The "Soft War" for Europe's East
2006; Hoover Institution; Issue: 137 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-5945
Autores Tópico(s)International Relations and Foreign Policy
ResumoSINCE THE ARREST of Mikhail Khodorkovsky on October 25, 2003, and the subsequent seizure of the Yukos oil company, democracy in Russia has entered into free fall. It is obvious in hindsight that the Bush administration badly misread the implications of the nationalization of strategic industries and the concomitant return of state-directed show trials to Moscow. In the shorthand of Washington, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued to into the soul of President Vladimir Putin even as the erstwhile KGB colonel was rounding up the remnants of civic society in Russia and laying the groundwork for economic and political aggression against Russia's neighbors. Despite statements at the time by President Putin and Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov that the government intended to recover the great power status of which Russia had been unfairly deprived by the regrettable collapse of the Soviet Union, both Washington and European capitals refused to see any geopolitical calculation in the methodical suppression of political and press freedoms and the takeover of the economy by FSB officers and Kremlin cronies. Russia apologists on the National Security Council staff and in American academe argued that what appeared to be, if not exactly the return of the Stalinist state, at least a lurch in the direction of czarist authoritarianism, was perfectly susceptible to reasonable explanation. These transitory phenomena were attributable to the affinity of the Russian people for order, they said, or to the pent-up resentment of the Russian narod against their predominantly Jewish oligarchic oppressors, or to the residual humiliation the voters felt as a consequence of our ill-considered decision to win the Cold War. Nothing could convince Western decision makers that something more sinister and more consequential might be underway. This was the counsel of realism. Opinion differs as to precisely when the propensity to see Putin as a necessary partner gave way to the realization that a dangerously revanchist state was on the rise in Europe's East. For Russian civic society activists it was clear that the relatively brief period of liberalism, Moscow's fleeting Prague Spring, had ended in the course of 2004 with the suppression of independent journalists, the wholesale replacement of elected regional governors with Kremlin appointees, and the initial attacks on nongovernmental organizations. For the democracy community, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine during the winter of 2005-06 was the watershed event. The repeated assassination attempts on Victor Yushchenko, the blatant involvement of Russian security services in Ukrainian politics, and the provision of massive financing and a troop of political advisors to Moscow-controlled parties presaged the reappearance of a new Comintern in the former Soviet Union. For Europe as a whole, it was the Ukrainian gas crisis in January 2006 that convinced its leaders that a resurgent and menacing Russia had stolen a march on the West and now threatened the independence of Europe's East with its newly developed energy weapon. With its influence and financial power, the Russian state could reach the German chancellor and into the inner circle around President Bush. It is not clear when, in the course of the destruction of Russian democracy and the rise of post-Soviet authoritarianism, the U.S. administration realized that its Russia policy had failed. For most of 2005, those senior officials who would discuss the subject pointed to the constructive role that Russia was likely to play in negotiations with North Korea and subsequently in the crisis over Iran's nuclear pretensions. When these partnerships proved ephemeral, America's Russian hands fell back on the vaguer argument that Putin was likely to moderate his anti-democratic behavior at home and his growing imperial tendencies abroad as the all-important G-8 summit on July 15-17 in St. …
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