource 

base for American power and limiting our capacity to 

preside over any kind of security order in the relevant 

region.

If our fundamental objective is nonproliferation, 

our resources should be focused on achieving that goal 

since the effort to link it to coerced regime change in 
83

Northeast Asia or the Gulf enjoys no support by the 

other negotiators and cannot be reached by any means 

available to the United States now or anytime soon. 

Objectionable as these regimes are, we have neither 

the means nor the legitimate international authority to 

change them by force, nor the wisdom to know how to 

achieve a legitimate order in these areas afterward by 

unilateral action.

Furthermore, by decoupling this demand from our 

demands for nonproliferation, we actually gain more 

flexibility to send a robust message to Iran, Syria, and 

North Korea should they then proliferate because they 

no longer have even the semblance of a justification for 

their position. Even if the invasion of Iraq may have 

given them a supposed justification for proliferation 

and sponsorship of terrorism, the fact that they will 

subsequently be held to account on the basis of existing 

international agreements to which they are parties to 

desist from proliferation and sponsorship of terrorism 

creates a sufficient justification for the use of pressure 

or the threat of force and releases us from the position 

of making threats that cannot currently be carried out. 

If we can change the international behavior of these 

regimes, by political means preferably but by force if 

absolutely necessary, then their current foreign and 

domestic policy behavior will gradually be rendered 

increasingly dysfunctional, forcing change upon them 

from within, not from outside. To the extent that they 

cannot then mobilize domestic or foreign support 

against the Bush administration, they will be compelled 

by force of circumstances and superior Western power 

to adjust their behavior over time. Admittedly, this is a 

slow process, but Iraq shows what happens when we 

seek instant , forceful, and externally imposed regime 

change. That lesson should induce behavior change in 
84

Washington first before we seek to persuade other key 

interlocutors of the soundness of our position. 

Therefore, to effectuate change within Russia and 

other challenging states, we must change the external 

environment within which they operate by engaging 

them politically. This engagement also includes 

holding Russia to account for treaties and conventions 

that it has violated. Indeed, careful examination will 

show that there is no other realistic alternative. Despite 

all the inherent traps and snares in a dialogue between 

Pyongyang and Washington or between Tehran and 

Washington, we cannot compel their denuclearization 

by our refusal to talk to them; quite the opposite. 

Here we cannot hide behind multilateralism because 

all our partners except possibly Japan have urged 

Washington to engage in precisely such a dialogue 

with North Korea. Avoiding such dialogues and 

clinging to ringing but empty rhetorical positions only 

deepens our internal divisions and disputes with our 

negotiating partners and allies while failing to achieve 

denuclearization. If anything, the threat of coerced 

regime change powerfully accelerates these countries’ 

nuclear programs which enjoy tacit or covert support 

from Moscow and Beijing precisely because they 

are joined in rejecting any further unilateralism by 

Washington, a position in which they are joined by 

both South Korea and our European allies.253 While it 

would be satisfying to punish these states, e.g., Iran 

for its actions in provoking a war in Lebanon, our 

capabilities are circumscribed and limited.

Consequently we need a strategy that will force 

these proliferators to change their behavior over 

time by mitigating their and our security dilemmas 

and rendering their current behavior even more 

dysfunctional than is presently the case until it is no 

longer feasible to carry it out. Furthermore, such an 
85

engagement will work over time to dissolve the bonds 

linking China, Russia, and in the Korean case, South 

Korea because neither Moscow, nor Pyongyang, nor 

Seoul wants China to be the deciding voice in Northeast 

Asia, whatever their criticisms of Washington. But 

that is where our obstinacy is driving us with regard 

to the Korean peninsula where Beijing rather than 

Washington will become the arbiter of that peninsula’s 

destiny. Endless statements from Beijing and Moscow 

reiterate the identity of these states’ views about Korea 

and much else because we have done everything 

possible to drive them together. For example, with 

regard to Korea, we see the Russian and Chinese 

governments’ oft proclaimed identity of interests and 

proposals.254

Indeed, Russian scholars now state that Russia 

works with China to coordinate their proposals 

in the Korean nuclear negotiations and numerous 

communiqués cite an “identity” of views on this 

topic.255Removing many of the reasons for their shared 

positions regarding either North Korea or Iran helps 

erode their unified position in these and other issues. 

As experts have argued that a working Russo-Chinese 

alliance is the greatest security threat we could face, a 

negotiating strategy designed to uncouple these two 

potential rivals against us but also against each other, 

makes perfect sense.256

This policy’s wisdom would also be underscored 

by the fact that an examination of the historical record 

strongly suggests that a precondition for effective 

nonproliferation is mutual cooperation between 

Moscow and Washington as happened in 1986-96 and 

which has since evaporated due to Russian domestic 

regression to autocratic rule, American unilateralism, 

and the perception thereof abroad.257 Once proliferation 
86

is uncoupled from regime change, it becomes much 

easier to fashion both a strong negotiating coalition 

against the former, which is the main threat, and to do 

so strictly on the grounds of international security and 

international treaties that must be observed. This allows 

us and the other treaty signatories to create a different 

security environment around proliferators, complete 

with binding accords, supervision, and inspections—

an environment that safeguards their internal security 

but which contributes to rendering their form of rule 

even more dysfunctional than is now the case. But 

most importantly, it facilitates the reaching of verifiable 

agreements on these states’ nuclear program which is 

the key point.258

Without the ability or rationale to justify threatbased programs, in the absence of a threat these states 

must then deal much more urgently with economic 

and political questions at home for which they have 

no answer and for which their structures are woefully 

inadequate, if not illegitimate. And since contemporary 

scholarly research suggests that proliferation policies 

are the product of various coalitions of domestic interest 

groups in these states, a policy that transforms the 

playing field on which these coalitions maneuver has 

a much greater chance of success than does unilateral 

rhetoric which in reality cannot be implemented except 

at ruinous cost.259 That process, as was the case with 

Moscow in 1986-91, will generate a process of change 

that will be all the more powerful for being domestically 

generated rather than externally coerced.

Arms Control.

The foundation stones of European and Eurasian 

security are the series of treaties beginning with the 

Helsinki treaty of 1975, its extension at Moscow in 
87

1991, the 1987 Washington Treaty on Intermediate 

Nuclear forces in Europe (INF), the 1990 Paris Treaty 

on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), extended in 

1999, the Paris and Rome treaties between NATO and 

Russia in 1997 and 2002, and the START and SORT 

treaties from 1991-2002. However, some, if not all, 

of these treaties are apparently at risk. And that risk 

has grown with Putin’s announcement that Russia is 

suspending its participation in the CFE Treaty for 150 

days (even though there is no legal basis for doing so 

in the treaty) in July, 2007. It also should be noted that 

there were numerous Russian warnings to this effect, 

e.g., Sergei Ivanov and his subordinates’ warnings that 

Russia might withdraw from the CFE Treaty or that it 

might die a natural death.260

Recently, thanks partly to Western pressure, Russia 

agreed with Georgia that it would leave its bases there 

by 2008. But meanwhile it refuses to leave Moldova. 

Indeed, it seeks a 20-year lease on a base there to 

perpetuate its intervention on behalf of a separatist 

and visibly criminalized Russian faction across the 

Dniester River.261Russian officials also talk of launching 

political gambits to formalize Russia’s incorporation 

of Georgia’s breakaway province South Ossetia into 

Russia. 

These actions not only violate Russia’s 1999 

agreement, putting the lie to claims that Russia has no 

juridical obligation to leave Moldova and Georgia, they 

also would shatter the basis of European security as 

outlined in the aforementioned treaties. Incorporation 

of South Ossetia or Abkhazia or Transnistria by force 

not only invokes Soviet and tsarist precedents, those 

actions violate the Helsinki and Moscow treaties, the 

Istanbul accords, and shatter the post-Cold War accords 

with NATO. Like Moscow’s 2004 and 2006 intervention 
88

in Ukrainian elections, such actions betray Russia’s 

continuing inability to accept the end of empire in 

Eurasia even though a Russian empire there inherently 

threatens Eurasian and even Russian security. Russia 

also claims that the Baltic States’ failure to ratify the 

CFE treaty makes the Baltic a “gray zone” from which 

potential threats to Russian security could come even 

though they also admit that NATO’s token forces there 

hardly represent a current threat.262

The INF treaty, too, is at risk. Clearly the efforts 

to withdraw from the INF and CFE treaties are also 

connected to Russian fears that Western militarypolitical pressure will be used to consolidate postSoviet states’ membership in NATO and/or the EU, 

or to compel democratizing reforms in Russia or 

elsewhere in the CIS where Moscow supports the 

reigning authoritarians. Since Russia cannot compete 

militarily with the United States, let alone NATO, it has 

openly discussed using its strategic and/or tactical (or 

so-called nonstrategic) nuclear weapons in a first strike 

mode in the event of a threat by either of those parties 

against it or its interests in the CIS.263 More recently, 

Sergei Ivanov has threatened once again to put missiles 

into Kaliningrad if NATO does not take up Russian 

complaints about these treaties.264 Moscow already did 

this in 2001 and created a scandal thereby, indicating 

a continuing inclination in at least certain circles to 

conduct unilateral and even menacing political and 

strategic actions using Russian nuclear weapons.265 For 

instance, Moscow long ago gratuitously extended its 

nuclear umbrella to the CIS even though none of those 

states invited it to do so. But such contingency planning 

could only truly be taken to its logical culmination if 

Moscow frees itself from these two treaties that are 

pillars of arms control and security in Europe and 
89

renounces its interest in the continuing stabilization of 

European security.

However, such an outcome reignites an arms race 

in Europe that, as Putin and Company knows, Russia 

cannot afford and which is in nobody’s interest. 

Ironically, Russia actually depends for its security 

on the restraints imposed by those treaties upon 

NATO’s members including Washington. Moreover, 

it depends on them for subsidies through the NunnLugar Act or Comprehensive Threat Reduction 

program to gain control over its nuclear, biological, 

and chemical weapons arsenals. Without that funding, 

it is quite likely that the recent visible regeneration of 

the Russian armed forces would have been greatly 

impeded because at least some of those funds would 

have had to go to maintain or destroy decaying 

nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Russia also 

needs Western, and especially American help against 

terrorism emanating from Afghanistan, or Iranian and 

North Korean nuclearization and is still interested, as 

recent agreements show, in curtailing those states or 

terrorists’ access to these materials.266 Furthermore, it 

is no less at risk from Iranian missiles than anyone else 

(except possibly Israel), given the two states’ hidden 

rivalry in the Caspian basin. Thus it needs to cooperate 

with the West on proliferation concerns, too. Therefore 

these efforts to withdraw from the relevant treaties 

are quite misguided insofar as Russia’s real interests 

are concerned even though Moscow’s legal right to 

withdraw from a treaty is obvious. But if Moscow 

persists in these gambits to weaken, eviscerate, or even 

leave these treaties, what does that signify concerning 

its goals and what then is the future of European and 

Eurasian security?
90

Therefore, an appropriate American response 

should be to maintain the validity of both the CFE and 

INF treaties, insist upon fulfillment of the former, and 

state U.S. willingness to reaffirm or extend the latter 

which is supposed to expire in 2008. Nobody benefits 

from a new arms race in Europe which should be a 

model of security practices, not a case of a model gone 

bad. And Russia’s announced desire to renegotiate the 

START I Treaty that is to expire in 2009 should similarly 

provide an new opportunity for further reducing the 

likelihood and perceived value of nuclear weapons use 

or threats to use them among the two leading nuclear 

states.267 Doing so would also reverse the trend toward 

greater reliance on nuclear weapons as warfighting 

instruments that has been in effect at least since 2000, 

and also possibly reduce the attractiveness of such 

weapons to would-be proliferators. 

To say this, however, is not to abandon the need 

to put pressure on Russia to fulfill the treaties it has 

signed whether they deal with nuclear arms control or 

conventional weapons and Eurasian security. Indeed, 

such a strategy is all the more necessary for our policy 

toward Russia because just as we seek to achieve our 

immediate defense and security goals by invoking 

rhetorical abstractions of democratization vis-à-vis 

Iran and North Korea, so must we do so with regard 

to Russia where there is a legal justification, based on 

solemn international treaties, for doing so. Whatever 

our private beliefs might be about the justification for 

such pressure, in political terms it is only sustainable 

on the grounds that the treaties to which Russia is party 

explicitly invoke these values and processes and thus 

represent the constitutional foundation of our present 

world order.268
91

Democratization.

