THE YEAR 2016 WAS A TIME of political surprises. None was as great as the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. His victory that November promised to change America’s relationship with the Kremlin. Taken together with the rise of populism in Europe, it also looked set to transform Russia’s relations with the broader Western world, heralding the start of a new era. Things were suddenly going Vladimir Putin’s way.
Trump’s warm words about Putin during the campaign suggested that he would be friendlier to Moscow than Obama had been – and certainly friendlier than Hillary Clinton, who had been portrayed in the Russian media as a Russophobe spoiling to start a Third World War. There was talk of finding common ground. Not surprisingly, his success was greeted in Russia with something approaching jubilation. Members of the Duma, in full session at the time, burst into applause at the news. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, bought 132 bottles of champagne for his fellow parliamentarians and staff, crowing that he expected Trump to help Russia achieve its strategic goals. ‘What’s Crimea to him? He doesn’t even know where it is!’ Zhirinovsky declared.
Russian state media carried out an abrupt 180-degree turn. During the campaign, when Clinton looked certain to prevail, it had lambasted the American electoral process as corrupt and unfair. Trump’s win was swiftly hailed as a triumph for democracy. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, linked the result with two equally tumultuous events in Britain: the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in September 2015 and the vote to leave the EU the following June. ‘Corbyn. Brexit. Trump,’ she tweeted. ‘The world is sick of the establishment, of its lies, of its lying condescending media. Today I want to ride around Moscow with an American flag in the window.’ Simonyan’s comments reflected Russia’s attempt to depict itself as leading the opposition to the global international liberal order. Now, apparently against all the odds, Clinton, who epitomised that liberal order, had been defeated by a populist revolt. Trump’s victory was also Russia’s.
Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to congratulate the president elect, sending him a telegram in which he said he hoped that relations between the two world powers would improve ‘from their crisis state’. Later that day, after swearing in a group of foreign diplomats in the Kremlin, Putin struck an optimistic note. ‘It’s not our fault that Russian–American relations are in this poor state,’ he said. ‘But Russia is ready and wants to restore full-fledged relations with the United States.’ The contrast could not have been greater with Obama’s election eight years earlier, when President Medvedev ‘forgot’ to congratulate him. Within the following few weeks, Trump and Putin reportedly spoke by phone at least twice.
The legacy Trump inherited was a difficult one. The reset that Obama attempted after he came to power was aimed at establishing a new partnership with Moscow. But by the end of his second term he was trying to isolate Russia or ignore it, even as Putin ran rings around him, first over Ukraine and then Syria. ‘Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours, not out of strength but out of weakness,’ was Obama’s withering response to Putin’s annexation of Crimea. ‘They don’t pose the number one security threat to the United States. I remain much more concerned about the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.’
Putin was livid – not least because Obama’s accusation struck home. Russia may still have been capable of muscling its way into Syria and possessed enough nuclear weapons to destroy America several times over, but its economy was just one sixteenth the size of America’s, it had considerably less territory than it had during the Soviet days and its conservative, Orthodox ideology had nothing like the global ideological pull of communism.
Relations reached a low point in October 2016 when Putin suspended an agreement with the United States, concluded in 2000, that bound the two sides to dispose of surplus plutonium originally intended for nuclear weapons. He set stringent conditions for the resumption of cooperation: all sanctions imposed over Crimea should be lifted and compensation paid, the Magnitsky Act repealed and the US military presence reduced in those countries that had joined NATO since September 2000. Putin’s announcement came the same day that Washington said it was freezing talks with Russia on trying to end the violence in Syria. Obama’s reset had been aimed at ‘delinking’ intractable issues from those where productive cooperation with Russia might be possible. Now Russia was making clear its determination to use arms control agreements – the basis of post-Cold War cooperation between the two countries – as leverage in other disputes. Putin’s move represented a new stage in the degeneration of Russia’s relations with the West.
The election offered the potential for a new start. Trump came to the presidency with one clear advantage: he was not Obama. His warm words for Putin during the campaign pointed to a willingness to give the Russian leader the respect he craved. This in turn looked set to raise Russian hopes of a ‘grand bargain’ with America that might eventually pave the way for the fulfilment of Putin’s dream: a return to the days when Washington and Moscow ran the world together – only now perhaps in tandem with China. Inevitably, this fuelled fears in Ukraine, the Baltic states and Russia’s other neighbours that any such rapprochement would be at their expense. These concerns were heightened by Trump’s lukewarm commitment to NATO and his suggestion that the Alliance should not come to the aid of those countries that did not pay their fair share to defend themselves.
