Volume 9 Number 4

Fall 2000

 

Clinton’s Moscow Circus
Donald N. Jensen

One may often see men who have never left their own country, who have never applied themselves to the study of public affairs, of meager intelligence, appointed overnight, so to speak, to important embassies in countries of which they know neither the interests, the laws, the customs, the language, nor even the geographical situation.

—François de Callieres, diplomatic envoy for Louis XIV, on eighteenth-century French foreign policy

A half century ago, the question, “Who Lost China?” bitterly divided the American political establishment. How could the Truman administration let an insurgent, anticolonial army under Mao Tse-tung take control of the Chinese mainland, isolationist Republicans in Congress fumed, and in the process rout the US-backed Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek? In the spring of 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked his staff to prepare a document known as the China White Paper, which was intended to explain how this had happened and to provide a history of US policy toward China. A model of objective analysis, the thousand-page study portrayed the Nationalist forces as corrupt and incompetent in the face of a determined, disciplined Communist challenge. Its deeper message was that there are limits to American power. Unfortunately, that lesson had to be learned again a generation later in Vietnam. And the US experience with Russia in the past decade has taught it yet again.

Few people dispute the outline of that latest engagement. In 1991, the Bush administration, caught flat-footed by the demise of the Soviet Union, welcomed the coming to power in Russia of a disparate, anti-Soviet coalition led by Boris Yeltsin as the triumph of forces supporting Western-style reform. Soon the recently installed Clinton administration tightened the US embrace of the new Kremlin leadership, giving substance to the term “engagement.” Taking at face value Moscow’s claims that it wanted to build democratic institutions and free markets, Washington tried to turn Russia into a “strategic partner” of the United States on a variety of international issues. To facilitate this transition, the US indirectly provided Russia with billions of dollars of financial assistance—often through favored Russian leaders—and pressured international financial institutions to lend Russia money as well. In the best tradition of Wilsonian diplomacy and the Marshall Plan, the US also sent an army of well-intentioned policy experts to Russia to transform the country into a Eurasian version of America.

Events quickly went awry. As an unexpectedly difficult transition eroded Yeltsin’s popular support, Washington increasingly tilted toward the Russian president as the chief guarantor of reform and as insurance that Russia would not return to its communist past. The US acquiesced when Yeltsin bloodily suppressed an insurrectionist parliament and welcomed a constitutional referendum that gave him strong presidential powers. Washington offered only lukewarm criticism of Moscow’s brutal campaign to rein in secessionist Chechnya and helped Yeltsin defeat a strong Communist Party challenger to win reelection in 1996. Finally, the Clinton administration minimized the widespread evidence of official corruption, by either denying its existence entirely or implying it was the price to be paid for reform, which it insisted was continuing. Indeed, while there was very little structural reform, for several years.

Russia’s macroeconomic indicators suggested that the economy was indeed turning around.Russia’s August 1998 economic collapse shattered Western illusions that Russia’s economy would recover anytime soon. The Bank of New York scandal the following year suggested, circumstantially, that Russian elites not only had misused IMF money and US assistance but also had laundered billions of dollars abroad. In response, the Clinton administration gradually distanced itself from the Yeltsin regime, while insisting that Russian reform was still on and working closely with Russia on issues such as nonproliferation.

Even as it cozied up to Moscow, Washington pursued contradictory policies that Russia saw as aggressive. The US led the war in Kosovo, pushed NATO expansion, and assertively sought to divert the transport of Caspian Sea oil away from Russia. Enfeebled by ill health and without significant political support, Yeltsin resigned the presidency on December 31, 1999. He was succeeded by Vladimir Putin, a little-known former KGB colonel who had rocketed to popularity in the months before as the architect of the second Chechnya war. Putin was elected decisively to a four-year term in March 2000.

The Russia Putin inherited is a mass of numerous, often contradictory, trends. On the one hand, Yeltsin bequeathed the new president a formal constitutional democracy with regular elections, unprecedented tolerance for civil liberties, and a relatively benign foreign policy. On the other hand, by almost every measure, Russia is economically, morally, and socially in crisis. Crime is widespread, and the population is declining, a large part of it living in poverty. Popular support for democracy and free markets, as understood in the West, is ebbing. Meanwhile, traditional Russian and Soviet values, such as the close relationship between money and political power and the personalization of authority, continue. However one interprets Russia’s long-term trajectory, what seems certain is that the collapse of the Soviet Union—in reality a civilization rather than a mere political or economic system—is likely to continue. What is less clear and more controversial is why US relations with Russia—at their lowest point in the year 2000 than at any time in the past decade—was so ineffectual in changing the country’s course.

