How does one handle what management experts call a wicked problem—one that is not rooted in a primary cause but rather results from dynamic interactions between a multiplicity of vexing technological, psychological, political, societal, institutional, and international factors, few of which individually are prone to solutions?1 There is no universal recipe for success. Like Tolstoy’s observation that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, every wicked problem exhibits its own peculiar qualities that require particular approaches. But failures in dealing with such systems problems tend to have some important common features. One way to begin grappling with the complexities of the current US-Russian dynamic and mitigate the dangers of escalatory spirals is to examine past failures in dealing with other complex systems problems, to understand what not to do. And looking outside the realm of statecraft, toward such fields as ecology, is a good place to start.
The path toward wisdom in managing our Russia problem begins in Yellowstone National Park. Created by an act of Congress in 1872 as the first formal nature preserve in the world, the park encompasses more than two million acres of the American West, an area larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. At the time of its establishment, Yellowstone teemed with wildlife. One naturalist characterized the early park as “an unfenced zoological garden for the enjoyment and enrichment of visitors who rarely saw such animals elsewhere.”2 Visiting the park in 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt observed many thousand elk, hundreds of antelope, and numerous cougar, mountain sheep, deer, and coyotes. Overwhelmed by the abundance and natural beauty, he wrote, “Our people should see to it that this rich heritage is preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with its majestic beauty all unmarred.” And for more than a century, American law has required the US government to do exactly that, protecting the park against damage to its geological and botanical wonders and preventing “wanton destruction of fish and game found within.” Yet within a few decades of Roosevelt’s visit, Yellowstone was in steep decline. In 1934, an official US government publication announced that “white-tailed deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone.” In the mid-1980s, one of the park’s foremost chroniclers declared, “As a wildlife refuge, Yellowstone is dying.”3 The tale of what produced this decline is not one of neglect or corruption or ill intentions. Rather, it is the story of a complex systems problem.
When the park’s new rangers set to thinking about how they would preserve its wonders, they quickly realized that they had been handed an enormous challenge. The park’s elk and bison populations were becoming endangered. At their peak, millions of bison and elk had roamed the American West. But for decades, Native American tribes and Euro-American settlers and game hunters had aggressively hunted the herds. In the years following the Civil War, the proliferation of modern rifles had greatly improved the efficiency of hunters, while new tanning technologies had generated huge markets for wildlife hides around the world.4 This combination devastated the bison and elk populations throughout the West. The Yellowstone herds were no exception. Hunting in Yellowstone was still legal through the 1870s, although the ill-defined “wanton destruction” of wildlife was banned. Hunters killed some four thousand elk in the park in the spring of 1875 alone, and they had reduced the Yellowstone bison herd to a mere twenty-five by 1894.5
To arrest the herds’ decline, the United States government banned the hunting of game in the park and literally called in the cavalry. Beginning in 1886, US Army personnel took over management of the park and invested considerable resources in feeding its elk and bison, driving out their poachers, and killing their natural predators. “Buffalo” Jones, appointed as the park’s first game warden, oversaw what effectively became a dedicated bison ranch within the park, devoted to the herd’s breeding, feeding, and care. These efforts were strikingly successful. By the late 1880s, Yellowstone’s elk population had started to rebound. Within a few more decades, the Yellowstone elk herd had grown to some thirty-five thousand, and bison had once again become a significant tourist attraction for the park.6 Moose began to establish themselves in Yellowstone for the first time, and the bear population increased. By early in the twentieth century, nearly everyone associated with Yellowstone, in and out of government, viewed the park as a grand success. More and more visitors were coming, and the park was regarded as a true national treasure.7
Just as old problems were being solved, however, new problems emerged. By the 1920s, it was becoming clear that something was going very wrong with park wildlife. Elk and bison continued to thrive, but the park’s antelope, deer, and bighorn sheep populations went into steep decline. White-tailed deer were gone altogether by 1924. Most alarmingly, beaver grew scarce:
Perhaps no animal was more important in Yellowstone than the beaver. By building his dams, he slowed spring runoff in the streams, discouraging erosion and siltation, keeping the water clean for the spawning trout. By building ponds, the beaver raised the surrounding water table, adding moisture that promoted vegetation—willow and aspen, forbs (broad-leaved plants such as aster, yarrow, and clover), berries and lush grass—that were essential foods for other animals. The ponds themselves provided habitat for waterfowl, mink, and otter.8
The National Park Service, which had been established in 1916 and had taken over management of Yellowstone from the US Cavalry, was convinced that it knew what was causing the problems: predators. Beavers were the primary staple of wolves, and cougar and coyotes preyed on deer, antelope, and bighorn sheep. Rangers redoubled their antipredator efforts, declaring “open war” on mountain lions, wolves, and other predatory animals.9 They eliminated the wolves and cougar altogether from the park. But instead of helping the deer, sheep, beaver, and antelope, these corrective steps only made the situation worse. “The more predators they killed, the greater the decline of the game; and the greater the decline of the game, the more predators they killed.”10
Perplexed, the park service called in experts to study the problem. The biologist Adolph Murie reached his conclusion after a two-year study in 1939. Predators, he said, were not the cause of the declining herds. Rather, the elk population “is unquestionably too large.” Hungry elk herds had devastated the park’s once abundant aspen and willow trees, which in turn left little for deer and antelope to eat. With the aspen in decline, beavers had fewer and fewer trees with which to build dams, and the beaver population declined. Without beaver dams, meadows lost a critical factor in their water management, and vast areas of the park that were once a source of native grasses, waterfowl, and small mammals dried up. This cascading effect was devastating the ecosystem.
As the origin and scale of the problem became increasingly evident, the National Park Service began to grasp the damage that well-intentioned but ill-informed park management had caused. They hired range specialists to study the park and invited more research by independent biologists. They followed elk movements, measured spring runoff and soil erosion, and carefully monitored tree and vegetation growth to gauge the impact of grazing. The more they learned, the worse things looked. Not only were the large herds overgrazing, but they were trampling vast areas of the park, compacting the soil and diminishing its porosity. When it rained, the water ran off the surface of the soil rather than soaking in. The soil dried out, and the water table dropped, decreasing plant growth. This, in turn, contributed to soil erosion, which exacerbated the other problems. Range decline had become a vicious cycle.
To break out of this cycle of devastation, park rangers embarked on a new program to contain the size of the elk and bison herds by trapping and transferring them to other parts of the country. They launched an ambitious reseeding effort to restore vegetation and native grasses. They encouraged the hunting of elk outside the confines of the park. But they made only limited progress; the elk population still remained too high. Trapping and transferring could only go so far in containing the herd, as demand for elk in other parts of the country was saturated. So rangers reintroduced cougar and wolves into the park and began to view coyote as allies rather than enemies. Elk would be “naturally controlled” by a combination of native predators and periodic harsh winters. But the addition of natural predation still failed to control the herd.
Absent alternatives, the National Park Service ultimately determined that it would have to kill a large number of elk annually in Yellowstone. A little over a century after the park’s dedication, its management approach had come full circle. The hunters and predators once thought to be the primary threat to the park’s wildlife were determined to be critical parts of its survival. Park managers had gone from regarding Yellowstone as the sum of its individual parts, each posing problems to be addressed segmentally, to viewing the park as an integrated ecosystem, a superorganism whose parts are interrelated and must be managed as such.
Through trial and a lot of error, the National Park Service had discovered in Yellowstone one of the main tenets of dealing with complex adaptive systems: you can never do merely one thing.11 In a complex system, multiple individual elements are connected to and interact with one another in ways that change over time. Relationships in such a system are not arithmetic, and good intentions do not necessarily bring success. Combining two and two seldom produces four; sometimes it produces twenty-seven or negative eight. Every individual step that you take inevitably has effects on other parts of the system, some of which may be damaging. And recognizing in advance what those cascading effects will be is immensely difficult.
