Winter is Coming (11 page)

So then, what could the American president or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) do about a bloody civil war in Russia where tens of thousands of civilians were being displaced, tortured, and murdered? One clue comes from earlier in the same press conference, when President Clinton was asked what he would do about Russia’s continued support for Iran’s nuclear program.

reporter
: “Will you resist Republican threats to cut off foreign aid to Russia?”

What!? Yes, this was the situation in 1995! Today, exactly twenty years later, the Iranian nuclear program Russia built is back on the front pages for mostly the same reason: fear over Iran making a nuclear bomb. It all started while American aid was helping keep Russia afloat (and helping Yeltsin get reelected in 1996). Surely making such aid conditional on dropping support for the Iranian nuclear program or on ending the massacre in Chechnya should have been discussed. In fact, such conditionality was discussed quite a bit in the US Congress, in both houses, in 1995 and 1996.

The Russian nuclear agency, MinAtom (succeeded by RosAtom in 2007), brought in desperately needed hard currency and was run with an alarming degree of autonomy. Its chief, Viktor Mikhaylov, had made a secret deal with Iran to deliver a gas centrifuge that would enable them to produce weapons-grade uranium, and he had done so without even telling Yeltsin. The rogue agency also had the support of Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who promoted close political and economic ties with Iran.

Clinton recounts in his book that when he first met Yeltsin in the Kremlin on that trip, they “shook hands” on Yeltsin publicly announcing Russia wouldn’t give any nuclear technology to Iran that could be used for military purposes. He duly did so at the press conference, but Yeltsin wouldn’t officially prohibit such weapons-related transfers until August 1996, over a year later.

Many members of Congress were outraged and added conditions to restrict aid to Russia if it continued to support Iran’s nuclear program and to wage war on civilians. But the Clinton administration managed to include a provision in the Russian aid bill to “allow the President to waive this restriction if he deemed it in the interest of US national security. The Administration argued that it was inappropriate to condition aid to Russia on a particular desired behavior in either Iran or Chechnya inasmuch as the aid program was intended to benefit reformist elements in Russia and ultimately facilitate a transformation that might ensure a more cooperative relationship in the future.”

That paragraph lays out everything that is wrong with dropping the moral element from foreign policy. For the sake of a vague hope for “a more cooperative relationship in the future,” the Clinton administration fought to keep the Iranian nuclear program and Chechnya massacre off the table. The money wasn’t the issue; a few billion dollars wasn’t going to make or break either country, although Yeltsin certainly needed all the help he could get as the 1996 election approached. (I campaigned for him myself.) Instead of tying foreign aid and foreign policy to the immoral slaughter of civilians in Chechnya, Clinton expressed concerns, made vague remarks about how it might drive other countries toward joining NATO (which it did), and called it an internal affair.

Clinton and Europe missed the chance to draw lines of acceptable behavior for Russia, at least anywhere beyond the Baltic States. In Central Asia and the various conflict zones in the Caucasus, the West tacitly supported a Russian sphere of influence. As the
New York Times
reported in October 1994, two months before Russian forces stormed into Chechnya, the West refused to provide peacekeepers to the newly formed states, allowing Russian ones to step in to manage the conflicts they themselves had provoked.

Reagan and his moral foreign policy had shown the way, but it was now completely abandoned. It was not based on what could be done unilaterally. No one could ever imagine that the United States or NATO would directly aid the Chechen separatists, for example. The important element was to show clearly and consistently that human rights mattered and that human lives mattered. Clinton was so invested in hoping “for a more cooperative relationship” that he could not simply state that massacring civilians and helping a state sponsor of terror build a nuclear program were unacceptable.

This record of immoral passivity also puts more nails in the coffin of the myth of Russian humiliation. Clinton treated Yeltsin in good faith throughout, provided Russia with intelligence on Iran, began to massively demilitarize Europe, and even helped disarm other ex-Soviet states with the effect of guaranteeing Russian preeminence. Nineteen ninety-four was the year the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the UK all sat side by side at a long table in Hungary to sign what would be known as the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.

This brief document is far from a comprehensive treaty or even a security guarantee, but its intent and purpose was clear. Ukraine was giving up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world under heavy pressure from Russia and the United States. In exchange, Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma wanted a public pledge from Clinton, Yeltsin, and John Major that they would “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”

Obviously Russia violated the agreement when it invaded and then annexed Crimea in March 2014. As for the other signatories, there are no means of enforcement in the memo and the only promised response is to seek UN Security Council action “if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”

When I spoke to the first Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, in Kyiv in late 2014, he was adamant that the United States had betrayed Ukraine to Putin by reneging on the obligations Clinton assumed in Budapest. He said it had always been Clinton, even more than Yeltsin, who had pressured him and the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus to relinquish their nuclear arsenals. No doubt this was a worthy goal and a worthy achievement at the time. But what does it say when twenty years later Ukraine is practically helpless against the giant nuclear-backed war machine of Vladimir Putin and the United States tells Ukraine sorry, but it should have read the fine print in Budapest?

