Russia and the Real World

It was an unhappy encounter between Vladimir Putin and Condoleezza Rice today. The Russian president remains unreconciled with the idea of the U.S. setting up missile-defense sites in Poland or the Czech Republic, and seems determined to throw his country's weight around the world as in days of old. Here's a summary of the arguments.

My first reaction when anyone complains about anyone else building a missile-defense system is to ask, "What? Do you think you have a right to nuke another country?" In effect, however, the balance-of-terror deterrence system developed during the Cold War acknowledged such a right. Each superpower was restrained, the theory went, by the assurance that the other could and would destroy it with a retaliatory strike. Ever since Gorbachev, the Russians have seemed to see it as a form of cheating that the U.S. wants to change the rules. In geopolitical terms, I understand the complaint. An effective missile defense system (however unlikely it may seem today despite U.S. propaganda) is presumed to give a country freedom of action around the world, since it would no longer be deterred by other countries' nuclear arsenals. From this funhouse-mirror perspective (so it must look to Americans), developing a defensive system is an act of aggression.

Secretary Rice assures the Russians that the missile defense apparatus is not directed at them, but at terrorist and rogue nations. In that case, she will need to explain more effectively to the American people as well as the Russians why such a system is ideally located in one or two former members of the Warsaw Pact, rather than in closer proximity to alleged rogue states. For that matter, why is the Russian offer to have their Azeri client state host the system unacceptable to the U.S?

I'm not happy to be taking Putin's side in this matter, because he seems to be an odious character out to centralize and consolidate power in the old Russian style -- and by old I mean before the Bolshevik Revolution. Like other aspiring authoritarians, he seems to be driving dissent off of TV while thinking of himself increasingly as an indispensable man. Maybe I'm reading and hearing too much American propaganda, but the bare facts don't tell an inspiring story. That's part of the problem with this missile-defense issue. To the extent that Putin is perceived as a dictator or would-be dictator (a la Hugo Chavez), our government and our opinion leaders tend to see Russia as an enemy.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that conflict between the U.S. and Russia in Eastern Europe is ideological in nature. Putin's perceived turn toward dictatorship may influence American unwillingness to concede any sphere of influence to Russia, but the Russians are likely to demand a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe regardless of who rules them. Russia is a big country and its people have a cultural superiority complex. They think they are the natural leaders of the Slavic or Orthodox Christian world, and as a large country they think they are entitled to favorable economic relations with their neighbors.

Historically, Americans have had a hypocritically hostile attitude toward other nations' spheres of influence. Understandably, as a rising economic power, the U.S. saw these spheres of influence as shutting them out of trade opportunities. One hundred years ago, for instance, the U.S. opposed European plans to divide post-Boxer Rebellion China into spheres of influence, proposing instead an "Open Door" policy that wouldn't shut them out of a huge market. Principle and self-interest are intertwined here. The principle is that no country, no matter how big or how close, should have the right to assign another country to its sphere of influence if the people of the other country think they can do better trading with different nations. The self-interest is self-evident. The hypocrisy can be summed up in two words: "Monroe Doctrine."

My hunch is that the heart of the current conflict between the U.S. and Russia is an American refusal to concede Eastern Europe to Russia's sphere of influence. Capitalism wants markets everywhere, and ever since the rest of the world recovered from World War II, the U.S. has been losing markets. We're even losing them in our own sphere as South American countries discover they can do business with China, Iran, etc., without questions being asked about how their governments behave. The more that happens, the more the U.S. is likely to be "aggressive" about opening markets by preventing or breaking up spheres of influence. That will mean measures to prevent big powers from imposing their will within their accustomed or expected spheres of influence. A missile-defense system in Poland sounds like such a measure to me, but we need to know more about the plans before we draw conclusions. That said, there seems to be some cause for suspicion for both U.S. and Russian motives.

In general, as the superpowers compete for ever-scarcer resources, spheres of influence and trade relations will loom ever larger as potential flashpoints for war. China, India, Russia and the U.S., among others, are going to want to reserve as much of those resources to themselves as exclusively as possible. There ought to be a way out of this, but it would require everyone to be willing to share, which means learning to accept only one's proper share of resources rather than what any country thinks it deserves. How we bring that about is a topic for another time.