Putin and his clique, including Lavrov, regularly 

charge that demands for democratization are purely 

politically motivated and neo-colonialist in their rhetoric and an attack on Russia’s system of governance, indeed an attempt to change it.269 Actually they are partly 

right. Such attacks do represent an attack on Russian 

governance because that governance is increasingly at 

variance with solemn international accords that Russia 

freely signed and to which it must be held. Just as the 

United States resents attacks on conduct at Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib but is nonetheless compelled to 

redress those situations through legal and democratic 

pressure and processes, so too is Russia subject to 

the same international constraints and standards that 

it freely accepted. However, it is clear that Moscow 

would prefer a relationship with the United States like 

that among realpolitikers in the 19th century, i.e., no 

discussions of democracy and rather a concentration 

on concrete bilateral interests.270 For example, Lavrov 

protested the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council 

complaints about democratic deficits in Russia. He 

charged that this was not part of the Council’s remit 

and duplicated the work of organizations like the 

OSCE which Russia, not by accident, also seeks to 

deflect from making such complaints as part of its 

remit.271 At the same time, the demand for an end to 

these attacks and this kind of defense by Putin et al.

reflects both Moscow’s demand for a free hand and its 

endless status insecurity or anxiety. 

Indeed, the demand for an end to such attacks along 

with the assertion that America seeks to undermine all 

the other CIS governments as well as Russia had become 

a staple of Russian foreign policy argumentation even 

before Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in late 2004. 
92

Already in July 2004, Russian commentator M. Chernov 

wrote:

The American Administration is beginning a campaign 

to topple the regime of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. . . . 

By all appearances Washington has decided to get rid of 

Karimov, relying on the successful experience of revolution in Georgia and using elements of the “Kosovo scenario,” establishing control over the territory by creating 

“managed conflicts” in the Uzbek provinces [primarily 

in the Fergana valley] and bringing in peacekeeping 

force.272

The exact parallel of this so-called American 

strategy to Russian strategy in Georgia and Moldova 

is testimony, as psychologists have long observed, that 

the projection onto “the other” is a hallmark of paranoia, 

the latter being a long-established tradition in Russian 

politics, not least where foreign influence in the CIS is 

concerned. Not to be undone, two other commentators, 

Yevgeny Myachin and Aleksandr’ Sobyanin, argued 

as well that Washington and European governments 

pursue a strategy of managed conflicts using terrorism 

to achieve their aims. Thus Sobyanin argued that the 

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) located in 

Afghanistan and Pakistan “works in close cooperation 

with Western intelligence services.”273

The persistence of such neo-Soviet tactics and 

mentalities in Russian public discourse underscores the 

distance separating Russia from true democratization. 

By early 2005, Moscow’s paranoia about the supposed 

democracy campaign orchestrated by Washington 

had merged with its anxieties about securing for 

itself an exclusive primacy in the CIS. The newspaper 

Kommersant reported on February 24, 2005, that, 
93

In response to the U.S. side’s criticisms regarding Russian domestic and foreign policy, the Kremlin, according to Kommersant’s information, has begun preparing 

counter-criticisms connected first and foremost with the 

growth of the West’s planned activity aimed at replacing the ruling regimes in the CIS. In Moscow they are 

convinced that the velvet revolutions which have taken 

place or are being prepared are the result of the activity of Western nongovernmental organizations and the 

special services, which are nurturing and training opposition forces. In the Kremlin’s opinion, such activity 

is particularly dangerous in regard to the countries of 

Central Asia where the export of revolution could lead 

to serious, long-term destabilization. Nor does Moscow 

like the military-political activity of the United States on 

CIS territory, in particular the intention to station military bases in Georgia [which has never been the caseauthor] and AWACS south of Kyrgyzstan, and also to 

assist in the creation of an association of Central Asian 

states (without the participation of Russia, China, and 

Iran). [There is no public record of such a proposal as of 

this time-author.] In the Kremlin they believe that all this 

could be perceived as the implementation of the strategic task of ousting Russia from the post-Soviet area, and 

they are suggesting that the United States cooperate in 

strengthening the “security zones” around Russia’s borders so as to hinder the proliferation of international terrorism.274

But as long as it is not a democracy and an 

international law-breaker, Russia cannot expect to 

be acknowledged as a true member of the G-8 or any 

democratic club or as a great power, certainly not a great 

European power. Neither can it be exempted from what 

is now the common practice whereby all governments’ 

internal policies are subjected to constant foreign 

scrutiny. And Russia, based on its record, certainly 

cannot be entrusted with an exclusive sphere of interest 

around its peripheries based on “security zones” when 
94

it is a prime fomenter of regional instability. Indeed, 

such policies only ensure the ultimate crash of the 

present Russian status quo. 

Therefore that pressure for democratization must 

not only continue, it should grow and be regularly 

invoked by American leaders even as they seek to 

advance the grounds of human rights and adherence 

to democratic norms of conduct precisely because 

Russia and other Eurasian governments have signed 

all these treaties, going back to the Helsinki treaty of 

1975. The cornerstone of our demand for this kind 

of policy is the basic building block of world order, 

namely the doctrine of Pacta Sunt Servanda (treaties 

must be obeyed). And the conditions that gave rise to 

those treaties with regard to democratization in Europe 

have not been fully overcome as Russian and even 

more Belarusian policy illustrate. Like it or not, Russia 

or its potential satellites cannot successfully pretend 

that they are being confronted with double standards, 

or talk about Russia being a sovereign democracy as it 

now does. The treaties now in effect clearly outline a 

diminution of unbridled sovereignty and arguably any 

recognized international treaty does so as well. That 

argument should be the cornerstone of our demands to 

treaty signatories coupled with meaningful sanctions, 

not just economic, for failure to uphold these treaties.

Of course, there are also equally good security or 

strategic reasons for upholding democratization at 

every turn even as we seek avenues for negotiation. 

It is not just because we believe, with considerable 

justification, that states which reach democracy are 

ultimately stronger, even if they have to cross through 

dangerous waters to get there, it also is that, as noted 

above, Russia shows no sign of wanting responsibility 

for its actions and their consequences, e.g., in the frozen 
95

conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, or in Ukraine, let alone 

its support for the repressive regimes of Central Asia 

or its arms sales abroad. To the extent that violence, 

crime, and authoritarian rule flourishes in these states, 

they are all at risk of upheaval, even sudden upheaval 

as we have seen in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and 

in the repeated manifestations of internal violence that 

shook Uzbekistan in 2004-05 and could easily do so 

again. Such violence and instability could easily spread 

to Russia as the example of Chechnya and the North 

Caucasus suggests. 

Not pushing for reform even as we seek these 

states’ security from attack by terrorists or from their 

incorporation in a Russian sphere of influence avails us 

little. For, as Tesmur Basilia, Special Assistant to former 

Georgian President Edvard Shevarnadze for economic 

issues, wrote, in many CIS countries, e.g., Georgia and 

Ukraine, “the acute issue of choosing between alignment 

with Russia and the West is associated with the choice 

between two models of social development.”275 Indeed, 

even some Russian analysts acknowledge the accuracy 

of this insight. Thus Dmitry Furman writes that, “The 

Russia-West struggle in the CIS is a struggle between 

two irreconcilable systems.”276 Indeed Furman even 

accepts the repressiveness of the current regime, saying 

that “Managed democracies are actually a soft variant 

of the Soviet system.”277

The aptness of these observations transcends 

Georgia and Ukraine to embrace the entire postSoviet region, since it is clear that Moscow opposes 

“exporting democracy” to it. Indeed, it regards the 

idea with contempt and thus attracts the local dictators 

who cleave to it for support against Western pressures 

for democratization.278 Basilia also pointed to the local 

perception of Russia as security threat.
96

Nowadays there are many in the West who believe 

that Russia has changed—and, having reformed, seeks 

to interact with neighboring countries in conformity 

with international norms. Some Eurasian countries 

would disagree with this opinion, and believe instead 

that the Russian mentality has not changed much, and 

that Russia continues to deem the “near abroad” as its 

sphere of social influence. After the second war with 

Chechnya, many think that Russia regards violence 

as its major tool for resolving social and political 

problems, especially with regard to non-Russian 

peoples from the former empire. Thus integration into 

the international community should be viewed as a 

guarantee for security and further development.279

The current silence or relative silence on democratic 

issues facilities the exportation of Russia’s sphere 

of influence and style of rule throughout the CIS, 

while strengthening Georgian, Ukrainian, and other 

democracies not only forestalls chances for internal 

upheaval in those states, it also rebuffs Russian 

imperialism and thus helps strengthen domestic 

Russian calls for reform. More urgently it reduces 

Russia’s chances to engineer long-standing reversals of 

both Westernization and democratization in Ukraine 

and elsewhere, outcomes that only reduce security 

throughout the CIS. 

The logic is the same as George Kennan’s even if 

containment is not the policy choice here. By standing 

on the basis of international law and the democratic 

choice of those states’ peoples, not our own unilateral 

and hegemonic power, and by working intensively 

with those states which wish the benefits of association 

with the West, we can create examples of progress that 

will resonate in Russia and elsewhere while checking 

the spread of deformations of governance that only add 
97

to Russia’s and our own insecurity. NATO was and is 

correct in observing that its and the EU’s expansions 

enlarge the domain of security in Europe and Eurasia 

to the benefit of Russia if not that of its elite which can 

only survive by imperialism and predation.

Ultimately then the tenacious, insistent, and 

unceasing proclamation by Russia of deviations 

from its own promised course of action are legally 

and strategically strongly founded and mutually 

invigorating. A strategy that engages not only Russia 

on its vital issues and agenda, but also the CIS on an 

equal basis with Russia and does so while unceasingly 

proclaiming that democratic values enshrined in treaties 

must be upheld, benefits everyone except Russia’s 

rulers. But it certainly redounds to the benefit of the longsuffering Russian people.280 Neither does it represent an 

effort to overthrow Russia unless one wants to accept 

at face value the self-serving pronunciamentos of the 

ruling group. What must be understood as a guiding 

strategic principle here is that Russian autocracy and 

its corollary, Russian imperialism, are the gravest 

security threats facing Eurasia (including Europe and 

Russia itself) and are ultimately incompatible with any 

progress of the Russian people, or Eurasia, to security, 

liberty, and prosperity.

Precisely because such a state constitutes a standing 

invitation to uncontrolled military adventurism—of 

which there has been much in Russia’s brief history 

and not least due to the absence of democratic control 

over the power ministries—it has to be checked.281

There is no contradiction between engaging Russia 

on the great issues of proliferation and arms control, 

and cooperating with it against the common enemy 

of terrorism, while at the same time insisting on its 

behaving according to European norms that it has 
98

accepted in the treaties it has signed, all with a view 

to integrating it with its European neighbors. While 

this is certainly difficult in practice, it is hardly less 

difficult than the policy we now are conducting which 

has left us attacked by unending crises with few if any 

governments willing to help us.

In fact, a policy that bases itself on treaties and 

laws rather than upon unilateral assertions of power 

is actually more effective than that alternative even if 

it means narrowing the scope of freedom of action for 

unilateral American ventures.282 As Robert Wright’s 

recent argument for reforming U.S. foreign policy in 

general towards what he calls progressive realism 

contends, 

There is principle here that goes beyond arms control: 

the national interest can be served by constraints on 

American behavior when they constrain other nations 

as well. This logic covers the spectrum of international 

governance, from global warming, (we’ll cut carbon dioxide emissions if you will) to war (we’ll refrain from it 

if you will).283

Indeed, democratization is essential, first of all in 

regard to Russia’s power agencies. The armed forces 

still regard NATO and the United States as their main 

enemies and their exercises confirm it, even to the point 

of often involving missile and nuclear strikes or largescale conventional exercises against alleged terrorists. 