Events in Europe, too, seemed to be moving in Putin’s favour, with Britain’s Brexit vote providing a foretaste of a surge in anti-establishment feeling similar to the one that brought Trump to power in America. Pro-Russian sentiment was already strong in countries such as Italy and Greece, while Viktor Orban, the Hungarian leader, was an avowed admirer of the Kremlin leader. The weeks after Trump’s victory saw the election of two more pro-Russian presidents: in Bulgaria, Rumen Radev, a Socialist former air force general with no political experience, trounced the candidate of the ruling centre-right party, while in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, the contest was won by Igor Dodon, who called for his country, the poorest in Europe, to scrap its association agreement with the EU and instead join Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union.
More significant was the choice two weeks later in France of François Fillon as the presidential candidate of the centre-right Républicains in the party’s primary, setting the stage for a battle between him and Marine Le Pen of the National Front in the second round of the election in May 2017. While Le Pen’s admiration for Putin was well known, Fillon was just as fulsome in his praise of the Kremlin leader, calling for the lifting of sanctions on Russia and for France to work together with Moscow to curb immigration and fight terrorism. The policy appeared straight out of the playbook of Charles de Gaulle, who had tried to steer a path between Moscow and Washington when he ruled France during the 1960s. It was also underpinned by a strong personal relationship between Fillon and Putin that had developed when they were prime ministers in the late 2000s. Both men share a similar conservative approach towards social policy and wariness of multiculturalism and international organisations. Fillon spoke of Putin as ‘cher Vladimir’. When his mother died, Putin reportedly sent him a bottle of 1931 wine – the year of her birth.
The result looked almost certain to be a softening of the hardline stance towards the Kremlin that had been followed by Francois Hollande, the Socialist president, even though it would put France at odds with Chancellor Merkel, who remained deeply suspicious of Putin. Yet Merkel was finding herself increasingly isolated: her Social Democrat coalition partners hankered for a return to the days of Ostpolitik, when Germany tried to balance West and East, while polls showed ordinary Germans would be reluctant to defend their Eastern neighbours if they became embroiled in a serious conflict with Russia. Britain, Europe’s other leading Russia hawk, was increasingly distracted by the challenges of Brexit, while a resounding ‘no’ vote in Italy in a referendum on constitutional reform in December gave a further challenge to the established order.
In the meantime, Syria was the most pressing international issue facing Trump. In the last years of Obama’s second term, the West found itself increasingly torn between the need to crush ISIS and its attempts to use ‘moderate’ rebels to oust President Assad. By late 2016, that policy was in tatters. Identifying groups that were not in league with the Islamists yet capable of ousting the regime proved an impossible task. At the same time, the West’s unwillingness to be drawn into a shooting war with Moscow left it impotent in the face of relentless Russian and Syrian government bombing of Aleppo, which culminated in the fall of the last rebel areas in the East of the city that December. Trump, by contrast, made clear during the campaign that his priority was crushing ISIS. If this meant a de facto recognition of Assad’s right to continue in power – albeit only for a limited transitional period – then so be it. Such a policy opened the way to cooperation with Russia, which, given its own large and often troubled Muslim population, has a special interest in the defeat of Islamic fundamentalism.
More intractable was the question of Ukraine, which had led to growing tension and a build-up of military forces on both sides of NATO’s border with Russia. The starting point had to be Crimea itself. Given the importance that Putin has attached to reversing the ‘historical injustice’ of 1954 when Crimea was transferred to Ukraine, it would be politically impossible for him to give up the peninsula. Such a move would also prove unpopular with the local Russian majority. Yet it would be equally difficult for the West to explicitly accept Russian rule over Crimea and its continued involvement in Eastern Ukraine, for fear that it would give the green light to other military adventures. History does provide a possible way out of the impasse, however: the United States, along with Britain and many other countries, refused to recognise Stalin’s annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, providing a major morale boost to the Baltic states, but this did not prevent the West from having dealings with the Soviet Union on other issues during the Second World War and in the decades that followed.
This still leaves the problem of Ukraine’s war-torn East. Events since 2014 have shown the lost lands will not be recovered through military conquest. The only way to do so is instead by example – by turning the rest of Ukraine into a reformed, Western country that those living in the separatist regions want to join. The government in Kiev still has much to do to achieve that – in particular in tackling chronic corruption. If it were to succeed, it would allow the country eventually to reunite peacefully, as Germany did before it.
