We’re Looking at Putin’s Russia Wrong
By: Robert Hansell
Tags: Putin, Foreign Policy, Russia, Election 2020

The American narrative on Russia has rarely been one of cooperation and friendship. Especially recently, though, attitudes have shifted towards competition and global power politics on a new level. Among academic, public, and political spheres, it seems a near consensus has been reached that Russia’s posture towards the United States and its interference in US elections seeks at best to challenge the United States’ place in the world, and at worst to engage in a new cold war. Even as concerns about Russia seem to take a back seat to those about China, it remains clear that America perceives Russia as an adversary.

A Gallup News poll in February of 2019 found that “a record high 73% of Americans view Russia unfavorably and 32% say it is the United States’ greatest enemy” (Gallup News). Furthermore, Washington Post Columnist Katrina Heuvel is one of many voices in the foreign policy analysis community who feel that “The United States and Russia are now locked in a new cold war that represents a grave danger to humanity” (Heuvel). Within the US Government, policy towards Russia has remained relatively constant since the Cold War, and has consistently failed to establish a solid US-Russian relationship. As Council on Foreign Relations fellow and regional Russia expert Thomas Graham wrote in his recent Foreign Affairs piece, “since the end of the Cold War, every US president has come into office promising to build better relations with Russia — and each one has watched that vision evaporate” (Graham).

While prior to 1991, the US-USSR conflict was certainly more pronounced than that between the US and the Russian Federation today, many of the same attitudes exist that Russia is a scheming global power seeking hegemonic dominance. These perceptions have been fueled by a number of recent flashpoints: the 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula, the disinformation campaign run by the Kremlin in 2016, and allegations of the Russian government paying bounties to the Taliban for the killing of US soldiers.

The foreign policy practices of Putin are undoubtedly problematic for threatening sovereignty and expanding illiberalism, however, they must be understood for what they are, and the temptation to misinterpret them must be resisted. Putin does not seek the creation of a new Soviet Union, rather, his goal is to re-assert Russia’s international position as one of strength, leadership, and respect. He is well known for viewing the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the century” which had caused “tens of millions of […][Russian] citizens and countrymen […][to find] themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory”(Putin). This is the central narrative for Putin’s policy.

And it is this central narrative that is widely misinterpreted in the west, and especially in the United States. The annexation of Crimea was seen in the west as an aggressive move of expansionism, while in Russia, its intention, at least as was the governmental narrative, was to repatriate Russians into Russia. The election interference, too, has been described as a “foreign policy coup” by credible policy analysts like Center for European Policy Analysis president Alina Polyakova.

Putin’s goal is not only to re-assert Russian strength, as he has shown with moves like annexation, but also to respond to what he perceives as threats to Russia from the United States and its NATO allies. The motive of Russian interference in foreign elections is, as Russian-American writer Anna Arutunyan has stated, “a series of uncoordinated and often opportunistic responses to a paranoid belief that Russia is under attack from the United States and must do everything it can do to defend itself. Every single thing that Russia stands accused of doing in the United States from 2016 onward it has previously accused the United States of doing” (Arutunyan).

So, then, if Russia is not trying to destroy the United States’ democracy and eliminate the liberal democratic model from the world, what is an appropriate posture for the US to take towards Russia?

Firstly, the view of Russia as a nation misled by Putin away from democracy and liberalism; one that could be guided back on the right track and integrated into the liberal world order with the right delicate US approach is a flawed one. It is flawed because, as Thomas Graham writes, the hope for the right US strategy to bring liberal democracy to Russia fails to see that nothing the United States can do will change “Russia’s sense of its own interests and basic worldview” (Graham). US Russian policy consistently fails to bring about changes in the Russian model because US attempts to encourage those shifts only serve to fuel the narrative of Putin the strongman, resistant to encroachment from the west. Instead, the United States should work to promote democracy, human rights, and transparency in Eastern Bloc nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Belarus, all of whom have motivated democratic activists and opportunities for democratic futures; the US should further seek grounds of cooperation with Russia as an essential partner in many realms, including technological development, nuclear proliferation, trade and transportation, and regional security concerns, all while continuing to denounce practices such as the targeting of journalists and political opponents by Moscow.

The main action step for Washington is not only policy revision. At the end of the day, the first step needs to be a fundamental reframing of the way US policy addresses Russia in order to more assuredly counter its harmful actions, but more importantly, develop for the first time a truly stable, strong, and resilient relationship that, despite ideological differences, can work towards solutions for many of the world’s most pressing issues.

Bibliography

Arutunyan, Anna. There Is No Russian Plot Against America. 7 Aug. 2020, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-08-05/there-no-russian-plot-against-america.

Gallup News. A Record High 73% of Americans View Russia Unfavorably and 32% Say It Is the United States’ Greatest Enemy. Https://T.co/snr0eN7zzp Pic.twitter.com/xtwuv0asDs. 27 Feb. 2019, twitter.com/GallupNews/status/1100785145811030016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1100785145811030016%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3.

Graham, Thomas. Let Russia Be Russia. 23 Nov. 2019, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2019-10-15/let-russia-be-russia.

Heuvel, Katrina vanden. “Opinion | From the Hope of 1989 to a New Cold War.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 12 Nov. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/12/hope-new-cold-war/

Putin: Soviet collapse a ‘genuine tragedy’. (2005, April 25). Retrieved November 23, 2020, from https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7632057

Polyakova, Alina. The Kremlin’s Plot Against Democracy. 11 Sept. 2020, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2020-08-11/putin-kremlins-plot-against-democracy

Image: Zemlianichenko, Alexander. 2019, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/12/analysts-discuss-the-20-year-rule-of-vladimir-putin/. Accessed 2019.