Second, although Putin and Ivanov have endeavored 

to restructure at least some of the armed forces to fight 

primarily against terrorist attacks, which are the current 

main threats to Russian security, this use of the military 

in a counterterrorist or counterintelligence force can 

have the most serious negative domestic outcomes 

as we have seen in Chechnya. Moreover, these forces 
99

could also easily be used, as Gorbachev and Yeltsin 

had sought to use them, i.e., against democratic reform 

at home.284

Third, the tendency to adventurism that led 

Moscow into its so called peacemaking operations in 

the Caucasus and Moldova have now embroiled it in 

situations where the threat of war, particularly with 

Georgia, is constant and where Russian policy seems 

mainly to consist of provocations of Tbilisi in order 

to get it to launch a violent conflict, or of responses 

to Tbilisi’s own penchant for provocative acts.285

So dangerous a policy inevitably has unforeseen 

consequences. The recent signs of military adventurism, 

buzzing Scotland, flights to Guam, the resumption of 

long-range air patrols, and submarine races to plant 

the flag of sovereignty in the Arctic, only serve the 

armed forces’ myopic interest of “walking tall.” They 

do nothing to enhance Russian security. And, finally, 

the lack of democratic control over the armed forces 

has been a constant and lethal aspect of Russian policy 

toward Chechnya which has resulted in frightful 

violations of human rights and which has generated 

in response a running series of low-intensity conflicts 

across the North Caucasus for which Moscow has no 

solution.

While democracy is not a panacea, it is safe to say 

that a democratically controlled military would have 

behaved differently as would its masters also. Indeed, 

it is arguable that what Russia’s military fears most 

about NATO expansion is that it generates an external 

pressure that is supported by domestic reformers 

to democratize the entire range of Russian national 

security policy and subject it to civilian and democratic 

accountability under law, something that is anathema 

to that military-political elite.286 Thus ultimately there 
100

are compelling geostrategic reasons why the vigorous 

and ongoing insistence on reforms as signed in 

international treaties is an essential and indispensable 

part of any sound Western policy toward Russia.

Energy Policy.

Every day Americans feel the lack of a sound energy 

policy. At the same time energy, in Putin’s words, “is 

the heart of our economy.” Thus, for Russia, its energy 

assets are the equivalent of a political Viagra making it 

seem that it is a great power and allowing the state and 

its servitors to amass fabulous wealth. Nonetheless, 

due to the organization of the Russian economy which 

follows the autocratic model of a rent seeking elite 

dealing with a rent-granting autocracy, it is very likely 

that by 2010, according to Russian analysts, Russia will 

be suffering from an energy shortage, in oil, gas, or 

electricity, if not all of these.287 This also helps explain 

Putin’s new nuclear power initiative.288

Neither the effort to blackmail Ukraine, the Baltic 

states, and Europe, nor Russia’s need to dominate 

Central Asian and Caspian producers in order to retain 

its political-economic structure, is in America’s interest. 

Neither are such policies in the interests of those states 

that would be victimized by such Russian policies, other 

key consumers like Europe and China, nor ultimately 

those of the Russian people who must bear the direct 

costs of an inefficient and autocratic petro economy, 

that is, in fact, growing more slowly than almost all 

the other post-Soviet states. Obviously, here we need 

to have a coherent and comprehensive domestic policy 

that reorients use of energy to more efficient systems, or 

other sources as they become affordable. But we should 

not delude ourselves that cheap oil or gas can return any 
101

time soon. This is due not only to our demand which is 

the greatest in the world, or to surging Asian demand, 

but also because approximately 80 percent, if not more, 

of world oil supplies are state-owned. These states are, 

except for Canada, Norway, and Great Britain, all too 

prone to use oil as a state weapon and turn into an 

economy dependent on energy rents. Cartels, in this 

environment, are the rule, not the exception.

Accordingly, Washington must fight fire with fire. It 

is already the case that numerous Asian and American 

scholars have called for an international energy 

association in the belief that such a system would not 

only alleviate North Korea’s need for energy which it 

uses to justify its nuclear program, but also assist other 

Northeast Asian and Pacific states to satisfy their needs 

as well.289 Such an organization also, or so they profess 

to believe, could lead to a stable structure or security 

discussions and peace in that region of the world.290

Whether or not that is the case remains to be seen. 

But it is quite important that China, Japan, South 

Korea, and India be integrated into global energy 

organizations and that the possibilities for energy 

rivalry with China, which fill policymakers here and in 

Beijing with anxiety be reduced.291 Certainly one way to 

do so is to facilitate the integration of India and China 

into the International Energy Agency. Nevertheless, 

it clearly is in the geopolitical interests of Washington 

and its allies including the members of the International 

Energy Agency (IEA) to integrate the largest Asian 

consumers and do everything possible to persuade 

them of the benefits to them of such integration and of 

reliance on the global market compared to the wasteful 

and dangerous current practice of exclusive long-term 

supply deals.292
102

Another and possibly complementary tactic is to do 

everything possible to encourage national oil companies 

in other producer states and in consumer states to 

invest in increasing their productive capacity.293 Indeed, 

the only way to do so is to demonstrate to Russia that 

its current method of oil and gas production cannot 

satisfy is own domestic needs, let alone the claims of 

importers who then remit to Russia valuable foreign 

currency. And without such investment at home and 

the accompanying transparency that it would generate, 

foreign direct investment in Russia’s energy sector 

will not materialize, leaving it behind. If we cannot 

get the producers’ attention in this fashion, it might be 

worthwhile to form the equivalent of a countercartel 

or at least a consumers’ association through the IEA 

which would be made up of the EU, the United States, 

China, Japan, India, and South Korea, and which could 

influence the price of oil and/or gas by announcing 

that each member of the group a whole is prepared to 

buy its entire energy needs, or even a large percentage 

of them at a fair market price and auction, making 

sellers compete for those contracts. Obviously, to the 

extent that this is possible it forces prices downward.294

Beyond forcing prices downward, this group should 

disseminate best technologies and practices among its 

members, allowing them to move toward ever greater 

efficiencies in energy use and to alternative sources of 

technology, particularly cleaner coal use which benefits 

the United States and China the most. Inasmuch as 

China has long been consciously seeking to reduce the 

energy intensity of its economy and per capita energy 

consumption, possesses enormous coal reserves, and 

is a large investor in alternative energy sources, such a 

policy would reduce demand and exercise downward 

pressures on prices.295
103

Third, such an organization would reduce the 

growing Sino-American tensions in the Gulf and 

Middle East which could contribute to an overall 

improvement in Sino-American relations and unite 

those governments around a compelling common 

interest.296 Fourth, inasmuch as Russo-Chinese energy 

relations are tense and even rivalrous, if not a case 

of both sides seeking to exploit the other, such an 

organization would magnify those things that divide 

Russia and China while reducing those that divide 

China and America.297 And since a new Russo-Chinese 

alliance is believed to be the greatest security threat we 

could face, this kind of outcome would represent no 

small achievement.298

Fifth, at the same time, such a solution would 

allow Russia to sell its oil and gas in Asia by creating 

a regularized forum at a fair market price and would 

help overcome the obstacles that have held back its 

ability to develop this market. If it stops trying to 

swindle its partners besides China, i.e., South Korea 

and Japan, as it has been doing for the last 3 years, it 

might actually get the investment it needs from them 

in return for a reasonable program of sales to them.299

Then Russia would get a fair market price and could 

more easily participate in the regeneration of North 

Korea as part of any overall solution to its energy 

and security problems. Indeed, an energy association 

would answer Pyongyang’s needs if it were to become 

serious about bargaining over its nuclear program. 

And facilitating such a settlement inviting Russia to 

become a major contributor to North Korea’s future 

energy sources has long been a major objective of the 

Putin government.300

Russian participation under market conditions in 

such an arrangement would force reforms in its energy 
104

industry, and thus its government. Such reforms 

might then allow for foreign investment, particularly 

in Siberia and its infrastructure, which is essential for 

the historical task of reviving Siberia, and rejuvenating 

Russia as a reliable Asian power. Russia would play a 

recognized role in a framework of security for Northeast 

Asia but it would not be able to blackmail its partners 

to the West and South because they would be able 

to build more pipelines to global markets and not be 

compelled to rely only on Russian pipelines. Finally, to 

the extent that the energy industry in Russia undergoes 

genuine reform and is unable to monopolize its 

customers, it will have to change. So, too, will the state; 

and hopefully other economic centers of excellence will 

arise in Russia, freeing it from its historic dependence 

upon a cash crop for export.

This strategy too depends upon transforming 

the external environment through creative U.S. 

statesmanship in order to effectuate change over time 

both in Russia and in the global order. In all cases of 

this strategy, whether it be proliferation or energy 

issues, the threat of force is existentially present as it 

always is, but it need not be invoked or called into play 

other than in cases of overwhelming threat. If carried 

through successfully, this strategy has the potential, in 

ways that force deployed unilaterally does not have, 

to bring about desirable changes over time in the 

world order on the basis of a shared consensus among 

America’s partners operating under our leadership or 

in tandem with us.

CONCLUSIONS

We urgently need to rethink many of our policies, 

especially as they are linked to one another. To get 
105

Iran to renounce nuclear weapons, we must deal with 

Russia’s plan for becoming a global center for nuclear 

power and spent fuel.301 One could easily multiply 

such examples. But this very interconnectedness, plus 

the fact that the problems Russia poses are essentially 

nonmilitary and must not be allowed to reach that stage 

where they become military, call for a coordinated 

multidimensional strategy using all the instruments of 

power across a global backdrop. We cannot impose our 

favored form of regime upon Russia nor should we try, 

but we cannot passively allow it to flout international 

agreements and embark upon a course of autocracy, 

empire, and adventurism, that has repeatedly proven 

to be ruinous for its people and its neighbors. 

Moreover, we cannot be either complacent or 

despairing. The oft-cited and even widely accepted 

ideas that we have little or no leverage, or its analogue 

that we need Moscow more than it needs us, are 

ridiculous.302 Unfortunately those notions are tied to a 

belief that complex political issues can be solved in the 

blink of an eye, not by what Henry Kissinger called 

the “patient accumulation of nuance.” Thus, some 

fallaciously argue that if we cannot fix the problem 

at once by Russia’s capitulation to our pressure, it is 

supposedly hopeless to try. Yet it is clear that the agenda 

of issues with Russia goes far beyond strict bilateral 

U.S.-Russian relations in both geographical scope and 

complexity, and requires precisely a combination of 

patience and superior insight.

Neither can we yield to the opposing complacency 

that other issues are too urgent, or that we can wait for 

another time to tackle the Russian agenda, or that we 

can simply browbeat Russia because of our superior 

power and virtue. Conditions in Eurasia are already 

and rapidly becoming ever more crisis-prone. Russian 
106

analysts admit that Russia remains “a risk factor,” not 

a reliable or autonomous pole of world politics.303 The 

North Caucasus, as noted above, remains out of control, 

with some 250,000 Russian security personnel from the 

armed forces and Ministry of Interior, as well as the 

so-called multiple militaries being stationed there.304

Russia’s relations with Georgia could very easily 

spill over into active violent conflict over Georgia’s 

breakaway province, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, 

and its ties to Moldova are a permanent violation of the 

treaties it has signed with the West. In fact, at least some 

governments and militaries reject this complacency 

even if they defend against their anxieties sotto voce. 

Although never voiced publicly by elected European officials, there is concern about Russia. It is rarely 

announced as policy, but the force structure of the 

Bundeswehr—still, all these years after the end of the 

Cold War, organized to defend the homeland against 

tanks coming from the east—makes it obvious. In a way 

that frustrates and confounds its NATO partners, Germany still de facto prioritizes conventional territorial defense even if it pledges allegiance to the Petersberg tasks 

which presume force projection capabilities.305

Moreover, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell 

stated, in the current threat environment, 

This means we must do something statesmen have been 

reluctant to do since the birth of the modern state system. We have to understand and try to influence not just 

what states do outside their borders, but in some cases 

what goes on inside their borders. This marks a strategic 

rebalancing made necessary by circumstances.306 (Italics 

in the original.)

Perhaps even more urgently, the current crisis in 

Ukraine which has brought the country to the brink 
107

of ungovernability, owes much to continuing Russian 

subversion and intervention there. If it is allowed to 

continue unchecked and the Ukrainian government is 

not strengthened to the point of being able to put its 

house in order, its democratization and Westernization 

processes will be set back for years. That not only 

means another quasi or virtual democracy as was the 

case before, but also a new satellite for Russia. Here we 

should always remember that Russia without Ukraine 

cannot threaten the peace of Europe because it is not 

an empire, just an aspirant to it. But with a Ukrainian 

satellite, Russia will be emboldened to carry further its 

efforts to destabilize neighboring regimes in Europe, 

only this time they will be NATO and EU members, 

Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, the Baltic states, and 

especially Poland. Finally, the condition of too many 

Central Asian states once their rulers depart the scene 

is too perilously close to violence or to failed state 

status to be complacent about trends in Central Asia. 