To answer my own question, it tells the world that American security promises are worthless (and British ones, for good measure). The only point of Budapest was to demonstrate to any potential aggressor—all eyes on the Russian bear next door, obviously—that the United States was putting Ukraine under its nuclear wing. If such displays are meaningless, and having one’s own nuclear weapon is the only way to be safe from aggression, it will not take long for other countries to move full speed toward acquiring them. Japan and Taiwan count on America to deter China. South Korea counts on America to deter North Korea. And whether they admit to it or not, half of the nations in the

Middle East have rejected a push for nuclear weapons to match Israel’s because of America’s long shadow. It is difficult to see that restraint lasting very long if President Obama continues to meet Russian military aggression with weak sanctions, worthless negotiations, and expressions of deep concern.

Since he is still very much a public figure, Bill Clinton himself should be asked what he thinks of Obama’s indifferent attitude about the document Clinton signed in Budapest. Especially since they are of the same party and Hillary Clinton served in Obama’s cabinet as secretary of state. It probably never occurred to any of the reporters in Budapest to ask Clinton what his administration would do if Russia rolled tanks into Ukraine as they have now done, but I would very much like to hear his answer today.

There is an irresistible tendency to look only for big moments in history. While such moments do exist, long-term trends and patterns usually matter more than any one decision or event. When we talk about the collapse of Russia’s democracy and the Western appeasement that facilitated its collapse, it is important to look at how each moment fit into an overall pattern.

Bush 41 supported Mikhail Gorbachev to a fault and to the bitter end. Bill Clinton’s administration was similarly enamored of Boris Yeltsin and supported him at the expense of a coherent and consistent policy of pressuring for economic reform and democracy in Russia. As I’ll discuss in the next chapter, Bush 43 made the same mistake with Putin by putting his trust in an individual instead of the democratic institutions, policies, and principles Russia so badly needed. The West would find someone they liked, or felt they could work with, and jump in with both feet. When the results inevitably failed to live up to the unrealistic hopes, it was awkward or impossible to back away.

At the same time, American authority and credibility on the global stage was being whittled away throughout the 1990s. The

United States looked all powerful at the end of the Cold War, like the Wizard of Oz before the curtain was pulled back. By 1999, when Clinton finally got it right in Kosovo, the curtain had been pulled back, torn down, and burned in effigy. The “Blackhawk Down” catastrophe in Somalia, the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, conceding to Russia on Chechnya and limiting NATO expansion: each was a blow to global stability and its supposed guarantors in the United States and the European Union.

Far from the imperial overreach and hegemonic tendencies that Russia and China kept warning about, the United States retreated instead. By 1998, Clinton’s personal credibility was also diminishing rapidly. The Monica Lewinsky scandal exploded in the headlines in January. The media circus, trial, and impeachment became a huge distraction for the government and the American people. Later in the year, Clinton had his wag-the-dog moment when he ordered a cruise missile strike on what turned out to be a benign pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

As convenient as it would be to put all the blame for the collapse of Russian democracy on Putin, the truth is more complicated. Russia’s return to dictatorship was not a sudden fall. Many small, quick steps in the same direction resemble a smooth slide. Just as when analyzing a completed chess game, what we call the postmortem, talking as if everything was going just fine until this or that event is usually absurd and harmful to the process of honest analysis. Of course huge isolated blunders in otherwise good positions do occur, but they are even rarer in diplomacy than in world championship chess.

This is a point of disagreement I often have with my more diplomatically minded friends today. They look back over twenty years of Russia-US relations and it doesn’t look so bad, so the complete catastrophe of 2014 is viewed as a sudden shock. But as I have been warning frequently for at least fifteen of those years, Putin’s latest eruption of repression and violence has been steadily building all the time and was only intensified by years of Western compromises and pretending that everything was fine. There was no big shift by Obama that provoked Putin, or any dramatic changes in Putin’s attitudes or Russia’s fortunes that necessitated the invasion of Ukraine. It was always moving in this direction, and the only question was whether or not Western leaders would change their ways to prevent such an eruption from taking place. Unfortunately, as we now know, the answer was no.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the streetlights. As I admitted earlier, I supported Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection despite his increasingly undemocratic attitude toward Russia’s institutions and the independence of our elections. Yeltsin abused the power of the state to fight off the challenge of the Communist Party that still had the power to terrify the reformers. It also had taken control of the Russian Duma in the 1995 parliamentary elections, so it was no imagined threat. Yeltsin was deeply unpopular, polling under 10 percent at the start of the year with only six months until the June election.

The Yeltsin administration’s trope of accusing every critic and opposition figure of trying to drag Russia back to the dark past became less and less effective as the economy struggled. The outside world didn’t think much of Yeltsin’s chances either. In February, Communist Party leader Zyuganov was treated like a rock star at the World Economic Forum in Davos, of all places, the belly of the capitalist beast. Of course Zyuganov was completely clueless about what to do and would have been an unmitigated catastrophe as president, but it certainly looked likely to happen. It wasn’t simply a case of people in hard times voting with their pocketbooks. There was a real sense of confusion and betrayal in Russia, and the natural target was the president.

Here is where we come to one of the most difficult concepts to explain to outsiders about the Russian rejection of democracy. When Soviets pondered the collapse of our country and the future ahead, democracy was not a very well-defined or well-understood concept to most of us. Yes, we desired freedom, rights, and all the things that come with an open society, but for most people these are abstractions. What we really envied about the West was opportunity; specifically the opportunity to improve our lot economically. The free world had elections and it had money and we had neither, so these things obviously went together: a package deal.