Much, though, depends on Ukraine’s future military alignment. The situation has changed radically since 2008 when America was pushing for the country to join NATO. All such talk appeared to have gone for good after the Crimea crisis. Yet the Alliance has been reluctant to acknowledge this explicitly. One of the leading voices arguing for a change in policy has been Henry Kissinger. In a series of interviews with The Atlantic on the eve of the election, the former secretary of state rejected Obama’s policy of isolating Russia and dismissed calls from some Democrats and Neocon Republicans for a military solution to the stalemate over Ukraine. ‘Russia is a vast country undergoing a great domestic trauma of defining what it is,’ said Kissinger.1 ‘Military transgressions need to be resisted. But Russia needs a sense that it remains significant.’
The status of Ukraine was key to this: attempting to incorporate the country into NATO, which would shift the Alliance’s eastern border just 300 miles from Moscow, would be an unnecessary provocation, Kissinger argued. Yet, by the same token, fixing a Russian security border along the western side of Ukraine would be intolerable to Poland, Slovakia and Hungary with their recent memories of Soviet occupation. Kissinger believed Ukraine should instead be turned into a bridge between East and West, much like Finland or Austria during the Cold War, ‘free to conduct its own economic and political relationships, including with both Europe and Russia, but not party to any military or security alliance’.
Lest it be interpreted by Moscow as capitulation, such a policy should be combined with a reinforced commitment to the defence of NATO’s most recent Eastern members. Like other members of the Alliance, they are covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty on collective defence. Yet the decision to take in the former Warsaw Pact countries, starting in 1999, was primarily a political one, which was not matched by the necessary deployment of troops. Sending extra forces to Poland and the Baltic states, as agreed at NATO’s Warsaw summit in July 2016, was a step in the right direction, even if there is a danger that the Alliance could still be wrong-footed by a limited Russian intervention in Estonia or Latvia.
This should be coupled with a vigilance towards Russia’s other attempts to divide the West and disrupt the established order, both in Europe and in the United States, countering the various attempts at cyber warfare and its propaganda efforts that pollute the information space. There should be attempts to engage with the Russian people, too, even though this has been made more difficult by the Kremlin’s clampdown on NGOs, which it characterises as agents of foreign governments. The widespread suspicion of the West and its values now felt by many Russians is an alarming phenomenon that did not exist in communist days, despite the heavy-handed efforts of the Soviet propaganda machine. Efforts should be taken to counter this by encouraging more personal contact, especially within the younger generation.
Given Trump’s intention to reach out to Putin, the personal chemistry that develops between the two men will be crucial. Trump’s aides predicted he would be happy to flatter Putin’s ego by returning to the high-profile summits of past years that had allowed Russia to present itself as America’s equal on the world stage. Although they had never met before the election, there was speculation that Putin might come to achieve the same rapport with Trump that he once enjoyed with Berlusconi, another flamboyant showman and businessman turned political leader. When Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats over cyber hacking in December, Putin did not respond, prompting Trump to describe him as ‘very smart’. Mutual flattery can only go so far, however, and it remains to be seen whether such a rapport would survive the inevitable policy differences between Russia and America. Putin’s tendency to see foreign policy as a zero sum game and his insistence on dominating any international organisation of which he is a member inevitably complicates relations with the West. For his part, Trump is equally determined to appear a strong leader, which would reduce the scope for him to negotiate any deal that smacks of giving ground.
The extent of Trump’s willingness to adopt a new policy towards Russia will also be shaped by those around him. His choices to fill the top jobs in his administration reinforced expectations of a change of course. One of the first to be named, Retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, appears to share his boss’s enthusiasm for Putin – and was criticised for sitting next to the Russian leader at an event in Moscow. Even more intriguing was Trump’s pick for secretary of state. After toying with a number of candidates including Mitt Romney, who had been hawkish on Russia during his failed presidential bid in 2012, Trump finally opted for Rex Tillerson, a veteran Texan oilman who headed ExxonMobil. Tillerson’s career had brought him into frequent contact with Putin since their first meeting on the Russian Pacific island of Sakhalin in 1999, when Exxon had struck a deal with Rosneft. In 2013, Putin awarded him Russia’s Order of Friendship medal; photographs that circulated in the media showed the two men drinking champagne. Tillerson was also close to Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, one of the most powerful members of Putin’s entourage. Not surprisingly, Tillerson was a vocal critic of the sanctions imposed on Russia after the seizure of Ukraine, saying they cost his company hundreds of millions of dollars and prevented its participation in key projects including a deal with Rosneft to explore and pump oil in Siberia. After four decades at Exxon, during which time he had accumulated an estimated $245 million of shares in the company, Tillerson would be open to accusations of conflict of interest in his new job. With even some Republican senators such as Marco Rubio and John McCain critical of him, a tough confirmation hearing seemed assured.