All these challenges, if not crises, are critical points in 

the East-West relationship because ultimately “The 

main reason why the West cannot remain complacent 

about Russia’s actions is the fact that Russia’s ‘near 

abroad’ is, in many cases, also democratic Europe’s 

near abroad.”307

In other words, time will not wait upon us. To quote 

David Ben-Gurion, “time works for us or against us 

depending on what we do with it.” Neither will other 

states wait passively for us or let us off the hook of 

our responsibility, i.e., developing a coherent policy, 

the means to carry it out, and harmonizing it with our 

allies. Iraq cannot be the only issue in our foreign policy 

for it already bids fair to suck up all the oxygen needed 

to conduct a global security policy. In any case, neither 

Russia, its interlocutors, nor other states or issues will 
108

let us merely act in an ad hoc tactical fashion with no 

thought for long-term consequences or strategy. Like it 

or not America, for better or worse, is in Colin Gray’s 

term “the sheriff” of world order.308 We, as Lincoln 

said, “hold the responsibility and bear the burden.” 

Therefore it is incumbent upon us to exercise this 

responsibility for and to the world judiciously, but we 

cannot let it evaporate due to inattention, fecklessness, 

or the lack of a strategic approach to our interests and 

those responsibilities.

ENDNOTES

1. “Russian Foreign Policy: A Chronology, April-June, 2007,” 

Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, www.defac.ac.uk/colleges/

csrc/document-listings/russian-chronologies/a-russian-chronologyapril-june-2007/?searchterm=a%20russian%20chronology, p. 37.

2. John Vinocur, “Politicus: America’s Misplaced Hopes on 

Russia,” International Herald Tribune, September 10, 2007, www.iht.

com.

3. Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Newsline, September 10, 2007, 

September 11, 2007.

4. Moscow, Agentstvo Voyennykh Novstey Internet Version, in 

English, May 16, 2007, Open Source Committee, Foreign Broadcast 

Information Service Central Eurasia (Henceforth FBIS SOV), May 16, 

2007; Moscow, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Internet Version, Press 

Conference of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with Secretary of State 

Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2007, www.mid.ru.

5. Tehran, Mehr News Agency Internet Version, in English, May 

14, 2007, FBIS SOV, May 14, 2007.

6. “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich 

Conference on Security, February 10, 2007,” www.kremlin.ru/eng/

speeches/2007/02/10/0138; Poslanie Federal’nomu Sobraniiu Rossiiskoi 

Federatsii, April 26, 2007, www.kremlin.ru/speeches/2007/04/26

(Henceforth Poslanie).
109

7. Vystuplenie na Voyennom Parade v Chest’ 62-I Godovoshchiny 

Pobedy v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine, May 9, 2007, www.kremlin.

ru/appears/2007/05/09/1127_type63374type82634type122381_12775

7.shtml.

8. Poslanie.

9. “CFE Treaty on Verge of Collapse, Iran Threat OverblownRussian Gen,” RIA Novosti, May 10, 2007.

10. Viktor Litovkin, “In the Language of Ultimatums,” 

Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 25, 2007, retrieved from Johnson’s Russia 

List, JRL #2007-140, June 25, 2007.

11. Thom Shanker, “ Russian Pullback on Arms Treaty 

Obscures Progress, Official Says,” New York Times, July 16, 2007, 

www.nytimes.com. 

12. Moscow, Agentstvo Voyennykh Novostey, Internet Version, 

in English, July 2, 2007, FBIS SOV, July 2, 2007.

13. Alex Rodriguez, “Rice Begins Russian Visit as Tensions 

Rise With U.S. Kremlin Growing Bolder With Criticism,” Chicago 

Tribune, May 15, 2007.

14. Moscow, Ekho Moskvy, in Russian, February 17, 2007, Open 

Source Committee, FBIS SOV, February 17, 2007.

15. Yuri Ushakov, “From Russia With Like,” Los Angeles Times, 

February 1, 2007, www.latimes.com.

16. Vladimir Isachenkov, “Top Russian General Calls U.S. 

Expansion Top National Security Threat,” Associated Press, 

February 9, 2007.

17. Apart from works already cited, see Sergei M. Rogov, “A 

Strategic Partnership Is Still Possible,” Moscow, Nezavisimaya 

Gazeta, in Russian, March 19, 2007, FBIS SOV, March 19, 2007.

18. “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich 

Conference on Security,” February 10, 2007.
110

19. Moscow, Vesti TV, in Russian, March 17, 2007, FBIS SOV, 

March 17, 2007; “Address by Russian Foreign Minister at Moscow 

University,” Moscow, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Website (www.mil.

ru), February 21, 2007.

20. FBIS SOV, February 17, 2007.

21. Moscow, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Internet Version, 

“Russian President Addresses Munich Forum, Answers Questions 

on Iran, February 12, 2007,” FBIS SOV, February 12, 2007, the 

question and answer session from which these remarks are taken 

is not on the kremlin.ru website.

22. “Interview with General Yuri Baluyevsky, First Deputy 

Defense Minister and Chief of the Russian Federation Armed 

Forces General Staff,” Moscow, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, February 21, 

2007, FBIS SOV, February 21, 2007.

23. FBIS SOV, February 12, 2007; “Speech and the Following 

Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security,” February 10, 

2007.

24. Vladimir Olegovich Rukavishnikov, “Values, Interests 

and Threats in U.S. and Russian Grand Strategies and Politics,” 

Review of International Affairs, (Belgrade), No. 1118, April-June, 

2005, p. 60.

25. Steve Gutterman, “Russian Calls U.S. ‘Difficult’,” Associated 

Press, February 4, 2007.

26. “U.S. Influence in World Affairs Weakening-Russian FM,”

RIA Novosti, March 17, 2007.

27. “Russian Foreign Minister Acknowledges Growing 

Divergence with US,” Mosnews, December 5, 2005, cited in 

Andrew Monaghan, “‘Calmly Critical’: Evolving Russian Views 

of US Hegemony,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. XXIX, No. 6, 

December, 2006, p. 988.

28. Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Newsline, March 6, 2007.
111

29. Sergei Lavrov, “Global Politics Needs Openness and 

Democracy,” Izvestiya, in Russian, April 24, 2007, FBIS SOV, April 

24, 2007.

30. John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study in Character, New 

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 58.

31. Vice-Admiral John M. McConnell (RET), Director of 

National Intelligence, Annual Threat Assessment of the Director 

of National Intelligence for the Senate Armed Services Committee, 

Washington, DC, February 27, 2007.

 

32. Prepared Statement of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates 

to the Senate Armed Services Committee, February 6, 2007, www.

senate.gov.

33. “Russia Starts Producing Topol-M Missile,” AGENCE 

FRANCE-PRESSE, June 26, 2007.

34. See, for example, Janusz Bugajski, Cold Peace: Russia’s New 

Imperialism: Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International 

Studies, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004; Richard Krickus, Iron Troikas, 

Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War 

College, 2006; Keith C. Smith, Russian Energy Politics in the Baltics, 

Poland, and the Ukraine: A New Stealth Imperialism?, Washington, 

DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2004; and 

Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr., “Politics and Diplomacy of the Global 

Defense Posture Review,” Carnes Lord, ed., Reposturing the Force: 

U.S. Overseas Presence in the Twenty-First Century, Newport, RI: 

Naval War College Press, 2006, pp. 57-58. 

35. Dmitri Trenin, “Russia Redefines Itself and Its Relations 

With the West,” Washington Quarterly, Vol. XXX, No. 2, pp. 95-

105.

36. Pavel Felgenhauer, “Russia’s Imperial General Staff,” 

Perspective, Vol. XVI, No. 1, October-November, 2005, www.bu.ed./

iscip/vol16/felgenhauer.

37. Moscow, Agentstvo Voyennykh Novostey, Internet Version, 

in English, February 14, 2007, FBIS SOV, February 14, 2007.
112

38. “Putin Interviewed by Journalists from G8 CountriesText,” www.kremlin.ru, June 4, 2007, retrieved from Nexis-Lexis.

39. Moscow, Internet web Digest, in Russian, January 31, 2007, 

FBIS SOV, January 31, 2007; “Interview With Yuri Baluyevsky by 

Yuri Gavrilov,” Moscow, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, in Russian, February 

21, 2007, FBIS SOV, February 21, 2007.

 

40. Viktor Litovkin, “V Yazyke Ultimatov,” Nezavisimaya 

Gazeta, June 25, 2007; Viktor Yuzbashev, “Illusory Moratorium,” 

Moscow, Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, in Russian, May 

30, 2007, FBIS SOV, May 31, 2007; Remarks of Colonel Albert 

Zaccor to the Conference, “The Role of the Black Sea Region in 

the Transatlantic Security Agenda,” Center for Strategic and 

International Studies, Washington, DC, June 21, 2007.

41. Martin Walker, “NATO Means Business To Protect 

Pipelines,” UPI, October 13, 2005; “US Missile Plans ‘A Clear 

threat’ to Moscow: Russian General,” AFP, January 22, 2007; 

“NATO Should Play Greater Energy Security Role, Envoy,” www.

serbinna.com, June 29, 2007. 

42. Zaccor.

 

43. Ibid.

44. “Russia Says US Democracy Criticisms is Unfair,” Reuters, 

June 29, 2007.

 

45. “No final decision to quit INF treaty-FM Lavrov,” RIA 

Novosti, February 16, 2007; “Russia Made a Mistake By Scrapping 

Its Mid-Range Missiles-Ivanov,” Moscow, Interfax, in English, 

February 7, 2007, FBIS SOV, February 7, 2007.

46. Moscow, ITAR-TASS in Englsih, February 26, 2007, FBIS 

SOV, February 26, 2007.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.
113

49. Sergei Gavrov, “Is the Transition to Authoritarianism 

Irreversible?” Russian Social Science Review, Vol. XKVIII, No. 3, 

May-June, 2007, pp. 22-23.

50. “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich 

Conference on Security, February 10, 2007”; Poslanie; Open 

Source Committee, OSC Analysis, “Russian Commentators Debate 

‘Besieged Fortress’ Rhetoric,” FBIS SOV, June 22, 2007.

51. Philip Hanson, “The Turn to Statism in Russian Economic 

Policy,” The International Spectator, Vol. XLII, No. 1, March, 2007, 

pp. 54-55.

52. “Russian Commentators Debate ‘Besieged Fortress’ 

Rhetoric.”

53. Vladimir Dvorkin, The Russian Debate on the Nonproliferation 

of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Delivery Vehicles, No. 4, 

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Belfer Center for Science 

and International Affairs, 2004, p. 23.

54. Bruce Jackson, “The Soft War for Europe’s East,” Policy 

Review, No. 137, June-July, 2006, www.hoover.org/publications/

policyreview/3202956.html.

55. Robert Kagan, “End of Dreams, Return of History,” Policy 

Review, No. 144, August-September, 2007, p. 31.

56. See the remarks of Blair Ruble, Director of the Kennan 

Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Moscow, Vremya Novostey, 

in Russian, July 2, 2007, FBIS SOV, July 2, 2007.

57. Joseph Ferguson, “U.S.-Russia Relations: Energy and 

Strategy,” Comparative Connections, July-September, 2006, p. 1, 

available from www.pacnet.org.

58. Sergey Strokan, “No More Gushers and Summertime 

Summits,” Moscow, Kommersant, in Russian, February 5, 2007, 

FBIS SOV, February 5, 2007; Fyodor Lukanov, “Where to Focus 

If Your Are Expecting Change,” Moscow Times, February 7, 2007; 

Rodriguez.
114

59. Audrius Baciulis, “Interview With Foreign Minister 

Antanas Valioinis,” Vilnius, Veidas, in Lithuanian, December 29, 

2005, FBIS SOV, December 29, 2005.

60. Testimony of Walter Slocombe, The Future of the North 

Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): Subcommittee Hearing on 

Airland Forces, Armed Forces Committee, U.S. Senate, 104th 

Congress, First Session, April 5, 1995, Washington, DC: U.S. 

Government Printing Office, 1996, p. 5.

61. Andrew A. Michta, The Limits of Alliance: The United States, 

NATO, and the EU in North and Central Europe, Lanham, MD: 

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006, p. 93.

62. Kagan, p. 38.

63. David Kerr, “The Sino-Russian Partnership and U.S. 

Policy Toward North Korea, “From Hegemony to Concert in 

Northeast Asia,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. XXXXIX, No. 