A study sponsored by congressional Republicans on US–Russia relations in the past decade, Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People, seeks to answer that question in the tradition of Acheson’s white paper. The document—released in September 2000 and called the Cox Report after the congressman who chaired the committee authoring the study—occasionally meets its predecessor’s high analytical standards. In particular, its depiction of the Clinton administration’s conduct of relations with Russia forms a damning portrait of arrogance and mismanagement. The study’s many sound conclusions are marred, however, by the timing of its release—in the middle of a presidential election campaign—and by the fact that not a single House Democrat participated in its drafting. Moreover, its assertion that the Bush administration could have done better is not clearly supported by what took place during its four-year term.

The authors state that as a result of its mistaken policies, the Clinton administration let slip “the greatest foreign policy opportunity since the end of World War II.” Russia’s current troubles and tense relationship with Washington, the report argues, belie the promise of the first months after the end of the Soviet Union (that is, the last year of the Bush administration in 1992). As a result, the appeal of the US as a model for reform has faded, and anti-US sentiment is strong. This is the result of the Clinton administration’s virtually unqualified support for the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, whose rule by decree undermined the rule of law. The Clinton administration, according to the report, also failed to recognize the challenges posed by an economy lacking the institutions needed to regulate economic activity. Washington unwisely poured resources into Russia, which did not have the infrastructure to properly disperse them. US funds and international assistance intended to reform the economic system benefited well-connected individuals or were used to maintain subsidies left over from the Soviet era. The report also states that a small group of senior US officials ignored or deprecated analyses that contradicted their own views. In the process, officials became isolated from actual conditions in Russia. Only Russia’s August 1998 economic collapse—which was impossible to ignore—had any effect on the thinking of the Clinton administration.

Few other studies capture so well the administrative chaos underlying US policy. The report shows how three officials, with little or no first-hand knowledge of Russia, were daily responsible for relations with Moscow: Vice President Al Gore, who headed the bilateral Gore–Chernomyrdin Commission; Strobe Talbott, at first Special Assistant for the Newly Independent States, later Deputy Secretary of State, and a journalist friend of Bill Clinton with no experience in public affairs; and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a former Harvard professor with little interest in Russia but with a great deal of confidence—misplaced, as it turns out—that the “shock therapy,” which had worked elsewhere, would be successful in Russia. The study asks, but does not fully answer, why there was no midcourse correction in US policy once things started going wrong.

To be fair, the Clinton administration took office at an especially difficult time for the conduct of a successful policy toward Russia. Although research had long suggested that the keys to long-term growth were microeconomic policies that fostered competitive markets and rewarded innovation, the Clinton administration emphasized instead the primary goal of macroeconomic stabilization, then all the rage in economic circles. Moreover, even before the Cold War ended, an already complex system of foreign policy–making grew even more so, as US concerns expanded to embrace a vast array of transnational issues such as drugs, terrorism, and the environment, issues that diplomats were often ill-equipped to handle. The result was the proliferation of agencies overseas and an immense problem of coordination (see Anthony C. E. Quainton, “Diplomacy in the 21st Century: Dead but It Won’t Lie Down,” a paper presented to the International Studies Association, Los Angeles, March 15, 2000).

Inevitably, such a complicated story is incomplete. The Cox Report barely mentions the US Congress, which—often with Republican support—funded many of the bilateral programs with Russia. The report gives little attention to the role of international financial institutions, which approved lending to Russia because of its political importance rather than according to objective economic criteria. It also neglects the activity of private US banks, which made millions of dollars in Russia and exerted pressure for continued close engagement.