This did not necessarily make Tillerson a soft touch as far as Russia was concerned. His backers pointed to his skills as a tough negotiator, which he could now deploy to advance America’s interests rather than Exxon’s. Other factors mitigated against a sudden transformation of Russia from foe to friend. Many of America’s top generals have made clear that they see Russia, rather than Islamist terrorism, as the principal threat to their country. Vice President Mike Pence, who took charge of Trump’s transition team after the election and was expected to play a powerful role in the administration, also appeared suspicious of the Kremlin’s intentions. During the vice-presidential debate he referred twice to Putin as ‘the small and bullying leader of Russia’ and derided his ‘crony, corrupt capitalist system’ as inferior to the American political system.
Either way, Putin and Trump appear destined to share the world stage for some time to come. The Russian leader is expected to stand for – and win – another term in 2018, ensuring a further six years in office. By that time he will be seventy-one – just a year older than Trump was when he was elected – and may find another way of bending the rules to stand again. He has the means to do so, since the parliamentary majority won by United Russia in the September 2016 election gave it enough votes to change the constitution. A change in American policy could nevertheless answer one of the fundamental questions about US–Russian relations over the past twenty-five years: will a more conciliatory stance by Washington usher in a new era of cooperation between the two erstwhile Cold War rivals or instead be seized upon and exploited by the Kremlin as a sign of weakness?
So, who did lose Russia? The failure of Russia and the West to find a modus vivendi has its roots in the inability of both sides to agree on what happened in 1991 and a tendency to conflate the end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union. The world we have inherited – and, in particular, Russian resentment at being treated as a vanquished foe – stems from this disagreement. Western actions such as the bombing of Yugoslavia, NATO’s enlargement to the East and the US-led attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan have also played their part in poisoning relations. So too did memories of the poverty and economic chaos of the 1990s, which were portrayed by critics as the result of the neoliberalism forced on Russia by the West.
A decade on, the war against Saddam has few defenders, while questions can be asked about the manner and intensity of the bombing of Yugoslavia. The expansion of NATO is not so clear cut: if the Soviet Union’s former satellites, seeing Russia’s weakness in the 1990s, saw a historic opportunity to tie their future to the West rather than to the East, then why should their desire have been subjected to a Kremlin veto? Yet George W. Bush’s attempt to extend the alliance to Georgia and Ukraine was a step too far and an unnecessary provocation – and also represented a commitment the Alliance would struggle to honour in the case of a Russian attack. The European Commission’s attempt to force Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian leader, to choose between Russia and Europe, proved the final straw.
Yet Putin himself bears much of the responsibility for his country’s isolation with his fear of Western plots and desire for respect, which in Russian eyes so often translates into a desire to be feared. The form of exceptionalism he has promoted since returning to power in 2012 is merely the latest manifestation of what Russians have long seen as their special mission, depicting their country variously over the years as the Third Rome, a centre of world communism and now the heart of Eurasia. Putin has used it a way to keep himself in power, bolstering his own reign by transforming the last vestiges of the naïve, euphoric pro-Western sentiment that followed the end of the Cold War into today’s popular anti-Americanism. In the process, he has come to appreciate that waging war, first against Chechnya, and then in Ukraine and Syria can do wonders for his ratings.
If anyone is responsible for losing Russia, then it is Putin. It would be wrong, though, to characterise the East–West tensions of the past decade as a ‘Putin problem’ that will disappear when he eventually leaves the Kremlin. Looking back another quarter of a century from now, it will likely be the pro-Western Russia of the Yeltsin years that is seen as the aberration and the assertive, self-assured Putin era that is the norm.
The final word belongs with George Kennan who, in his ‘Long Telegram’ from Moscow and an anonymous article for Foreign Affairs in 1946, is credited with the devising concept of containment, which underpinned US policy towards the Soviet Union for several decades. In an article in 1951 in Foreign Affairs, this time written under his own name, Kennan pondered what might eventually follow the Soviet regime, which, he noted presciently, ‘like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay’. It was foolish, he argued, to expect the emergence of an American-style liberal democratic system in Russia or to believe that ‘doctrinaire and impatient well-wishers in the West’ would help to produce there ‘in short order a replica of the Western democratic dream’.
‘Of one thing we may be sure: no great and enduring change in the spirit and practice of government in Russia will ever come about primarily through foreign inspiration or advice,’ Kennan added. ‘To be genuine, to be enduring and to be worth the hopeful welcome of other peoples such a change would have to flow from the initiatives and efforts of the Russians themselves.’