3, September, 2005, pp. 411-437. 

64. Robert Jervis, “U.S. Grand Strategy: Mission Impossible,” 

Naval War College Review, Summer 1998, pp. 22-36; Richard K. 

Betts, “Power, Prospects, and Priorities: Choices for Strategic 

Change,” Naval War College Review, Winter 1997, pp. 9-22; John 

C. Gannon, “Intelligence Challenges Through 2015,” odci.gov/cia/

publicaffairs/speeches/gannon_speech_05022000.html.

65. Constantine C. Menges, China: The Gathering Threat, 

Nashville, TN: Nelson Current Publishers, 2005.

 

66. Ibid; Kerr, pp. 411-437; Minxin Pei, Assertive Pragmatism: 

China’s Economic Rise and its Impact on Chinese Foreign Policy,

Proliferation Papers, Institut Francais des Relations Internationales 

(IFRI), 2006, p. 17, www.ifri.org.

67. Kim Yo’ng Hu’i, “The Relevance of Central Asia,” Seoul 

JoongAng Ilbo Internet Version, in English, July 11, 2005, FBIS SOV, 

July 11, 2005.
115

68. Lyle Goldstein and Vitaly Kozyrev, “China, Japan. and the 

Scramble for Siberia,” Survival, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1, Spring, 2006, 

pp. 175-176.

69. John J. Tkacik, Jr., “How the PLA Sees North Korea,” 

Andrew Scobell and Larry M. Wortzel, eds., Shaping China’s 

Security Environment: The Role of the People’s Liberation Army, 

Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War 

College, 2006, pp. 160-163.

70. James Brian McNabb, “The Unanticipated Utility of U.S. 

Security Structures: Avoiding Cold War II in Central Asia,” 

Comparative Strategy, Vol. XXV, No. 4, October-December, 2006, 

pp. 307-327.

71. Lukanov; Strokan, FBIS SOV, February 5, 2007; “Russia: 

U.S. Election Expected to Chill Relations Further,” Radio Free Europe 

Radio Liberty, November 9, 2006; Sergei Rogov, “Washington’s 

Attitude Toward Us Won’t Change,” Moscow, Izvestiya, in 

Russian, November 9, 2006, FBIS SOV, November 9, 2006. Rogov 

is the director of the Institute for the Study of the United States 

and Canada (ISKAN) in Moscow.

72. Moscow, ITAR-TASS, in Russian, July 6, 2006, FBIS SOV, 

July 6, 2006; Andrei Zolotov, Jr., “Russia Experts Granted Ample 

Answers to Softball Questions,” Russia Profile, September 10, 

2006, quoted in Johnson’s Russia List, No. 204-2006, September 

10, 2006; Stephen Boykevich, “Putin Says Russia Doesn’t Need 

Any Lectures,” Moscow Times, July 17, 2006, retrieved from LexisNexis.

73. John B. Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow: A Plan of the Yeltsin 

‘Family’ to Destabilize Russia,” Paper Presented to the Project on 

Systemic Change and International Security in Russia and the 

New States of Eurasia, Johns Hopkins University, Nitze School of 

Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, 2004.

74. Ibid; Stephen Blank, “The 18th Brumaire of Vladimir Putin,” 

in Uri Ra’anan, ed., Flawed Succession: Russia’s Power Transfer 

Crises, Foreword by Robert Conquest, Lanham, MD: Lexington 

Books for Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, pp. 133-170. 
116

75. Wojciech Kononczuk, “The ‘Yukos Affair,’ Its Motives and 

Implications,” No. 24, Warsaw: Center for Eurasian Studies, 2006, 

www.osw.waw.pl.

76. Gavrov, pp. 22-23; Lilia Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia, Antonia 

Bouis, trans., Revised and Expanded Edition, Washington, DC: 

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005.

77. Vitaly Shlykov, “The Economics of Defense in Russia 

and the Legacy of Structural Militarization,” in Steven E. Miller 

and Dmitri Trenin, eds., The Russian Military: Power and Purpose, 

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, pp. 160-182; Vitaly Shlykov, 

“The Anti-Oligarchy Campaign and its Implications for Russia’s 

Security,” European Security, Vol. XVII, No. 2, 2004, pp. 11-128; 

Leonid Kosals, “Criminal Influence/Criminal Control Over the 

Russian Military-Industrial Complex in the Context of Global 

Security,” NATO Defense College Research Paper, No. 1, March 2004, 

pp. 6-8; “Moscow,” Ekho Moskvy in Russian, June 4, 2004, FBIS SOV, 

June 4, 2004; Moscow, ITAR-TASS, April 14, 2005, FBIS SOV April 

14, 2005; Moscow Center TV in Russian, September 30, 2003; FBIS 

SOV, October 1, 2003; Moscow, Moskovskaya Pravda, in Russian, 

April 17, 2003, FBIS SOV, April 17, 2003; Moscow, “Interview With 

OAO Gipromez General Director Vitaly Rogozhin, “Rossiyskaya 

Gazeta, in Russian, July 13, 2005, FBIS SOV, July 13, 2005; Bugajski,

Cold Peace; Krickus; Smith. 

78. Interview With Director General of the Political 

Technologies Center, Igor Bunin, Ezhednevnaya Gazeta, March 

26, 2004, www.fednews.ru.

79. Stephen E. Hanson, “The Uncertain Future of Russia’s 

Weak State Authoritarianism,” East European Politics and Societies, 

Vol. XXI, No. 1, January, 2007, p. 69.

80. Timofei Bordachev, “Russia’s Europe Dilemma: 

Democratic Partner vs. Authoritarian Satellite,” Andrew Kuchins 

and Dmitri Trenin, eds., Russia: The Next Ten Years, A Collection of 

Essays to Mark Ten Years of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Moscow: 

Carnegie Center, 2004, p. 120. 

 81. Jim Rutenberg, “Putin Offers to Expand Plan for Missile 

Defense,” www.nytimes.com, July 2, 2007.
117

82. Peter Finn, “In Russia A Secretive Force Widens: Putin 

Led Regrouping of Security Services,” Washington Post, December 

12, 2006, p. A25; Nicole Gallina, Law and Order in Russia: The 

Well-Arranged Police State, International Relations and Security 

Network, www.isn.ethz.ch, 2007, makes the explicit connection 

between the tsarist police state rooted in German cameralism of 

the XVII-XVIII centuries and Putin’s Russia.

83. Hanson, pp. 76-77.

84. Lilya Shevtsova, “Anti-Westernism Is the New National 

Idea,” The Moscow Times, August 7, 2007, p. 9. 

85. Vladimr Shlapentokh, “Are Today’s Authoritarian Leaders 

Doomed to Be Indicted When They Leave Office? The Russian and 

Other Post-Soviet Cases,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies,

Vol. XXXIX, No. 2, Autumn, 2006, pp. 462-463.

86. Minxin Pei, Assertive Pragmatism: China’s Economic Rise and 

Its Impact on Chinese Foreign Policy, IFRI Proliferation Papers, No. 

15, Paris, Institut Francais des Relations Internationales, 2006, p. 

17, www.ifri.org.

87. “Experts Say ‘Main External Threat’ to Russia Coming 

From US, Central Asia,” RIA Novosti, October 2, 2005.

88. Moscow, ITAR-TASS, in English, June 28, 2006, FBIS 

SOV, June 28, 2006; Jim Hoagland, “Don’t Give Up on Russia,” 

Washington Post, November 17, 2006, p. A25.

89. “Press Conference Following Talks With German 

Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Bocharov Ruchei, Sochi, January 21, 

2007, www.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2007/01/21/1910.

90. Sergei Lavrov, “Russian Foreign Policy Going Strong,” 

Moscow, Vesti TV, in Russian, September 1, 2006; FBIS SOV, 

September 1, 2006; FBIS SOV, April 24, 2007.

91. Colonel A. A. Paderin, “Policy and Military Strategy: A 

Unity Lesson,” Military Thought, in English, June 30, 2006, FBIS 

SOV, July 14, 2006.
118

92. Alexei Pico, “Washington-Style Forecasting: Has a Chill 

Come to US-Russian Relations,” Moscow, Krasnaya Zvezda, in 

Russian, June 10, 2006, FBIS SOV, June 10, 2006; Open Source 

Center, “Analysis: Anti-US Rhetoric Grows in Russia,” FBIS SOV, 

July 11, 2006.

 

93. Richard Weitz, Russian-American Security Cooperation After 

St. Petersburg: Challenges and Opportunities, Carlisle Barracks, PA: 

Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2007; Gunnar 

Arbman and Charles Thornton, Russia’s Tactical and Nuclear 

Weapons Part I: Background and Policy Issues, Stockholm, Swedish 

Defense Research Agency, 2003, Part II: Technical Issues and Policy 

Recommendations, Stockholm: Swedish Defense Research Agency, 

2005.

94. Weitz; “Russia Starts Producing Topol-M Missile.”

95. Ibid.

96. Baluyevsky, “This Shield Is Aimed Against Russia,” 

Warsaw, Dziennik, in Polish, September 6, 2006, FBIS SOV, 

September 8, 2006.

97. Simon Saradzhyan, “Military to Get $189BN Overhaul,” 

Moscow Times, February 8, 2007; “Russia to Put 50 Topol-M 

Millie Systems on Duty Before 2015, “RIA Novosti, February 7, 

2007; Vladimir Isachenkov, “Weapons Plan Strives to Beat Soviet 

Readiness,” Washington Times, February 8, 2007, p. 13; “Russian 

Defense Chief Unveils Army Spending Spree,” defensenews.com, 

February 8, 2007.

98. “Osnovnye Polozheniia Voennoi Doktriny Rossiiskoi 

Federatsii,” Rossiiskie Vesti, November, 19, 1993.

99. Pavel Felgenhauer, “Ivanov Comment Suggests Moscow 

Ignoring Nuclear Weapons Agreement with Washington,” 

Eurasian Daily Monitor, September 13, 2006.

100. “Russia Wants U.S. To Sign Deal Saying Militaries Don’t 

Target Each Other,” Associated Press, February 6, 2007.
119

101. Ibid.

102. “Analysis Russian Reactions to US Missile Defense Plan,” 

OSC Analysis, FBIS SOV, February 8, 2007, Bloomfield, pp. 57-58.

103. The treaty and accompanying documentation can be 

found at www.state.gov/t/ac/trt/18016.htm.

104. “U.S. Air Shield Possible Only With Russia’s Involvement, 

FM,” RIA Novosti, March 23, 2007.

105. Moscow, ITAR-TASS, in English, July 2, 2007, FBIS SOV, 

July 2, 2007.

106. Baluyevsky Interview, FBIS SOV, February 21, 2007.

107. “Interview with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov,” 

Rossisyskaya Gazeta, February 21-28, 2007, www.mid.ru.

108. Nuclear Posture Review www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/

library/policy/dod/npr.htm; Kerry M. Kartcher, “U.S. Nuclear 

Weapons and Nonproliferation: Dispelling the Myths,” 

Presentation to the Carnegie Moscow Center, February 2, 2007, 

available at www.carnegie.ru/en/pubs/media/101192007.02.02.

Presentation.ppt.

109. Alexei Arbatov and General (Ret.) Vladimir Dvorkin, 

Beyond Nuclear Deterrence: Transforming the U.S.-Russian Equation, 

Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 

2006, John F. Steinbruner, Foreword.

110. FBIS SOV, February 26, 2007.

111. “U.S. Air Shield Possible Only With Russia’s Involvement, 

FM.”

112. David S. McDonough, “Nuclear Superiority: The ‘New 

Triad’ and the Evolution of Nuclear Strategy,” Adelphi Paper, No. 

383, 2006; Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “The Rise of U.S. 

Nuclear Primacy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. LXXXV, No. 2, MarchApril 2006, pp. 42-54; Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “The End 
120

of MAD?: The Nuclear Dimensions of U.S. Primacy,” International 

Security, Vol. XX, No. 4, Spring 2006, pp. 7-44; George Bunn and 

Christopher F. Chyba, eds., U.S. Nuclear Policy: Confronting Today’s 

Threats, Foreword, William J. Perry, Washington, DC: Brookings 

Institution Press, 2006.

113. David McDonough, “The US Nuclear Shift to the Pacific,” 

RUSI Journal, April, 2006, pp. 64-68.

114. Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Nuclear 

Capabilities: Report Summary, Washington, DC: Office of the Under 

Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistic, 

December 2006, pp. 11-12.

