January - February 1994
American Purpose
Issue 1, Volume 8

Publication Date: February 1, 1994
Posted: Tuesday, February 2, 1994

This issue includes 'For Peace in Europe'; 'The Centrality of Europe'; 'The Dilemma of Russia'; 'A Complex of Complexities'; 'Storm Warnings'; 'Muscular Diplomacy'; 'The Case for the New NATO'; 'Policy Toward Russia'; 'Policy Toward Ukraine'; 'Policy Toward Central Europe'; and 'Beyond Yalta'.


In This Issue :

For Peace in Europe
The Case for NATO Reconstruction
The holidays are over. No, not just the seasonal celebrations of Hanukkah, Christmas, and the new year, but the vacation from serious thinking about foreign policy that Americans have enjoyed for the better part of two years. Ever since the Revolution of 1989 and the New Russian Revolution of August 1991 put an end to the Fifty-Five Years' War against totalitarianism, public opinion (encouraged by weary, shortsighted, and/or cowardly political leadership) has assumed that the only issues of consequence in world affairs are economic: thus, amidst rapid and in some cases cataclysmic change throughout the world last year, the key 1993 foreign-policy battle in American public opinion and in the Congress was over the North American Free Trade Agreement.  [More]

The Centrality of Europe
The prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea led by the irrational Kim Il-sung or his heirs would have unhappy consequences for the security of East Asia, and would almost certainly lead, in short order, to the nuclearization of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. These are not developments that the United States—or, better, a U.S. government serious about its international security responsibilities—could ignore. Nor could we remain blithely indifferent to the victory of radical Islamic forces in Algeria and Egypt, or to the acquisition by Syria, Iraq, or Iran of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles capable of raining death on Israel and much of Europe.  [More]

The Dilemma of Russia
Seeing Russia clearly has never been easy for western Europeans or Americans. There is the sheer size, the raw geographic magnitude, of the place. There are the cultural differences derived from the fact that Russia is the heir of a distinctive form of Orthodox Christianity while the West has been deeply influenced by Latin Christianity; these differences have worked themselves out historically in differing patterns of political development. Russian nationalism, and its expression in imperial thrusts to the south and west, often abutted British and French ambitions and interests in the neighborhood, and once led to the kind of tensions that eventually produced the Crimean War. Then there is the long-running, still unresolved debate between "Westernizers" and "Slavophiles" within Russia itself, a debate that has given that massive land a strange relationship to its western European cousins. And there is, of course, the fact that for three-quarters of a century Russia was the center of a world revolutionary movement that aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of the basic institutions of modem Western politics, economics, and culture.  [More]

A Complex of Complexities
But granting both the magnitude of that reformist task and the grudging minimalism of the Western response to it, one still has to ask, in the cold light of dawn: What is Russia up to these days, anyway?  [More]

Storm Warnings
So, yes, by all means, let us move ahead with aid to Russia and support for economic and political reform there. But that aid and support must not be perceived in Moscow as a sign of explicit or tacit consent to new Russian imperial adventures, a new Russian military aggressiveness, or a reassertion of a Russian "sphere of influence" that would effectively redivide Europe along the old Yalta faultline. Unhappily, it seems that such Western permission slips may have been given, and accepted as such by Russia's leaders, in recent months.  [More]

Muscular Diplomacy
Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev has also been making increasingly assertive statements in recent months. He has claimed "the entire geographic area of the former USSR" as a "sphere of vital interest to Russia" and has sought international recognition of Russia as the successor state to the former Soviet Union, so that a "distinctive zone ... of good neighborly relations and cooperation" would be maintained around Russia—a zone presumably to be policed by the Russian military. But even more ominously, Kozyrev has hinted at times that Russia's "special and exclusive sphere of influence" in what Russians call the "near abroad" may extend beyond the CIS and the former USSR into central and eastern Europe, i.e., into the nations of the old Warsaw Pact.  [More]

The Case for the New NATO
Strategic thinking begins with goals. What should be America's goals in central and eastern Europe over the next twenty years?  [More]

Policy Toward Russia
The first thing Russia must understand is that the United States wants reform to succeed there. We want, in other words, a stable, democratic, economically successful, and secure Russia. This is one major reason why we insist that there be no Yalta II. Besides further destabilizing an already unstable area, Russian imperial assertiveness would be a terrible distraction from the enormous task of reconstruction that Russia must complete over the next several generations, if it is finally to achieve its long-sought place as a great power in the modern world. Indeed, one of the best things we could do right now would be to persuade Russian leaders that any possible future their country may have as a great power is entirely dependent on their forswearing, for the foreseeable future, the imperial assertiveness traditionally associated with great-power status in Europe. Russia is a basket case, and it will become even more of one if it does not devote its attention to economic reform and democratic consolidation. Moreover, failure to make progress on these fronts, particularly the economic one, will only heighten the possibility of a Vladimir Zhirinovsky coming to power: at which point Russia would again become an adversary whose containment would be a principal goal of U.S. policy.  [More]

Policy Toward Ukraine
No one can be sure how the struggle within the present reform coalition in Russia will play out, or whether the neo-imperialist currents in the Yeltsin camp will eventually make common cause with the forces now aligned behind Zhirinovsky (and even with the former Communists). In such a situation, Ukraine would be, from the American strategic point of view, the first line of resistance. And thus our policy goal should be to make Ukraine indigestible, so that the western Russian border remains where it is today no matter how things turn out in Russia in the next few years. This will mean paying far greater attention to Ukraine than we have paid recently.  [More]

Policy Toward Central Europe
Then there is the question of NATO. The negative U.S. response to the Visegrad Group's application for immediate NATO membership (which would not unreasonably be interpreted in Moscow as having given Russia a veto over NATO policy) is strategically mistaken: precisely because it has strengthened the hand of those forces within Russia whose neo-imperial ambitions are distracting attention from the imperatives of Russian economic reform while exacerbating the dangers of destabilization in east central Europe. But immediate incorporation of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and possibly Slovakia into the alliance does not now seem in the cards: Britain and France are squeamish, and American public opinion has not been alerted to the possibility of such a major innovation in our foreign policy.  [More]

Beyond Yalta
A new, reconstructed NATO, open to all the states of the former Soviet bloc that met the criteria defined above, would also put an end to the Yalta mentality, which has exacerbated the security problems of Europe by getting us accustomed to thinking in historically and culturally artificial terms about "western Europe" and "eastern Europe." The history of the twentieth century ought to have made it clear that European security is precisely that, European security, or it is no security at all. We cannot make a single great leap forward into a pan-European security system. But such a system ought to be our goal, and achieving that goal requires the incremental reconstruction of NATO.  [More]