The report criticizes the Clinton administration, in passing, for ignoring intelligence assessments detailing the widespread corruption in Moscow, but in general the report does not spell out the CIA’s role. It is true that the CIA, as the agency now claims, sometimes warned the White House that the Russian government was corrupt. However, the thrust of the majority of its assessments in the mid-1990s—though perhaps less so in the past two years—was that the reforms were on track. The CIA was so marginalized by the Clinton administration—which, after all, could rely on its extensive personal contacts with the Kremlin to find out what was going on in Russia—that Langley emphasized the good news the White House wanted to hear so that at least it would be listened to and be seen as relevant to policy. As events in Russia unfolded, CIA managers saw their organization’s mission not so much as providing hard-headed analysis as offering policy “support.” They often referred to policymakers as “consumers”—as though they were selling doughnuts or cars to customers who could always go elsewhere. Moreover, for generations of analysts weaned during the Cold War on counting Soviet missile warheads or digesting official economic statistics, the fiscal sleight of hand practiced by Russia’s new rulers must have been a challenge indeed.

It is on the question of analytical balance that the Cox Report is most wanting. Certainly the Clinton administration had some solid achievements, such as managing the withdrawal of Russian troops from Central Europe. A few US initiatives—especially those with clear, limited goals and clear accountability—did some good. For example, the Nunn–Lugar program, a bipartisan initiative designed to prevent nuclear proliferation worked well, and bilateral cooperation in law enforcement and air safety made important progress. More importantly, the Cox Report incorrectly places the Gore–Chernomyrdin Commission, the bilateral forum for a variety of technical programs, at the center of US–Russia relations. This allows the report’s authors to attack Gore’s competence in foreign policy, and to do so when was a presidential contender.

In fact, the essence of the bilateral relationship was the web of personal ties between Talbott (and the rest of Clinton’s foreign policy team) with the people around Yeltsin. These ties, which sometimes circumvented not only the US Congress but the US Embassy in Moscow, contributed to a clientelistic arrangement that identified the fate of particular Russian politicians with that of specific US initiatives and, ultimately, the success of US policy.

But there should be no doubt, above all, that Bill Clinton was deeply involved. Privately, Clinton cultivated his “friend Boris” through scores of telephone calls and other personal contacts. Publicly, Clinton often conveyed the impression that he viewed foreign policy as secondary to his domestic agenda. Clinton’s rhetorical excesses in praise of Russia’s “reformers,” the country’s “march” toward “free markets,” and “successful” efforts at privatization suggested that he believed these phrases had the same meaning in that country as they did in the US. (The Cox Report mentions the most famous presidential misuse of comparative history: his comparison of Moscow’s brutal campaign in Chechnya with the beginning of the American Civil War.) In addition, Clinton’s domestic populism inclined him to ladle out money to groups offering projects in Russia as though they were contracts proposed by greedy lobbyists back home in Little Rock.

But suggesting, as the Cox Report does, that George Bush would have handled Russia better than Clinton recalls the old argument that John F. Kennedy, had he lived, would not have escalated the war in Vietnam. Both with regard to Southeast Asia in the early ’60s, or Russia three decades later, there is simply too little evidence to know for sure. What we do know is that Bush was less engaged on Russian issues than Clinton—contrary to what the Cox Report says—and that Bush’s firmer grasp of US strategic interests on other issues may well have led him to avoid the pitfalls that befell his successor regarding Russia. What both presidents shared—and it is a fault also of the Cox Report—is the misconception that Yeltsin’s victory in August 1991 was a truly democratic revolution. In most respects, Yeltsin’s government was a successor regime to that of the Soviet Union, run by many of the same Soviet elites. This fact made events there fundamentally different from the downfall of communism in much of Eastern Europe and thus more difficult to shape.

Despite its scholarly virtues, as a means of explaining to the public what had happened in China, The China White Paper, according to Acheson’s biographer James Chace, was a failure. The complexity of events, the politicization of the issue, and its bulk alone ensured the document would be read only by experts. The Cox Report, far more flawed and barely 200 pages, seems destined for the same fate. Nevertheless, its proposal—not to isolate Russia but engage it in the right way—is important. For if there is one thing Vladimir Putin has shown, it is that the interplay between Russian domestic politics and its international behavior endures.

Donald N. Jensen, associate director of broadcasting at Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty in Prague, served as a political officer at the US Embassy in Moscow from 1993 to 1995. He is the author of “Power, the Media, and Corruption in Russia: The Presidential Transition,” in The Power of Corruption, ed. Virginie Coulloudon, (Westview Press, forthcoming).

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