TRANSFORMATION WATCH #12: ‘PLUS ÇA CHANGE…’ RUSSIA REVERTS TO FORM, HOW WILL CLINTON RESPOND?

(Washington, D.C.): Even as Russian
President Boris Yeltsin is insisting that
the United States and its G-7 partners
immediately reschedule his country’s $80
billion-plus foreign debt and provide
large new cash infusions, he has embraced
policies that raise serious questions
about the wisdom of such assistance.
Specifically, Yeltsin’s regime has served
notice in recent days that it has adopted
a new foreign policy course that
threatens, in important ways, to
undermine crucial U.S. and Western
foreign policy objectives.

These unfolding Russian foreign policy
initiatives, authored by resurgent
hardline forces, appear to amount to
“old wine in new bottles” —
the sort of behavior that many had hoped
Moscow would permanently forego with the
passing of Mikhail Gorbachev and the
“Cold War.” They include the
following:

• When asked in a press conference
  on 25 January about the use of
  force against Saddam Hussein in
  lieu of diplomacy, President
  Boris Yeltsin unceremoniously
  responded that “The United
  States has a certain tendency to
  dictate its own terms.”
• Vice President Alexander Rutskoi
  — whose doctrinaire
  authoritarianism seems
  increasingly the order of the day
  in Moscow — put it even more
  bluntly in an interview with
  Radio Liberty last weekend.
  According to Rutskoi, Russia
  would use its U.N. Security
  Council veto at the next
  opportunity to block further
  military action against Iraq.
  Such a step would be consistent
  with Russian Foreign Ministry
  statements issued last week which
  decried U.S. and British air
  strikes against Iraq as
  “inappropriate” and
  “out of proportion” to
  the transgressions that provoked
  them.

• According to the
  “Vesti” evening news on
  26 January, Yeltsin “has
  signed an instruction to the
  Russian Ministry to boost work
  with Iraq in order to create
  conditions for the restoration of
  Iraqi oil deliveries to repay
  credits of the former Soviet
  Union.”
• In the 25 January press
  conference, Yeltsin went on to
  denounce U.S. objections to
  Russia’s agreement last summer to
  sell $250 million sale of rocket
  engines (cryogenic boosters) and
  related technology to India. As
  he put it: “No other state
  can command such a great nation
  as Russia to terminate its
  obligations.” The sale to
  the Indian Space Research
  Organization represents a blatant
  violation of the Missile
  Technology Control Regime, a
  multilateral agreement to which
  Russia is a party which is
  designed to slow the
  proliferation of rocket
  technology.
• Yeltsin made a point of saying
  that, “Although the West,
  and especially the United States,
  has taken a guarded view of this
  contract, I take this opportunity
  to reaffirm our commitment to
  honoring this contract.”
  Yeltsin also noted that, in the
  course of his visit, he would not
  be raising the issue of India’s
  refusal to sign the Nuclear
  Non-Proliferation Treaty.

• Interestingly, on 15 January, the
  head of the Russian Defense
  Industries Committee, Victor
  Glukhikh, told reporters that
  India and China would be Russia’s
  chief customers for sophisticated
  military equipment in 1993.
  Glukhikh also boasted that Moscow
  planned to display scores of
  items — including highly
  classified military equipment —
  at a major arms exhibition in Abu
  Dhabi next month in an effort to
  capture a still greater share of
  the world’s arms trade.
• Deputy Foreign Minister Vitaly
  Churkin also warned on 25 January
  that Moscow would propose at the
  United Nations the introduction
  of sanctions against Croatia
  “if the Croatian side does
  not stop military activities
  against the Serbs.”
• On 26 January, President Yeltsin
  took the Foreign Ministry out of
  its leadership role in foreign
  policy and gave the Security
  Council — which is prominently
  staffed with military officials
  — the principal coordinating
  function for international
  affairs. At his news conference
  on Monday, Yeltsin averred:

“There have been
accusations that our
Foreign Minister’s
orientation is
pro-Western, that he is
always looking left and
cannot turn his head to
the right. It seems to me
that now our policy is
more or less balanced.
After all, we are a
Euro-Asian state. We do
not want axes, triangles
or blocs. We would not
wish for an alliance with
India to the detriment of
other countries. I would
call this policy the
specialty of the new
Russia.”

You Heard It Here First

Clearly, the United States cannot
expect that its foreign policy interests
will always coincide with those of Russia
— even a genuinely democratic, free
market-oriented Russia. Nonetheless,
cooperation on Iraq, the former
Yugoslavia and missile proliferation have
been pointed to as proof positive of the
more cooperative relationship that Russia
and the United States have developed over
the past two years.

Indeed, in a just-leaked and
extraordinary transcript of the
Bush-Yeltsin meeting in Moscow on 3
January, the Russian president
underscored the importance of this
cooperation: “I can…tell you that
we intend to retain Russian bench-marks
in foreign policy, we will come out for
stronger relations of partnership with
the United States and subsequently for
forging allied relations with the United
States.”