115. Ibid., pp. 12-13.

116. Ibid.

117. “US Report Warns of Russian Nuclear Threat,” Jane’s 

Intelligence Digest, January 26, 2007, jid.janes.com.

118. Igor Plugtarev and Viktor Myasnikov, “Vice Prime 

Minister Sergey Ivanov, Governors, and Twenty Thousand 

Soldiers,” Moscow, Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, in Russian, 

September 29, 2006, FBIS SOV, October 4, 2006.

119. Aktual’nye Zadachi Razvitie Vooruzhennykh Sil’ Rossiiskoi 

Federatsii, Moscow, 2003, www.mil.ru (Henceforth Aktual’nye 

Zadachi).

120. Lieber and Press, “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,” 

pp. 42-54; Lieber and Press, “The End of MAD?: The Nuclear 

Dimensions of U.S. Primacy,” pp. 7-44. 

121. Mcdonough, “The US Nuclear Shift to the Pacific,” p. 68.

122. Dvorkin, p. 9.

123. Kartcher.

124. For example, “US Missile Plans ‘A Clear Threat’ to 

Moscow: Russian General,” AFP, January 22, 2007; “Russia 
121

Questions Target of US Anti-Missile Shield,” Reuters, January 24, 

2007; Sergei Blagov, “Iran threat Hovers Over US-Russia Missile 

Dispute,” CNSNews.com www.crosswalk.comnew/1465996.html, 

January 29, 2006; Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Newsline, January 

25, 2007.

125. “Interview With Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: 

We Want to Be Heard,” Der Spiegel, February 5, 2007, Johnson’s 

Russia List, 2007-#30, February 7, 2007.

126. “Threat to Russia May Come From Several Sides,” ITARTass, February 9, 2007, retrieved from Lexis-Nexis; Baluyevsky, 

“The Shield Is Aimed Against Russia,” FBIS SOV, September 8, 

2006.

 

127. Ibid; “Russia’s Ivanov Slams U.S. Missile Shield Plans 

in Europe,” RIA Novosti, February 9, 2007, “Press Conference 

with Political Analyst Alexei Arbatov and Vice President of the 

Academy of Geopolitical Problems Leonid Ivashov on Russian 

Foreign Policy,” RIA Novosti, February 6, 2007, www.fednews.

ru; Alexei Arbatov, “An Unnecessary and Dangerous Step,” 

Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, No. 7, March, 2007, www.

america-russia.net/eng/security/143683092.

128. Ibid.; “Russia Wants U.S. To Sign Deal Saying Militaries 

Don’t Target Each Other,” Associated Press, February 6, 2007.

 

129. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, “Interview on Fox 

News Sunday With Chris Wallace,” February 25, 2007, www.state.

gov/secretary/rm/2007/feb/81037.htm.

130. Lieber and Press, “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,” 

pp. 42-54; Lieber and Press, “The End of MAD?: The Nuclear 

Dimensions of U.S. Primacy,” pp. 7-44.

131. Nikolai Sokov, “Second thoughts About a First Strike,” 

Nonproliferation Review, Vol. XIV, No. 1, March, 2007, p. 141.

132. Stephen Blank, The NATO-Russian Partnership: A Marriage 

of Convenience or a Troubled Partnership? Carlisle Barracks, PA: 

Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2006.
122

133. Moscow, Agentstvo Voyennykh Novostey Internet Version, 

in English, February 10, 2006, FBIS SOV, February 10, 2006.

134. Felgenhauer.

135. Nikolay Poroskov, “The Last Argument of the Generals: 

The Topic of Tactical Nuclear Weapons Will Continue to Be Raised 

Repeatedly,” Voyenno-Promyshlennyi Kurier, in Russian, July 19, 

2006, FBIS SOV, July 19, 2006.

136. “Interview With Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: 

We Want to Be Heard.” 

137. Rukavishnikov, p. 60.

138. “Bush Troop Redeployment Plan: A Threat to Russia?” 

pp. 1-4.

139. Blank, The NATO-Russian Partnership: A Marriage of 

Convenience or a Troubled Partnership?

140. For example, “Russian Defense Minister Calls START 

Treaty ‘Cold War Relic’,” Moscow, ITAR-TASS in Russian, 

February 11, 2007, FBIS SOV, February, 11, 2007.

141. “Sergey Lavrov: CFE Treaty No Longer Relevant,” The 

Moscow Times, February 19, 2007; Poslanie; “CFE Treaty on Verge 

of Collapse, Iran Threat Overblown-Russian Gen.” 

142. Guy Dinmore, Demetri Sevatopulo, and Hubert Wetzel; 

“Russia Confronted Rumsfeld With Threat to Quit Key Nuclear 

Treaty,” Financial Times, March 9, 2005, p. 1. 

143. “Scrapping Medium-Range Ballistic Missiles a MistakeIvanov-1,” RIA Novosti, February 7, 2007.

144. Demetri Sevastopoulo, Neil Buckley, and Daniel Dombey, 

“Russia Threatens to Quit Arms Treaty,” Financial Times, February 

15, 2007, www.ft.com.

 
123

145. Martin Sieff, “Russia Rattles Missile Treaty,” UPI, March 

2, 2006.

146. Interfax, February 27, 2006.

147. Sokov, p. 141.

 

148. Smith, p. 13.

149. “US Defense Chief Sees Problems in Russian Withdrawal 

from INF,” ITAR-TASS, February 16, 2007.

150. “The ISCIP Analyst,” Vol. XIII, No. 9, March 8, 2007, 

Boston, MA: Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and 

Policy, Boston University, www.bu.edu/iscip.

 151. “Cold War was ‘Paradise’ Compared to Modern 

Threats—Ivanov,” RIA Novosti, January 16, 2007; Sergei Ivanov, 

“Russia Must Be Strong,” Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2006, p. 

14.

152. “Russia’s Angry New Military Doctrine,” Jane’s Intelligence 

Digest, August 2007.

153. “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly of the 

Russian Federation,” May 10, 2006, www.kremlin.ru/eng/

speeches/2006/05/10/1823_type70029type82912_105566.shtml.

154. Ibid.

155. Ibid.

156. Ibid.

 

157. China’s National Defense in 2004, Beijing: State Council 

Information Office, December 27, 2004, pp. 2-4; China’s National 

Defense in 2006, Beijing: State Council Information Office, 

December 29, 2006, pp. 2-4, www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-

12/29/content_771191.htm.

158. Moscow, Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, in Russian, 

December 5, 2003, FBIS SOV, December 5, 2003.
124

159. Moscow, ITAR-TASS, in English, October 2, 2003, FBIS 

SOV, October 3, 2003.

160. Moscow, Interfax in Russian, October 2, 2003, FBIS SOV, 

October 3, 2003.

 

161. Conversations with Russian officials and analysts in 

Moscow and Helsinki, June 1999; Martin Nesirsky, “Russia Says 

Threshold Lower for Nuclear Weapons,” Reuters, December 17, 

1999.

162. Aktual’nye Zadachi, pp. 16, 18.

163. Viktor Myasnikov, “The Time of Nuclear Truncheons 

Has Passed,” Moscow, Nezavisismoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, 

in Russian, July 7, 2006, FBIS SOV, July 7, 2006; Amy F. Woolf, 

“Nuclear Arms Control: The Strategic Offensive Reductions 

Treaty,” Congressional Research Service, Report to Congress, 

January 3, 2007, RL31448, pp. 21-22; Peter Baker and Robin Wright, 

“U.S. and Russia Vow Further Cuts in Nuclear Arms,” Washington 

Post, July 4, 2007, p. 12.

164. Vladimir Putin, Speech at Meeting with the Ambassadors 

and Permanent Representatives of the Russian Federation, 

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Moscow, June 27, 2006, www.president.

ru.

165. FBIS SOV, September 1, 2006.

 

166. Ibid.; Viktor Yasmann and Liz Fuller, “Russia Threatens 

to Withdraw from the CFE Treaty,” Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty 

Russian Political Weekly, Vol. VI, No. 2, January 26, 2006.

167. Sergei Ivanov, “Maturing Partnership,” NATO Review, 

Winter, 2005, www.nato.int/docu/review/2005/issue4/english/special.

htm; Baluyevsky, “NATO Expansion Will Strike a Fatal Blow to 

the Treaty on Conventional Arms in Europe,” Izvestiya, March 3, 

2004, retrieved from Lexis-Nexis.
125

168. Todd W. Fields, “Eastward Bound: The Strategy and 

Politics of Repositioning U.S. Military Bases in Europe,” Journal of 

Public and International Affairs, Vol. XV, Spring 2004, p. 88.

169. Ibid.; see also Zaccor’s remarks.

170. “Moscow’s Plan To Build Military Base in Moldova 

Rejected-Voronin,” Interfax, October 30, 2005.

171. Gunnar Arbman and Charles Thornton, Russia’s Tactical 

and Nuclear Weapons Part I: Background and Policy Issues, Stockholm, 

Swedish Defense Research Agency, 2003; Part II: Technical Issues 

and Policy Recommendations, Stockholm: Swedish Defense Research 

Agency, 2005.

172. Sergei Ivanov, “Russia Must Be Strong,” Wall Street Journal, 

January 11, 2006, p. 14.

173. Vitaly Moroz, “Konstantin Sivkov of the Center of 

Military Strategic Studies of the General Staff is Worried by the 

Threat Posed by NATO,” Krasnaya Zvezda, July 13, 2005, p. 1.

174. Ibid.

175. Ivanov, “Russia Must Be Strong,” p. 14.

176. “Minister Wants Full Transparency in Russian-NATO 

Relations,” Baltic News Service, December 27, 2005, retrieved 

from Lexis-Nexis; Ivanov, “Maturing Partnership.”

177. Arbatov, “An Unnecessary and Dangerous Step.”

 

178. Peter Baker, “U.S. and Russia to Enter Civilian Nuclear 

Pact,” Washington Post, July 8, 2006, p. A1.

179. “RF President Putin’s Speech to the Federal Assembly, 

May 10, 2006”; Baker and Wright, p. 12.

180. Nicholas Kralev, “Russia, U.S. to Discuss START,” 

Washington Times, March 6, 2007.
126

181. “Confronting Today’s Threats,” George Bunn and 

Christopher H. Chyba, eds., U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, 

Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006.

 182. Stephen Blank, “Undeterred: The Return of Nuclear War,” 

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Vol. I, No. 2, Summer/

Fall, 2000, pp. 55-63.

183. Phillip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the 

Course of History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, pp. 634-638; 

Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Stephen Welch, “Russia and the 

United States After 9/11,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 

XVII, No. 2, 2005, pp. 282-288.

184. Remarks of Coit D. Blacker in “A World Remade: The 

United States and Rising Powers in the 21st Century,” Leveraging 

US Strength in an Uncertain World, Washington, DC: Stanley 

Foundation Conference on National and Global Security, December 

7, 2006, secure.stanleyfoundation.org/registration/securityconference/

panels/rising_powers, accessed on December 19, 2006.

185. Trenin, “Russia Redefines Itself and Its Relations With 

the West,” Washington Quarterly, Vol. XXX, No. 2, pp. 95-105.

186. Lavrov, “Vneshnepoliticheskaya Samostoyaltel’nost’ 

Rossii, Bezuslovyi Imperativ”, (“Russia’s Foreign Policy 

Autonomy is an Unconditional Imperative,”) Moskovskiye Novosti,

January 19, 2008, http://www.mn.ru/issue.php?2007-1-56.

 187. Francesca Mereu, “Putin’s Campaign has Kiev on Edge,” 

Moscow Times.com, October 28, 2004, www.moscowtimes.com/

stories/2004/10/28/001.html.

188. Eugene Huskey “The State-Legal Administration and the 

Politics of Redundancy,” Post-Soviet Studies, Vol. XI, No. 2, 1995, 

pp. 115-143; Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir 

Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution, New York: Scribner’s, 2005, 

p. 417; Steven Rosefielde, Russia in the 21st Century: The Prodigal 

Superpower, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004; 

Marshall T. Poe, The Russian Moment in World History, Princeton, 
127

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; Stefan Hedlund, Russian Path 

Dependence, London: Routledge, 2005; Emil Pain, “Will Russia 

Transform Into a Nationalist Empire,” Russia in Global Affairs, 

Vol. III, No. 2, April-June, 2005, pp. 71-80; Stephen Kotkin, “It’s 

Gogol Again,” Paper presented as part of the project The Energy 

Dimension in Russian Global Strategy, James A. Baker III Institute 

for Public Policy, Rice University, Houston; and Richard Pipes,

Russia Under the Old Regime, New York: Scribner’s, 1975. These are 

only a few of the authors who now see the vitality of the Tsarist 

metaphor as a means of explaining Putin’s Russia.

