Editor’s note: Big Tent Ideas always aims to provide a balanced perspective on the hottest issues of the day. The following is the second in a series of columns presenting Chuck DeVore’s analysis of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. You can find the rebuttal here. This was originally published in IM—1776, Erik Prince will present his analysis of US foreign policy at that time.
On May 2, Erik Prince published a lengthy 4,600-word op-ed in the Daily Caller called “Neocons Nearly Killed America. How Patriots Can Fix It,” which made so many points that it required two responses to be fully discussed. In part one, I discussed Prince’s largely correct criticism of the failure of American foreign policy after the Cold War and the Pentagon’s myriad inefficiencies. In part two, I explore Prince’s argument that U.S. foreign policy missteps have driven Russia into China’s arms. (Related article: Chuck DeVore: Neocons aren’t entirely to blame for America’s foreign policy failures)
Unfortunately, while Prince makes some good points in his analysis of America’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he also lapses into wishful thinking reminiscent of the foreign policy “experts” he criticizes, arguing that “opportunities for proactively engaging with Russia after 1991 were rejected by Washington’s ruling neoconservative faction and their allies in the military-industrial complex.”
Prince argues that NATO’s expansion after the Cold War pushed Russia out, which at best reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Russian history and culture, and is probably little more than historical revisionism to suit his arguments against interventionism and state-building that he makes well elsewhere in his essay.
My on-the-ground experience in post-Soviet Russia gives me a personal perspective. From 1992 to 1994, I was with a Western-controlled startup called Air Cargo Refueling Services on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. On October 4, 1993, I flew to the Russian Far East to serve a month-long shift as a replacement for the local operations manager. That was the day Russian President Boris Yeltsin moved to crush Communist resistance at the Soviet Congress in Moscow.
Even then, the corruption displayed by the Russians was astonishing, along with a total lack of understanding or respect for contract law. Even then, it was clear that Russia was being systematically plundered by agents of the former Soviet Union, who, through years of ruthless experience, had the wherewithal and the drive to steal whatever they could. Centuries of economic dysfunction, first under the Tsars, then under the Communists, could not be overcome by a few years of near-anarchic self-government.
Boris Yeltsin served as the first post-Soviet President of Russia from December 1991 until his abrupt resignation on December 31, 1999, due to ill health possibly compounded by alcoholism. Yeltsin was also deeply unpopular due to the 1998 Russian economic crisis and a mounting number of scandals that led to his impeachment in May 1999.
Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin and has been ruling Russia ever since.
How Putin rose to power is also important here: he served in the KGB, rising to the rank of colonel, before serving in the (some say corrupt) St. Petersburg mayor’s administration from 1990 to 1996. Within a year, Yeltsin appointed Putin deputy head of the presidential administration. A year after that, Putin was named head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB.
But in 1999, Putin was a colorless bureaucrat, reeking of Yeltsin’s unpopularity and corruption. Just three months before Yeltsin stepped down, a series of mysterious apartment bombings in four apartment buildings in three cities, including Moscow, that were quickly blamed on Chechen separatists, killed more than 300 people. Apartment residents discovered a fifth bomb in the basement and called local police, who quickly arrested three FSB agents.
Putin led the FSB, the successor to the KGB, until March of that year, and personally handpicked its next director, Nikolai Patrushev. The day after his arrest, FSB chief Patrushev claimed that the bombings were actually part of an anti-terrorism drill.
The FSB agents were released. On the same day, Putin, now Secretary-General of Yeltsin’s Security Council, ordered an airstrike on Grozny, starting the Second Chechen War.
Interestingly, in July 1999, a few months before the “terror” bombing, a Russian journalist had written an article in the Moscow newspaper Pravda warning of a false flag terror attack planned by the government to weaken President Yeltsin’s reformist opposition.
It worked, paving the way for Putin to gain control over 300 Russian bodies.
The former Warsaw Pact countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, all with their long histories of violent repression by the Soviet Union, joined NATO in March 1999. It is a stretch to think that the domestic politics of Russia, with its long history of czars and bloody intrigues, would have been affected in any way by the fact that these three Central European countries did not join NATO. Putin’s pretext for seizing power was Chechnya, not Poland.
Putin did only what was necessary to gain power in the system he operated in. Everything else was just a pretext. If history had played out as Prince recommended, the only difference would be that Putin would have already absorbed Ukraine and would be back on Germany’s doorstep. Germany is familiar territory for Putin, as he had a long stint in the former East Germany during his time with the KGB.
By the time Washington’s foreign policy establishment tried again to reconcile with Russia a decade later, the borsch had already gone cold, which is why some believe the “reset” or “overload” made famous by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March 2009, when the words on a big red prop button were awkwardly translated into Russian, came too late.
But in reality, the effort was foiled by the wrong people, the wrong country, and the wrong time. Remember, Putin himself has stated on multiple occasions that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Of course, he meant by this the loss of the empire, not the loss of Communist Party control.
But a reset might have been possible, or even necessary, if the Soviet Union had not been an evil empire, mismanaged its economy, and fragmented. The hostility of former Soviet bloc countries might have been manageable.
Their fears might have been less. They might have wanted to maintain ties with Moscow. But alas, in Prince’s story, Poland’s free will means nothing.
And if the Soviet Union had simply degenerated into a new Russian Empire, the words Henry Kissinger spoke to Richard Nixon a week before Nixon’s landmark visit to China in 1972 might still be valid. Kissinger said this about the future outlook for national security:[I]In 20 years, your successor, if he is as wise as you, will be leaning to the side of Russia against China. For the next 15 years, he must be leaning to the side of China against Russia. We must play this balance of power game totally unsentimental. Now we need China to correct the Russians, to punish the Russians.”
But Kissinger’s advice only worked when the Russian Empire was in good health, not when it sought revenge in the much more densely populated regions of Central Europe. Also, remember that in 1972 roughly two-thirds of the Soviet military’s personnel were deployed on the Chinese border, albeit in the oldest equipment and least combat-ready formations.
And yet, during the Obama administration, Russia allowed air cargo resupply to U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan in exchange for the U.S. abandoning President George W. Bush’s plans to deploy missile defense systems in NATO countries in central Europe. Putin praised the deal. Of course he did. He gave up nothing and got everything.
But by 2014, Russia had attacked Ukraine, annexed Crimea and started a violent conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
With Putin and Xi declaring a “new era” of cooperation against the US-led West, it’s hard to imagine a course of action that would satisfy Putin unless they agreed to return it to Moscow without the consent of free nations in a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Erik Prince’s ideas on military and foreign policy reform are a welcome addition to a long-overdue debate. At a time when the People’s Republic of China and its allies and proxies — Russia, North Korea, and Iran — seek to undermine U.S. national security, we need a vigorous and serious debate about how to best protect our interests while maintaining peace and prosperity.
Chuck DeVore is Chief of State Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He served in the California State Assembly and currently serves as a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. He is the author of “Crisis of the House Never United.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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