Unfortunately, despite such sentiments
and in light of the Russians’ actual
behavior, the Center for Security Policy
foresees a pronounced downward spiral in
bilateral U.S.-Russian ties. In the days
ahead, it believes that the Clinton
Administration will be obliged to deal —
among other, pressing foreign policy
problems — with the following:

• Russia will resume within
  thirty days its active
  undermining of the United States’
  ability to use force against
  Saddam Hussein in
  response to his continuing
  violations of U.N. resolutions —
  a gambit similar to that
  attempted by Gorbachev prior to
  the start of the Gulf War.
• Within the next
  thirty days, Russia will
  also make overt what Russian
  Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev
  recently acknowledged has been
  its “covert veto”
  of Western military intervention
  in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
  An early indication of Moscow’s
  more brazen policy can be found
  in its announced intention to
  seek U.N. sanctions in response
  to Croat efforts to liberate part
  of Serbian-held Croatia. Such an
  action would help obscure
  Russia’s determination to support
  Belgrade even as it further
  delays allied efforts to halt
  “ethnic cleansing,”
  rape camps and genocide.

Once the question of punishing
Croatia is decided, Moscow will
endeavor to coordinate with the
Chinese and the British and/or
the French in the U.N. Security
Council to block a lifting of the
arms embargo on Bosnia,
enforcement of the no-fly zone,
armed support of humanitarian
relief efforts, forcible
liberation of death and rape
camps and Western air strikes on
Serbian targets — without
having to do so unilaterally.

• Russia will seek to
  isolate and vilify Ukraine on the
  basis of the latter’s ostensible
  obstruction of START I and II.
  Within three months, it
  will be insisting that the U.S.
  and other Western nations suspend
  all assistance efforts to Ukraine
  — unless and until Kiev
  capitulates to Russian (and
  others’) demands.

Already Russia is engaged in
economic warfare against Ukraine
in the form of cutbacks in oil
deliveries from 40 million tons
of crude oil last year to 15
million tons. Yeltsin crowed to
President Bush on 3 January,
“This [cutback] is a coffin
nail for [Kravchuk].”

• Russian economic and
  military relations with Iran,
  Iraq, China, India, Syria, Cuba,
  Vietnam, North Korea, Angola and
  other repressive regimes will
  continue to expand markedly in
  1993. Of particular
  concern will be Moscow’s supply
  of sophisticated, controlled
  weapons and technology and
  defective nuclear reactors to
  such nations — including,
  incredible as it may seem given
  Russia’s financial straits, with
  the provision of Russian supplier
  credits needed to consummate
  these sales.
• The constitutional
  referendum currently scheduled
  for April 1993 will either not
  occur at all or will be
  manipulated in such a way as to
  make it meaningless, at best, or,
  worse yet, an outright defeat for
  democratic forces (read,
  no change in the growing power of
  the hardline Russian parliament).
• Evidence will continue to
  mount over the next six
  months that Russian
  technology theft and espionage
  activities against the West are
  virtually as relentless as ever.
  The unreconstructed but renamed
  KGB under the stewardship of
  Saddam Hussein’s friend, Yevgeni
  Primakov, will contribute
  significantly to the hardliners’
  agenda of preserving maximum
  military and central power while
  securing new Western financial
  flows.
• Serious challenges to the
  “territorial integrity”
  of the Russian Federation will
  emerge over the next six
  months, resulting
  in increasingly heavy-handed
  political pressure, economic
  blackmail and coercive military
  operations by Moscow against
  outlying regions. Despite such
  extortionary measures, the
  break-up of the Russian empire
  will become evident over the
  course of 1993-94.
  Although outside Russia, the
  Baltic states will be subjected
  to the same treatment in the name
  of “protecting the rights of
  Russian minorities.”

The Bottom Line

Notwithstanding the foregoing, the
heavy betting is that the Clinton
Administration will be disposed to
provide further economic, financial,
diplomatic and technological support to
Russia. An early bellwether will
be its handling of the pending — and
seriously flawed — $2 billion U.S.
Export-Import Bank “framework
agreement” to finance with taxpayer
guarantees American oil and gas equipment
sales to Russia — loans being made on an
essentially unsecured, non-collateralized
basis.⁽¹⁾

Approval of this strategically
sensitive deal, which would have the
effect of helping to revitalize the
Russian energy sector, would perpetuate a
misguided Russo-centric policy.
It would be foolish, if not utterly
irresponsible, to do so at a time when it
is increasingly clear that such
assistance will neither: benefit genuine
reformers in Russia; endear the U.S. to
regional and Soviet successor state
entities (whose importance as alternative
power centers will only grow); nor buy
“protection” from more
malevolent Russian foreign policies. Only
when a demonstrable reversal of the
aforementioned negative trends is
certified to by President Clinton should
Russia be again deemed eligible for
large-scale Western assistance flows.

– 30 –

1. In
three separate papers, the Center for
Security Policy has recently raised
serious concerns about the timing,
structure, strategic and financial
implications of this framework agreement.
See “Revolving Doors:
Eximbank Official’s Scandalous
Self-Dealing is a Blow to U.S. Taxpayers,
‘Red Carpet’ for Returning Russian
Hardliners — and Their American Friends,”
(No. 92-D
148, 22 December 1992); “How
Not to Lend to a Bankrupt
Russia: Eximbank Energy Deal Should be
Iced, Reworked,” href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=93-D_3″>(No. 93-D 3, 11 January
1993); and Red Ink Rising:
Congress Needs to Take a Look Hard Look
at New Loans to Defaulting Moscow,
(No. 93-D 9, 19
January 1993).