 

189. Dmitri Trenin and Bobo Lo, The Landscape of Russian 

Foreign Policy Decision-Making, Moscow: Moscow Center of the 

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005, p. 9.

 

190. U.S. Department of State, Briefing En Route to Moscow 

with Secretary Condoleeza Rice, April 19, 2005, www.state.gov.

191. Janusz Bugajski, Cold Peace: Russia’s New Imperialism: 

Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 

2004; Richard Krickus, Iron Troikas. 

192. Francesca Mereu, “Putin’s Campaign has Kiev on Edge,” 

Moscow Times.com, October 28, 2004, www.moscowtimes.com/

stories/2004/10/28/001.html.

193. Igor Torbakov, “Russia Plays up Kosovo Precedent for 

Potential Application in the Caucasus,” Eurasia Insight, April 12, 

2006.

194. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 

1994, p. 152. More recently, we should take for example the 1999 

agreement at the OSCE’s Istanbul conference in 1999 to remove 

troops from Moldova and Georgia. 

195. Lilia Shevtsova, “Russia 2005: The Logic of Backsliding,” 

New Europe Review, 2005, www.neweuropereview.com?English/

Shevtsova.cfm.

196. Heinrich Vogel, “Europe and Russia—a Partnership 

Without a Vision,” Johnson’s Russia List, February 10, 2006, 

available from www.cdi.org.
128

197. Ibid.

 

198. Interfax, November 11, 2005.

199. “Lavrov: West Needs to Acknowledge Russia’s Interests,” 

Interfax, November 11, 2005.

200. Dmitry Furman, “A Cold War Without Words: Democratic 

Camouflage Keeps Russia from Properly Formulating Its Real 

Policy in the CIS,” Moscow, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, in Russian, 

March 27, 2006, FBIS SOV, March 27, 2006.

201. Trenin, “Russia Leaves the West,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 

LXXXV, No. 4, July-August, 2006, pp. 85-96.

202. John Loewenhardt, “Russia and Europe: Growing Apart 

Together,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. VII, No. 1, WinterSpring 2000, p. 171.

203. Shlapentokh, pp. 463-464.

 204. “Russia At Risk of Collapsing, Putin Says,” Associated 

Press, April 18, 2005, retrieved from Lexis-Nexis; “Interview 

with Chief of the Presidential Staff Dmitri Medvedev,” Ekspert 

Weekly, April 5, 2005, retrieved from Lexis-Nexis; “Vladislav 

Surkov’s Secret Speech: How Russia Should Fight International 

Conspiracy,” www.mosnews.com, July 12, 2005; “Interview with 

Vladislav Surkov,” Moscow, Ekho Moskvy, FBIS SOV, September 

29, 2004.

205. Lieutenant General V. I. Ostankov, “Geopolitical 

Problems and Possible Solutions in the Context of RF Security,” 

Voyennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought), No. 1, 2005, p. 23.

206. “Moscow, NTV in Russian, July 2, 2005, FBIS SOV, July 

2, 2005; Charles Clover, “Ukraine Looks East,” FT.com, January 

21, 2001, p. 2; Charles Clover, “Kiev Warned on Neutral Policy,” 

Financial Times, July 12, 2001, p. 1.
129

207. Stephen Blank, “The Values Gap Between Moscow and 

the West: Sovereignty at Issue,” The Diplo-Goat, No. 2, 2007, www.

diplogo.at.

208. Vladislav V. Froltsov, “The Post-Soviet Puzzle and 

Western Democracies,” Connections: The Quarterly Journal, Winter 

2005, pp. 99-101.

209. Thomas Ambrosio, “The Political Success of RussiaBelarus Relations: Insulating Minsk from a Color Revolution,” 

Demokratizatsiya, Vol. XIV, No. 3, Summer, 2006, pp. 407-434; 

Thomas Ambrosio, “Reacting to the Color Revolutions: Russia’s 

Antagonistic Policy Toward Ukraine and Georgia,” Paper 

presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies 

Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, February 28, 

2007.

 

210. Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Newsline, January 11, 

2006.

 

211. “Interview With Sergei Ivanov,” Der Spiegel, November 

28, 2006, mil.ru/eng/1866/12078/details/index.shtml?id=18788; 

“Interview With Sergei Yastrzhembsky,” Ekho Moskvy, May 22, 

2004, retrieved from Lexis-Nexis.

212. Natalia Ratiani, “The European Union Is Tired of Making 

Exceptions for Russia,” Izvestiya, February 26, 2004, p. 2, retrieved 

from Lexis-Nexis.

213. Vitaly Tretiakov, “Putin’s Pragmatic Foreign Policy,” 

International Affairs, No. 3, 2002, p. 19.

214. Henk Houweling and Mehdi Parvizi Amineh, 

“Introduction,” International Studies in Sociology and Social 

Anthropology, Mehdi Parvizi Amineh and Henk Houweling, eds., 

Central Eurasia in Global Politics: Conflict, Security, and Development, 

Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004, p. 15.

 215. Bugajski; Krickus; Keith C. Smith.

216. Trenin, “Russia Leaves the West,” pp. 85-96; Dmitri 
130

Trenin, “The Post-Imperial Project,” Moscow, Nezavisimaya GazetaDipkurier, No. 2, January 31, 2006, retrieved from Lexis-Nexis.

217. Stanislav Secrieriu, “Russia’s Foreign Policy Under Putin: 

‘CIS Project’ Renewed,” UNISCI Discussion Papers, No. 10, January 

2006, p. 291.

218. Maura Reynolds, “Moscow Has Chechnya Back—Now 

What?” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2000.

219. Quoted in Boris Rumer, “Central Asia: At the End of the 

Transition,” Boris Rumer, ed., Central Asia At the End of Transition,

Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe & Co. Inc., 2005, p. 47.

220. Quoted in Michael Emerson, “From an Awkward 

Partnership to a Greater Europe: A European Perspective,” Dana 

Allin and Michael H. Emerson, eds., Readings in European Security, 

Vol. III, Brussels and London; Center for European Policy Studies 

and International Institute for Security Studies, 2005, p. 19. 

221. E.G., Alexei Pushkov, “Quo Vadis?: Scenarios for Russia,” 

International Affairs, No. 3, 2002, p. 71.

222. Julie Wilhelmsen and Geir Flikke, “Evidence of Russia’s 

Bush Doctrine in the CIS,” European Security, Vol. XIV, No. 3, 

September 2005, pp. 387-417.

223. “Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues and 

U.S. Interests,” CRS Report for Congress, Updated January 18, 

2007.

224. “Testimony of Walter Slocombe; Michta, p. 93.

225. Dimitri K. Simes, “End the Crusade,” The National Interest, 

No. 87, January-February, 2007, p. 9.

 

226. Dov Lynch, “Same View, Different Realities: EU and US 

Policy Toward Russia,” Marcin Zaborowski, ed., Friends Again?: 

EU-US Relations After the Crisis, Paris: European Union Institute 

for Security Studies, 2006, p. 166.
131

227. See, for example, Sergei Karaganov, “Dangerous 

Relapses,” Russia in Global Affairs, Vol. IV, No. 2, April-June, 2006, 

pp. 82-85.

228. “Closed-Type Democracy,” www.gazeta.ru, October 6, 

2005, cited in Johnson’s Russia List, October 6, 2005, available at 

www.cdi.org; Natalya Gevorkyan, “The Bottom Line,” Moscow, 

Kommersant, in Russian, October 17, 2005, FBIS SOV, October 17, 

2005.

229. Moscow, ITAR-TASS, in English, November 21, 2004, 

FBIS SOV, November 21, 2004.

230. Heinrich Vogel, “Prospects for Coordination of Western 

Policies,” Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik: Berlin; and the 

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hannes Adomeit 

and Anders Aslund, eds., Russia Versus the United States and 

Europe—or “Strategic Triangle,” Berlin, 2005, p. 92.

231. Ron Susskind, The One-Percent Solution: Deep Inside 

America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, New York: Simon 

& Schuster, 2006, pp. 224-228, 307-308; Peter Baker, “Russian 

Relations Under Scrutiny,” Washington Post, February 26, 

2006, p. 1; John Vinocur, “Putin’s Brazen Moves Force Bush to 

Recalibrate,” International Herald Tribune, February 27, 2006, p. 2, 

retrieved from Lexis-Nexis; “Russia: Friend or Foe of the USA?” 

prvda.ru, February 27, 2006, from Johnson’s Russia List, February 

27, 2006, available at www.cdi.org. On Korea, see C. Kenneth 

Quinones, “Dualism in the Bush Administration’s North Korea 

Policy,” Asian Perspective, Vol. XXVII, No. 1, 2003, pp. 197-224; 

David Ignatius, “A CEO’s Weaknesses,” Washington Post Weekly, 

September 12-18, 2005, p. 27; Karin Lee and Adam Miles, “North 

Korea on Capitol Hill,” Asian Perspective, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, 2004, 

pp. 185-207; Robert M. Hathaway and Jordan Tama, “The U.S. 

Congress and North Korea During the Clinton years,” Asian 

Survey, Vol. XLIV, No. 5, September-October 2004, pp. 711-733; 

David E. Sanger, “Aftereffects: Nuclear Standoff, Administration 

Divided Over North Korea,” New York Times, April 21, 2003, p. 

15; David Rennie, “Rumsfeld Calls for Regime Change in North 

Korea,” Daily Telegraph, April 22, 2003; Gordon Fairclough, “Talks 

Display U.S. Rift on Pyongyang,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2004, 
132

p. 9; Bill Gertz, “USA Considers Reactor Deal With North Korea,” 

Washington Times, May 19, 2004, cited by Aidan Foster-Carter, 

“Pyongyang Watch: Six-Party Glacier: Did the US Melt?” Asia 

Times Online, June 28, 2004, www.atimes.com. The author can attest 

to those policy divisions on Central Asia from his conversations 

with U.S. officials from the Department of State, Defense, and 

the National Security Council over the period May-2005 to the 

present. See also “The Pentagon’s Mission Creep,” Jane’s Foreign 

Report, June 1, 2006, www.4janes.com/subscribe frp/doc_view.jsp?K2 

DocKey=/content1/janesdat/mags.

232. Jeffrey Donovan, “Energy: EU Throws Gauntlet Down 

to Russia’s Gazprom,” Radio Fee Europe Radio Liberty Features, 

September 19, 2007.

 

233. Author’s conversations with U.S. officials, 2005-06; Baker; 

Vinocur; “Russia Friend or Foe of the USA?”

234. Lynch, pp. 168-169; Richard Wolffe and Eve Conant, 

“The Problem with Putin,” Newsweek, May 9, 2005, p. 49; Fred 

Hyatt, “Silent on Putin’s Slide,” Washington Post, October 3, 2005, 

www.washingtonpost.com; Sergei Chirkin, “Washington Promotes 

Democracy More Cautiously,” Rossiyskaya Gazeta, September 19, 

2005, p. 2, retrieved from Lexis-Nexis.

235. Michael McFaul, “American Efforts at Promoting Regime 

Change in the Soviet Union and Russia: Lessons Learned,” Paper 

Presented to the Annual Convention of the American Political 

Science Association, Washington, DC, September 2-4, 2005.

236. Lynch, pp. 168-169.

237. James Collins, “To Keep a Broad Dialogue Going,” 

International Affairs (Moscow), No. 4, 2007, p. 151.

238. Bugajski; Krickus; Keith C. Smith. 

239. “Russia Will Not Ratify Energy Charter Soon,” Alexander’s 

Gas and Oil Connection, Vol. XI, No. 13, July 7, 2006, www.gasandoil.

com/goc/news/ntr62775.htm; “Russia ‘Will Not Ratify Charter’,” 

Platt’s Oilgram, accessed on August 1, 2006, www.platts.com/

Natural%20Gas/Resources/News%20Features/Ukrainega/charter.xml.
133

240. James Sherr, “The School of Defeat,” Camberley, Surrey, 

United Kingdom: Conflict Studies Research Centre, Defence 

Academy of the United kingdom, 2006.