Around the time that the National Park Service was coming to grips with failed efforts to fix the problems in Yellowstone, government officials in Russia and experts from the United States were embarking on an ambitious new effort half a world away: to build a free-market democracy in Russia on the ruins of the Soviet Union’s failed communist system. Their intentions were noble. Both Russian and American reformers wanted those who had suffered under the Soviet system to have better, freer, more prosperous lives. Each side believed that successful reforms would enable Russia to be “at peace with itself and with the world.”12 But while there were many free-market democracies in the world at the start of the 1990s, nearly all of them had evolved gradually over time, growing out of the rich soil of a substantial middle class and long experience with private enterprise and rule of law that the Soviet Union lacked. And when the recipe that the reformers devised for Russia’s rapid transformation produced an unanticipated cascade of negative effects—a handful of crooked insiders owning billions of dollars of former state assets, an unprecedented 40 percent decline in gross domestic product, a shocking plunge in male life expectancy to some fifty-seven years—each side pointed fingers at the “predators” they deemed culpable rather than admitting misplaced confidence in their ability to reengineer a complex societal system. Learning lessons from what went so wrong with reforms in the 1990s is a critical part of taming the vicious cycles of US-Russian hostility that threaten to spin out of control today.
Russia’s new leaders faced a daunting task as they surveyed the wreckage of the Soviet Union on its last day of existence, December 25, 1991. The newly independent Russian Federation had almost none of the attributes of a viable state, let alone a free-market democracy. First, the Soviet economy had collapsed. Store shelves had emptied, budget deficits had ballooned, and hard currency reserves had dwindled. The ruble was nearing worthlessness. Starvation threatened. Second, the levers of government that a normal state might employ to deal with this crisis barely functioned. Key government operations had been in the hands of the highly centralized but dysfunctional Soviet state, and Russia lacked the ability to collect taxes, coordinate monetary policy, control borders, regulate trade, enforce laws, or oversee military activity on its own. Directives were given but not carried out. Third, although the state had imploded, civil society was all but nonexistent. People were bewildered, demoralized, and spiritually exhausted. There was next to no private property or private enterprise. Genuine political parties and nongovernment civic organizations did not exist. Religious life had long been hollowed out. Decades of KGB informant networks had bred deep mistrust among Russians toward both the government and each other. The Russian republic had held its first legislative elections in 1990, but the newly created Russian Congress of People’s Deputies had little experience with the business of passing actual legislation or representing the views and interests of its constituents. Under the circumstances, how were Russia’s leaders to pull the country out of its rapidly worsening crisis?
A small team of young Russian economists, led by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, insisted that they had the answer. Russia’s crisis, they argued, had its roots in Soviet leader Gorbachev’s refusal to adopt true market-based reforms. Gorbachev had hoped to preserve some elements of the Soviet state-owned and state-run economic system, but his timid half measures had only made matters worse. The Soviet economy could not be tweaked, they argued, only destroyed and replaced. Putting the old system out of its misery would be painful, but “shock therapy”—Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs’s term for the immediate elimination of price controls, rapid privatization of state-owned enterprises, extreme tightening of the money supply, and radical reduction of government spending—would minimize the duration of that pain. Classical capitalism would restock Russia’s empty shelves, reduce budget deficits, stabilize the currency, and begin to restore growth and prosperity within as little as a year.13
American experts largely agreed. There was a broad consensus in Washington at the time of the Soviet collapse that the fate of liberal reform in Russia would be a critical factor determining whether Moscow would make a decisive break with its old imperial ways. Senior officials strongly believed that the United States had a compelling interest in Russia’s liberalization; the only question was how it should liberalize. A few lone voices warned that radical economic disruptions could produce a societal backlash and endanger the survival of Russia’s fragile democracy, and they cautioned that the post-Soviet transition to capitalism should proceed carefully in accordance with local Russian traditions.14 But the vast majority of American experts, including several Harvard economists who advised the Russians and later joined the Clinton administration, regarded Russian traditions as the problem, not the solution. A gradual transformation of the Soviet command economy would only allow benighted revanchists to choke reform in its cradle. Rapid market reforms, on the other hand, would produce a growing Russian middle class that would become the foundation for an enduring capitalist democracy.
President Yeltsin was no economist, but he liked the approach Gaidar and Chubais advocated. It not only promised an economic turnaround relatively soon, but it also contrasted nicely with Gorbachev’s indecisiveness and resonated with the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation. And Yeltsin was not a patient man. As he put it in his memoirs, “I couldn’t force people to wait once again, to drag out the main events and processes for years. If our minds were made up, we had to get going!”15 He put Gaidar and Chubais in charge of economic stabilization and privatization, and they launched “shock therapy” on January 2, 1992. Overnight, most state-controlled prices were freed.16 Then, in rapid succession, old import barriers were lifted, and private retail trade was legalized.
