A Personal Discussion of Russian National Security

 

BY MELVIN GOODMAN

Photograph Source: A.Savin – CC BY 3.0

I correctly anticipated significant criticism of my last piece for CounterPunch, which argued that President Vladimir Putin’s was not “unproved,” that NATO expansion was a significant factor in the Russian use of force, and that our policymakers and so-called experts failed to understand the central national security aspects of Soviet/Russian policy.  Among the critics of my CounterPunch article were Walter Slocomb who served in Clinton’s national security council and lobbied for NATO expansion, and a former colleague of mine at the National War College, Marvin Ott, who supported expansion and is anticipating a Russian victory in Ukraine to be followed by Putin’s aggression elsewhere.

I am not trying to minimize the Russian challenge to U.S. national interests throughout the Cold War, but there needs to be recognition of U.S. efforts to exaggerate the Soviet threat as well as the acknowledgment of systemic Russian domestic weakness.  A further problem is that there are too few U.S. experts on either Russia or East Europe, and too few institutes devoted to such study.  I benefitted from my graduate work at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute.  And I benefitted financially as well thanks to the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Program and the generosity of Indiana University.

At the same time, the decline in expertise on arms control and disarmament also contributes to the decline in substantive exchanges with both Moscow and Beijing as well as Tehran and Pyongyang.  I was fortunate to have served as the intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation in Vienna, where the SALT and ABM treaties were hammered out.  We could be facing a nuclear confrontation because of the lack of political discussions with these four key states.  The fact that we don’t even recognize Iran and North Korea shows how our diplomats have failed us and our policymakers have been so short-sighted.  [Arms control not only led to Soviet-American detente, it fostered European detente, which allowed 380,000 Soviet troops to withdraw from East Germany without incident.]

We are at a serious juncture with two mindless wars in East Europe and the Middle East.  Instead of developing a policy toward these two disasters, we are fixed on building so-called alliance relationships in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.  Thomas Friedman of the New York Times even wants to form an alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia to combat Iran.  We should be dealing with Iran directly in an effort to avoid such alliance building, which will have no satisfactory outcome.  The expansion of NATO has weakened NATO politically, and contributed to a major war.  Our efforts to contain China with a series of alliance arrangements has only made it more difficult to deal with China regarding political security.  As a result of our efforts, we have pushed Moscow and Beijing into their closest relationship in their histories, and we are looking for ways to match and exceed their defense spending and nuclear modernization.

In the 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the United States sought to change the European theatre balance for no real reason.  The continued effort to expand NATO and to deploy power in East and Central Europe preordained a Russian reaction no matter who was in charge in the Kremlin.  U.S. planners thought the expansion of power in Europe would deter Russia from seeking advantages in the Third World, but this was another miasma in our thinking.  Russia has never developed a sophisticated power projection force that would be needed for a significant expansion of Russian power.  Nor does China appear to be interested in power project.  Only the United States believes that it needs 700 military facilities around the entire world.

No industrialized country has been willing to place military goals ahead of social and economic welfare, which isn’t the case regarding Soviet and Russian leaders over the decades.  Putin’s war in Ukraine has backfired on every level, not only in Ukraine itself, but has led to a revival of NATO that finds two additional members in Sweden and Finland as well as increased military spending in most of the NATO countries.  Putin now justifies the war as an existential conflict with the United States and the European members of NATO.  There is still strong support for the war with Ukraine throughout the country because it follows fromRussian fears of military vulnerability and even conquest.

Border security is essential to Russian national security policy.  By comparison, think about what German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said about the border safety of the United States: He called the United States lucky for its foreign politics situation, saying that the “Americans are a very lucky people.  They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.”  Compare that to the difficult situations on Russia’s borders.

When Russians themselves write their histories, these works are rarely triumphal but emphasize the horrors and loses of confrontation.  When they write about their southern border, it is always described as the “sensitive” southern border because of battles fought long ago.  The western border is particularly sensitive because of the Swedish, French, and German invasions over the past several centuries.  We may claim the “greatest generation” for the success in World War II, but the war itself was fought largely by the Russians on the western frontier who were responsible for most German fatalities and casualties in the war.  It is difficult to imagine the success of the Normandy invasion, if the best Germany troops were not preoccupied with Russia.

The United States ignored a major strategic opportunity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.  In his containment writings in the late 1940s, George F. Kennan argued that, once Russia had demonstrated that it would behave in a moderate and conciliatory fashion in the world community, it would be essential to “anchor” or tie Moscow to the West.  In our triumphal and exceptionalist mood, we did just the opposite.

When the United States expanded NATO in the Clinton and Bush presidencies, it ignored an old Russian proverb: “Don’t try to skin the Russian bear before it is dead.”  Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama ignored this proverb, and the next American president will face a more difficult relationship with Moscow than the one that existed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.  President Biden’s constant vilification of Putin will certainly make it more difficult to convince an American audience that it is time for compromise and negotiation, and to convince a Russian leadership that we are prepared to return to substantive discussions.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.         

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/29/a-personal-discussion-of-russian-national-security/