241. Statement of Steven R. Mann, Principal Deputy Assistant 

Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Before 

the House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee 

on the Middle East and Central Asia, July 25, 2006 (henceforth 

Mann, Testimony); Zeyno Baran, “Assessing Energy and Security 

issues in Central Asia,” Statement to the House Committee on 

International Relations, Subcommittee on the Middle East and 

Central Asia, July 25, 2006 (henceforth Baran, Testimony).

242. Quinones, pp. 197-224; Ignatius, p. 27; Lee and Miles, pp. 

185-207; Hathaway and Tama, pp. 711-733; Sanger, p. 15; Rennie; 

Fairclough, p. 9; David Kerr, “The Sino-Russian Partnership and 

U.S. Policy Toward North Korea, From Hegemony to Concert in 

Northeast Asia,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. XXXXIX, No. 

3, September, 2005, pp. 411-437; Constantin C. Menges, China: The 

Gathering Threat, Nashville, TN: Nelson Current Publishers, 2005.

243. Elaine Sciolino and Steven Erlanger, “U.S. and NATO 

Balk on Lebanon,” New York Times, July 25, 2006, p. 1; Michael 

Abramowitz and Robin Wright, “Lebanon Buffer Force Proposed,” 

Washington post, July 29, 2006, p. 1.

244. “Russia-Iran Military Cooperation Cannot Be Target of 

Sanctions-Lavrov,” Interfax, July 13, 2006; FBIS SOV, March 21, 

2007.

245. Author’s Conversations with officials from the National 

Security Council, Department of State, and Department of Defense, 

May 2005 to July 2006.

246. Jim Rutenberg and David Sanger, “Bush to Urge Putin 

to Aid in Pressuring Iran,” New York Times, July 1, 2007, www.

nytimes.com; M.K. Bhadrakumar, “Russia’s Tango With Tehran,” 

Asia Times Online, June 25, 2007, www.atimes.com; Moscow, 

Kommersant.com, in English, March 12, 2007; Moscow, Interfax, in 

English, March 12, 2007, FBIS SOV, March 12, 2007.
134

247. Stephen Blank,”Proliferation and Counterproliferation in 

Russian Strategy,” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, Vol. XII, No. 

1, Winter-Spring 2000, pp. 149-191; Jason D. Ellis and Geoffrey 

D. Kiefer, Combating Proliferation: Strategic Intelligence and Security 

Policy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, pp. 

36-54, 110-125, 197-199.

248. Kerr, pp. 411-437; Conversations with U.S. officials, June 

2005, December 2005, May 2006.

249. Ilan Berman, “Russia Shows US The Central Asian Door,” 

Jane’s Defence Weekly, July 18, 2007, www4.janes.com/subscribe/

jdw/doc_view.jsp?K2DocKey=/content1/janesdata/mags/jdw/history/

jdw2007/jdw33516.htm@current&Prod_Name=JDW&QueryText=.

250. Marcin Zaborowski, “Friends Reunited? Recalibrating 

Transatlantic Relations in the 21st Century,” Marcin Zaborowski, 

ed., Friends Again?: EU-US Relations After the Crisis, Paris: European 

Union Institute for Security Studies, 2006, p. 221.

251. Lynch, p. 170.

252. Jonathan Eyal, “NATO’s Summit: A Disappointment to 

the Alliance’s New Member States,” RUSI Newsbrief, Vol. XXVII, 

No. 1, January, 2007, pp. 1-2; Angela Stent, “Berlin’s Russia 

Challenge,” The National Interest, No. 88, March-April 2007, pp. 

46-51.

 

253. Conversations with U.S. officials, June 2005; Kerr, pp. 

411-437.

254. Ibid., more recently, see the Russo-Chinese reporting on 

Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Moscow on March 26-27, 

2007, which repeatedly stressed the identity of viewpoints of the 

two states on Korea and Asian-Pacific issues.

255. Ibid.; Alexander Zhebin, “The Bush Doctrine, Russia, and 

Korea,” in Mel Gurtov and Peter Van Ness, eds., Confronting the 

Bush Doctrine: Critical Views From Asia, Abingdon and New York: 

Routledge, 2005, p. 149.
135

256. Robert Jervis, “U.S. Grand Strategy: Mission Impossible,” 

Naval War College Review, Summer 1998, pp. 22-36; Richard K. 

Betts, “Power, Prospects, and Priorities: Choices for Strategic 

Change,” Naval War College Review, Winter 1997, pp. 9-22; John 

C. Gannon, “Intelligence Challenges Through 2015,” odci.gov/cia/

publicaffairs/speeches/gannon_speech_05022000.html.

257. Christopher Jones, “The Axis of Nonproliferation,” 

Problems of Post-Communism, Vol. LIII, No. 21, March-April 2006, 

pp. 3-16.

258. Thomas Friedman, “A Choice for the Rogues,” New York 

Times, August 2, 2006, www.nytimes.com.

259. Etel Solingen, Regional Orders at Century’s Dawn: Global 

and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

University Press, 1998.

260. Ibid.; Viktor Yasmann and Liz Fuller, “Russia Threatens 

to Withdraw from the CFE Treaty,” Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty 

Russian Political Weekly, Vol. VI, No. 2, January 26, 2006.

261. “Moscow’s Plan To Build Military Base in Moldova 

Rejected-Voronin,” Interfax, October 30, 2005.

262. Sergei Ivanov, “Maturing Partnership,” NATO Review, 

Winter 2005, www.nato.int/docu/review/2005/issue4/english/special.

htm; Yuri Baluyevsky, First Deputy chief of the Russian General 

Staff, “NATO Expansion Will Strike a Fatal Blow to the Treaty on 

Conventional Arms in Europe,” Izvestiya, March 3, 2004, retrieved 

from Lexis-Nexis.

263. Gunnar Arbman and Charles Thornton, Russia’s Tactical 

and Nuclear Weapons Part I: Background and Policy Issues, Stockholm, 

Swedish Defense Research Agency, 2003, Part II: Technical Issues 

and Policy Recommendations, Stockholm: Swedish Defense Research 

Agency, 2005.
136

264. Sergei Blagov, “Missiles for Kaliningrad,” ISN 

Security watch, July 16, 2007, www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.

cfm?id=17863.

265. Nikolai Sokov, “‘Tactical Nuclear Weapons’ Scare of 

2001,” CNS Reports, January 4, 2001, cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/tnw.

htm.

266. Peter Baker, “U.S. and Russia to Enter Civilian Nuclear 

Pact,” Washington Post, July 8, 2006, p. A1.

267. “RF President Putin’s Speech to the Federal Assembly,” 

May 10, 2006; Baker and Wright, p. 12. 

268. Phillip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the 

Course of History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, 634-638; 

Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Stephen Welch, “Russia and the 

United States After 9/11,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 

XVII, No. 2, 2005, pp. 282-288.

269. Putin, Interviews; Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Newsline, 

May 17, 2006; Moscow, Interfax, in English, September 1, 2005, FBIS 

SOV, September 1, 2005; Moscow, Interfax Russia & CIS Diplomatic 

Panorama, February 10, 2005, FBIS SOV, February 10, 2005.

270. Moscow, Interfax Russia & CIS Diplomatic Panorama, 

February 14, 2005, FBIS SOV, February 14, 2005.

271. Moscow, ITAR-TASS, December 8, 2005, FBIS SOV, 

December 8, 2005.

272. Daniel Kimmage, “Analysis U.S. Aid to Uzbekistan; 

Carrots and Sticks,” Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Features, July 

22, 2004.

273. Ibid.

274. Leonid Gankin, “Toward the Summit: Kowtowing 

Toward the East George Bush Finds Approach to Vladimir Putin,” 

Moscow, Kommersant, February 24, 2005, FBIS SOV, February 24, 

2005.
137

275. Tesmur Basilia, “Eurasian Commentary,” Jan H, Kalicki 

and Eugene K. Lawson, eds., Russian-Eurasian Renaissance?: U.S. 

Trade and Investment in Russia and Eurasia, Stanford, CA: Stanford 

University Press, 2003, p. 166.

276. Dmitry Furman, “A Silent Cold War,” Russia in Global 

Affairs, Vol. IV, No. 2, April-June, 2006, p. 72. 

277. Ibid., p. 73.

278. “Putin Speaks Out Against “Exporting Capitalist 

Democracy,” ITAR-TASS News Agency, April 11, 2003, retrieved 

from Lexis-Nexis; for an example from Turkmenistan, see 

Gennady Sysoev, “Saparmyrat Niyazov Seeks Protection,” 

Moscow, Kommersant, in Russian, April 11, 2003, FBIS SOV, April 

11, 2003.

279. Basilia, p. 163.

280. Garry Kasparov, “What’s Bad for Putin Is Best for 

Russians,” New York Times, July 10, 2006.

281. One need only cite Russian interventions in the Caucasus, 

Moldova, an endless Chechen war that has now spread to the 

North Caucasus, and the bizarre intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

282. Robert Wright, “An American Foreign Policy That Both 

Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With,” New York Times, 

July 16, 2006, pp. E12-13.

283. Ibid.

 

284. Stephen Blank, “Russia’s Project 2008: Reforming the 

Army and Preparing a Coup,” Forthcoming, World Affairs, Fall 

2006.

285. Michael Mainville, “Armed Clash With Georgia Feared,” 

Washington times, June 21, 2006, p. 14.
138

286. Alexander Golts and Tonya Putnam, “State Militarism 

and Its Legacies: Why Military Reform Has Failed in Russia,” 

International Security, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Fall 2004, pp. 121-159; 

Aleksandr’ Golts, Armiya Rossii: 11 Poteryannykh Let, Moscow, 

Zakharov, 2004. 

287. Moscow, ITAR-TASS, in English, December 8, 2005, FBIS 

SOV, December 8, 2005; “Russia Expects Oil Production Growth 

Rate to Fall in 2006,” Alexander’s Gas and Oil Connections, October 11, 

2005, www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntr54168htm; Rudiger Ahrend 

and William Tompson, “Unnatural Monopoly: The Endless Wait 

for Gas Sector Reform in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. LVII, 

No. 6, September 2005, pp. 801-821; “Russian Economic Growth 

May Result in Electricity Shortages-Putin,” Interfax, February 10, 

2006; Vladimir Paramonov and Aleksey Strogov, New Russia’s 

Strategic Choice: Regionalization Versus Globalization, Camberley, 

Surrey, United Kingdom: Conflict Studies Research Centre, 2004.

288. “Putin Suggests Enrichment Centers in ‘Nuclear Club’ 

Countries,” Interfax, January 31, 2006; “Russia Ready to Cooperate 

on International Nuclear Centers-Putin,” Interfax, February 4, 

2006; “Russia Draft Nuclear Energy Proposals for G8 Summit,” 

Interfax, February 2, 2006.

289. Ian Bremmer, Choi Sung-hong, and Yoriko Kawaguchi, 

“A New Forum for Peace,” The National Interest, No. 82, Winter 

2005-06, pp. 108-111; Shoichi Ito, Vladimir I. Ivanov, and Zha 

Daojiong, “China, Japan, and Russia: The Energy Security Nexus,” 

Niklas Swanstrom, ed., Conflict Prevention and Conflict Management 

in Northeast Asia, Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2005, pp. 

121-142, available at www.silkroadstudies.org; Niklas Swanstrom, 

“An Asian Oil and Gas Union: Prospects and Problems,” China 

Eurasia Forum, Vol. III, No. 3, 2005, pp. 81-97; Zha Daojiong, 

“An Opening for U.S.-China Cooperation,” Far Eastern Economic 

Review, May 2006, pp. 42-45.

290. Ibid.

291. The White House, The National Security Strategy of the 

United States Washington, DC, 2006, www.whitehouse.gov; Robert B. 

Zoellick, “Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility,” 
139

Remarks to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, 

September 21, 2005, www.state.gov/s/d/rem/53682.htm; Chad 

Kreikemeir, “Lights Out in China?: China’s Energy Crisis and 

Opportunities for U.S. Engagement,” International Affairs Review, 

Vol. XV, No. 1, 2006, pp. 13-30; Leverett and Noel, pp. 62-70.

292. Leverett and Noel, pp. 69-70; Kreikemeier, pp. 113-130.

293. Leverett and Noel, pp. 62-70.

294. Kenneth Lieberthal and Mikal Herberg, China’s Search 

for Energy Security: Implications for U.S. Policy, NBR Analysis, Vol. 

XVII, No. 1, Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Research Asia, 2006, 

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