Russia Hints at Blackmail Over Arms

The Russian government of Boris Yeltsin is presenting U.S. President Bill Clinton with what Marlon Brando in his "Godfather" role used to call "an offer you can’t refuse." To put it bluntly, the United States had better facilitate Russia’s efforts to sell advanced arms to more than 100 nations around the word — or else.

According to Russian Foreign Minister Andrel Kozyrev, Russia would not use the proceeds of the weapon sales to nations that have traditionally been markets for American or Western arms "to boost the military-industrial complex." Instead, "The money would be used for conversion, and [some of it] for consumer goods and new machinery."

The implication is that if Washington does not go along, Russia will not only maintain its immense military-industrial complex but persist in sending the products of that complex to bad actors around the world like Iran, Syria, China and North Korea.

Let’s face it. This is the equivalent of blackmail, a sort of international protection racket. The U.S. and other Western governments should be under no illusion: It is a bad idea and real grief will likely come of it. Here’s why:

• If implemented, the Russian arms sale proposal would actually provide an important new rationale and financial underpinning for the old Soviet military-industrial complex — an organization that it is in the interest of both the Russian people and our own to see dramatically reduced in scope and productive capacity.

 

This is particularly true because those who are calling the shots in Moscow these days — the former Communist nomenklatura — have made clear their intention to preserve and sustain the centerpiece of their power base: the military-dominated state industries. Toward this end, the Old Guard has used the Russian central bank to undermine the Yeltsin economic reform program by printing trillions of rubles to feed these industrial dinosaurs. It strains credulity that ascendant ex-Soviet hard-liners will be more amenable to eliminating such manufacturing assets should they start to turn a profit.

 

• One need not be an unreconstructed Cold Warrior to have apprehensions about the prospect of Russia supplanting U.S. and Western supplier relationships, and the presence and influence that tends to go with them, in nations around the world. In a dynamic world like today’s, such tie can open, and their absence foreclose, important political and strategic options.

 

• Under present and foreseeable circumstances, the Kozyrev proposal also would give an unfair competitive edge in international arms deals to Russian state-owned industries that are not subject to free enterprise forces. Already the Russians have been selling weapons on the international market at below construction costs, offering advanced systems for 50 percent or less of the price of comparable Western equipment.

 

As a result, U.S. Defense companies are virtually certain to be denied opportunities to sell their products overseas. If so, the effect on U.S. interests would be doubly detrimental. For one thing, the American economy and balance of trade will be adversely affected. Worse yet, such unfair competition could destroy the chance offered by foreign military sales to preserve defense industrial capabilities that might otherwise be unsustainable, but which may prove essential to future U.S. national security.

 

• It must be expected that the Chinese leadership — who appreciate no less than their Russian counterparts the hard currency earning and strategic benefits of arms exports — will seek the same opportunities Washington accords Moscow. If granted to the Russians, how can they be denied to China? Surely it will not be on the basis that one is a bona fide democracy and free market-oriented state and the other is not. Indeed, as Kremlin halls ring ever more frequently with calls to "follow the Chinese model" of political authoritarianism and economic liberalization, distinctions between the two governments based on progress toward reform will become utterly untenable.

 

• Last but not least, the Kozyrev proposal would almost certainly increase worldwide proliferation of sophisticated conventional (and perhaps other) weapons. It would be ironic indeed if an American administration substantially staffed by individuals associated with various arms control interest groups were to endorse a proposal at odds with the newly declared objective of curbing conventional arms proliferation.

 

Incredibly, despite such serious problems with the new Russian stratagem, the Clinton leadership appears receptive to it. For example, on Feb. 28, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, fresh from a meeting with Kozyrev in Geneva, announced "I don’t see any reason why [the Russians] should be precluded from competition for arms sales as long as the purchasers are responsible."

Even if the secretary of state cannot see the compelling reasons for discouraging Russian competition in weapon sales to responsible purchasers, he should recognize that doing so will not preclude Moscow’s continuing arms transfers to irresponsible ones. It is, after all, the pariah states that are unable to obtain arms from Western suppliers who are in the greatest need of Russia’s military exports. It will take more than diplomatic protests and tidy intellectual constructs to curb Russian sales of ballistic missiles, Backfire bombers and diesel submarines to the Irans of the world.

The United States and its allies should make clear that the rescheduling of some $ 70 billion in Soviet debts and the distribution of future aid to the successor states is contingent upon real structural reform. That should start with the wholesale dismantling of the vast military-industrial complex and the reallocation of its assets and personnel to meet the crushing need for consumer goods and services.

While such a stringent requirement will entail some dislocation in the Russian economy, it is far better to deal with the direct consequences of that hardship than to pay the multiplied costs that would be precipitated were the West to acquiesce in the Russian protection racket.

Frank Gaffney is the director of the Center for Security Policy in Washington and a regular contributor to Defense News.