Much as the shock therapists anticipated, the pain was immediate: prices skyrocketed almost instantly. But they soon reached unexpectedly high hyperinflationary levels of 2,500 percent annually. Russians had only recently lost their empire and then their country, and now inflation caused them to lose their savings. “A scientist, whose salary in Soviet times may have been two hundred rubles a month, who may have saved five thousand rubles over a career, saw the value of his entire life savings shrink to a loaf of bread.”17 Consumer goods eventually returned to shelves, but by the time they did, no one could afford them. Stores became, as one observer put it, “museums,” where Russians came to look but not buy. Protests spread across Russian cities, and people resorted to bartering and selling personal possessions on the streets to get by. By April, Gaidar had become Russia’s most unpopular figure, and by year-end, he was forced to resign from his post as acting prime minister and play a less public role on Yeltsin’s team.
The problem was not that Gaidar was a bad economist. He understood the workings of a classical market economy well, probably better than any other economist in Russia. But he failed to grasp the limits imposed by the complexities of the broader social and political system in which he was operating,18 so he was surprised when his narrowly focused technocratic prescriptions produced unintentional cascading effects. Ending state price controls was necessary, but freeing prices without first breaking up the Soviet economy’s numerous monopolies to create market competition had invited an uncontrollable inflationary spiral. Monopolists, not markets, started dictating prices. Tightening Russia’s money supplies made sense, but it was impossible to do when the other newly independent former Soviet republics also had the ability to print rubles and when the chairman of Russia’s own central bank was not on board with the reform team. As one humorist put it, Russia was like a man who had fourteen bitter ex-wives, each of whom still had a credit card billed to his account.19 And imposing radical market reforms from above without erecting a social safety net or building political support from below created the impression that the Yeltsin team was indifferent to popular suffering. Reformers who were attempting to save Russia quickly came to be seen as wreckers who were trying to destroy it.
Yeltsin’s team adjusted tack amid the storm. They launched an ambitious privatization effort to break up state monopolies, create market competition, and incentivize investment. They tried to explain their approach to the public and build political support. Yeltsin named an experienced Soviet industrial manager, Viktor Chernomyrdin, as prime minister. And Yeltsin’s team worked even more closely with American advisers and government officials to think through their next steps, win large infusions of credit from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and cushion the blows of reform.
But while each of the steps they adopted helped to ease some problems, they created others in the process. Establishing new privately owned banks to replace the Soviet state bank, for example, was an important step toward building a functioning financial sector supporting genuine markets. But where would the banks get their capital? In a country where the state owned nearly everything, only the state had money. So several new banks convinced government ministries to deposit their money in special accounts within specific “authorized banks.” And once the banks had state funds on hand, they quickly found lucrative ways to make easy money off of it. Rather than lending money to new entrepreneurs or to old enterprises that needed to retool, the banks made big money off currency speculation.20 And by delaying disbursements, they could keep funds available to invest in high-yield government bonds and reap huge profits.21 But that meant that “coal miners, pensioners, teachers, and nurses [among others] went without pay” because the banks would not release the funds to pay them in a timely fashion.22 Enterprises could not pay their suppliers and went into arrears. That had a domino effect on other enterprises, creating a massive inter-enterprise debt problem.
So an economy that had been running on fumes for the waning years of Soviet rule did the only thing it could under the circumstances: it demonetized. People dumped their rubles and turned to dollars, gold, silver, and barter. Transactions increasingly went off books and underground. “Authorized banks” making huge profits off government deposits shipped their earnings to secret accounts in offshore tax havens denominated in dollars, safe from the reach of the state. With enterprises conducting fewer and fewer transactions officially, and accumulating more and more of their income off-book, the Russian government collected even fewer taxes. The less it collected, the weaker the state grew, and the less it was able to provide the basic services of government. Citizens lost any remaining respect for state officials, and the country’s ethnic republics—including Chechnya—spun increasingly out of Moscow’s control. Corruption and lawlessness spread. Organized crime exploded. Countless Russians desperate to escape poverty fell prey to cynical get-rich-quick scammers.
