Harmonizing the Evolution of U.S. and Russian Defense Policies.

• Author: Sherr, James

TO REALISTS, IT has always been axiomatic that one must deal with those who matter, even when they are least congenial. That paradigmatically realist institution, the nineteenth century Concert of Europe, not only treated war as a legitimate institution (to the outrage of its critics), but had an emphatic Great Power bias. That bias was deemed central to the Concert's aim of reconciling interstate conflict with international order. Conservatives like Castlereagh, nationalists like Bismarck and internationalists like Gladstone were all convinced that international order would be torn apart unless the interests of Great Powers were respected and kept in balance.

The Standing Group of this joint U.S.-Russian project--which includes, inter alia, a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, a former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense, a former U.S. Army Chief of Staff and the last Chief of the Soviet General Staff--have brought these classical convictions to bear upon entirely novel circumstances. The novelty lies in the swift collapse of the power that "balanced" the interests of the United States for forty-five years. Though guarded in its manner of saying so, the report shows discomfort at the extent of the collapse of Soviet power, while welcoming the collapse of the ideology that made this power menacing by definition. If post-Communist Russia could be induced to play the part that post-Napoleonic France played after 1815, these contributors would harbor far fewer anxieties about the post-Cold War order than they plainly do.

In Zhirinovsky's New Year, how realistic is it to suggest that Russia could play this part? Why had so many in Russia's "near abroad" concluded, long before the elections of December 1993, that Russia was playing the role of fire rather than fire brigade in their "common strategic space," and doing so with her customary deliberation and guile? Why have so many in the "far abroad" concluded that the Leninist mentality was swept away with Leninist ideology? How likely is it that Great Russian sentiment will prove to be its antidote rather than its surrogate?

Those who have raised these questions should study this report no less carefully than those who have not. They will find analysis and proposals that, in tone and substance, have as much affinity with liberal internationalism as with classical realism. Yet they will also rediscover that Americans and Russians have impeccably "realist" reasons for maintaining a special relationship with one another.

As the authors note at the outset, today, as in the years of the Cold War, "Russia and the United States continue to share the overriding interest in avoiding global nuclear war." To superpowers who have long felt invulnerable to other forms of military threat, this nuclear preoccupation has been intense. Yet to allies, it has often seemed myopic. Throughout the years of East-West confrontation, Europeans dreaded conventional war no less than nuclear war, and had good reason to fear that policies which made nuclear war "unthinkable" could make conventional war more thinkable. For the same reasons that West Europeans feared "adversary partnership" in the 1960s, East and Central Europeans might approach a 1990s "strategic partnership" with apprehension.

Serious as these apprehensions might be, many of the report's recommendations about nuclear policy are both beneficial and overdue. Why should the U.S. and Russian navies preserve submarine patrol patterns drawn up in a period of superpower confrontation? Why should countries that no longer contemplate first strikes against one another's territory oppose...