The Yeltsin reformers sought two ways out of this vicious circle. The first was to lean even more heavily on American help. Borrowing from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other lending institutions became Russia’s primary means to cover its massive budget deficits. Cultivating close relations with official and unofficial Washington heavyweights, in turn, became the Yeltsin team’s best way to convince those institutions to keep lending money. America formed “a strategic alliance with Russian reform,” as President Clinton put it. And the more money the West lent, the more political pressures mounted to show success for its effort. Washington leveraged Russia’s need for debt relief and infusions of capital to push for policies aimed at “transforming almost every aspect of Russian economic, political, and social life.”23 A top Russian diplomat commented at the time that “among ourselves, we call Talbott [the top American official overseeing Russia policy] ‘Proconsul Strobe.’ He has all the answers and rarely hesitates to tell us what to do, as if we were small children in need of instruction.”24
Yeltsin’s second approach was to consolidate power to overcome political resistance. As Russia’s living standards plummeted and popular opposition to “shock therapy” exploded, the Yeltsin team sought a renewed popular mandate by holding a national referendum in April 1993 asking four questions: whether Russians had confidence in Yeltsin, whether they supported his reforms, whether Russia should hold an early presidential election, and whether early legislative elections should be held. American advisers created a high-profile, Western-funded public relations campaign for the referendum, urging Russians to vote “Da, Da, Nyet, Da” on the four questions.25 Yeltsin prevailed narrowly in the referendum, but Russians would not forget such overt American involvement in Russia’s politics.26
Despite the temporary political boost provided to Yeltsin by the referendum, it had become clear by the fall of 1993 that the tension between economic reform and democratic governance had reached a breaking point. Russia could not continue radical market reforms without dissolving the democratically elected Russian legislature, which had openly rebelled against Yeltsin’s rule. In October 1993, he ordered tanks to shell the legislative building, killing more than one hundred of its occupants. In the aftermath of the violence, the Kremlin engineered the approval of a new constitution that dramatically increased Yeltsin’s executive power and diminished that of the new parliament, the State Duma. When the Clinton administration backed Yeltsin’s moves against what it termed “reactionaries,” many Russians concluded that Washington cared little for their economic plight and even less for genuine democratic governance. According to gradualist reformer Grigory Yavlinsky, “The Russian people expected to hear something like this: ‘We Americans understand the difficulties you are facing. America has been through the Depression, has dealt with crime and corruption. Please do not think that crime and corruption are normal attributes of democracy.’ Instead, all they heard was unstinting praise for the [Russian] government.”27
Russian voters made their unhappiness clear in the December 1993 elections to the new State Duma. Gaidar led a pro-Yeltsin reform party called Russia’s Choice, but the “shock therapists” garnered a disappointing 15 percent of the vote. The anti-reform nationalist party of the bombastic Vladimir Zhirinovsky took first place with nearly a quarter of the vote, and the Communists and other anti-reform parties won another 20 percent, with a sprinkling of votes for gradualist-reform and special-interest parties accounting for much of the remainder. Washington was stunned. Almost no one had seen Yeltsin’s popular rebuke coming.28 In a press conference following the vote, Strobe Talbott suggested that the results reflected the need for “less shock and more therapy for the Russian people.”
But many of the shocks had already been administered, and backing off reforms could stall Russia’s transformation in a catastrophic no-man’s-land between capitalism and socialism where nothing functioned at all. In the face of a hostile legislature, Yeltsin increasingly resorted to imposing reforms by executive decree, and Chubais pressed the accelerator on his privatization program, worrying that Russia had to make privatization irreversible before revanchists recaptured the reins of power. To get a vital piece of legislation through the Duma, he reluctantly agreed to a provision that would allow workers and managers in state enterprises to buy 51 percent of the shares of their new privatized companies at a nominal price.29 Chubais reasoned that it was the best he could do under the circumstances and that market forces would eventually force the privatized companies to retool and restructure no matter who ran them. But in practice, this meant not only that the government failed to earn much revenue selling ownership shares but also that the old Soviet factory managers under communism became the new Russian managers under capitalism. They pressured workers to sell their shares to management for a pittance and had none of their own skin in the game. Rather than rebuild their companies into efficient producers, many of these “red directors” simply stripped them of assets and embezzled funds. A program aimed at progress produced regression.
The reformers’ most fateful compromise came in 1995 and 1996, as legislative and presidential elections approached. By that time, Yeltsin’s once robust popularity had cratered, his approval ratings consistently registering well below 10 percent. The Communist Party was clearly Russia’s strongest political organization, and Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov’s polling numbers dwarfed those of Yeltsin. Unless Yeltsin somehow pulled some election magic out of his hat, the reformers looked to be on the way out. To conjure up that magic, Chubais struck a backroom deal with a handful of Russia’s leading bankers and media moguls. In return for lending their financial and media support to the Yeltsin campaign, the moguls would be granted large shares in the crown jewels of the Russian economy, the prized state-owned enterprises in the oil and gas and extractive industries worth billions of dollars. It was a win-win deal for the bankers. The “loans for shares” deal would make them instant billionaires while minimizing the chances that a Communist government might seize their ill-gotten gains and jail them. Chubais recognized that he was making a Faustian bargain, selling the state’s most valuable assets for a tiny fraction of their worth, but he saw no viable alternative.
The deal worked as both sides had hoped. The bankers poured millions of dollars into the Yeltsin campaign to produce television advertising that blanketed the airwaves. American political experts advised the campaign on tactics and messaging. And the Russian media moguls provided the campaign with the equivalent of many more millions in unpaid advertising by focusing network news coverage relentlessly on Yeltsin, lavishly praising his accomplishments and virtues. On the few occasions when television did devote airtime to Zyuganov, news coverage lambasted him. Yeltsin won reelection, Washington breathed a sigh of relief, and the moguls won both instant billions and instant power.
Afterward, some moguls officially joined the new Yeltsin government as ministers and presidential administration members. Others exercised their political power unofficially in what became known as the semibankirshchina, or “reign of the seven bankers.” Some were part of a shadowy group of Yeltsin relatives and close aides that became known as the “Family,” which served as a substitute presidency to compensate for the fact that Yeltsin could no longer govern, having suffered an unpublicized heart attack during the presidential campaign and undergone bypass surgery thereafter, while increasingly succumbing to alcoholism. Russia had privatized and staved off the communist threat. But it had not become a free-market democracy. It had become an oligarchy, with a handful of obscenely wealthy businessmen presiding over a government that could not function, underpinned by a corrupt, semi-criminal economy.
When an ailing Yeltsin resigned the presidency in 1999, apologizing to the Russian people for his failures and turning his administration over to his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, two questions loomed large: Who was to blame for the mess Russia found itself in? And what should be done about it? A few Russians, and many Americans, felt that the Yeltsin team had backed off reforms too soon, watering them down quickly when they met popular resistance, not paying enough attention to democratic reforms, and never completely following through on the reform agenda. The reforms that they did implement accomplished a lot, according to this school of thought, and a stronger reform team would have done a better job of explaining its approach to the public and building support in Russian society. For these die-hard believers in shock therapy, the villains in this tale were those ignorant of market economics and democratic principles who stood in the way of history’s inevitable progress. This only prolonged the pain that Russia would sooner or later have to endure. Getting reform back on track was the only viable path to success in post-Yeltsin Russia.
Others viewed the 1990s not as a narrative of disrupted reforms but as a story of the decline and destruction of the Russian state, a process that had started in the Soviet period, and which accelerated under reforms designed, as Ronald Reagan might have put it, to get the state off the people’s backs.30 Absent that state, however, no private enterprises or civic institutions existed in Russia that could encourage virtuous behavior and respect for the law. In an anything-goes atmosphere, anything went. Democratic and market reforms were both possible and desirable, according to this school of thought, but they should be advanced slowly and carefully over time in accord with Russian history and long-standing traditions, and they could not take place without restoring the state’s authority and capacity for governance. Putin and other gosudarstvenniki—loosely translated as statists—strongly advocated such an approach.
Still others adopted a different diagnosis. Like the Yellowstone park managers who blamed decline on predators, some pointed fingers at Yeltsin’s reformers, at the “oligarchs,” and at the Americans thought to be their allies. Ousting these malefactors was the key to progress. Gaidar came to be regarded suspiciously as a foreign agent. Chubais became the most unpopular man in Russia. The oligarchs were seen as robber barons, stripping the motherland of its riches while ostentatiously flaunting their stolen wealth and frequenting luxury resorts in the West. And because American officials had played such a public and intrusive role in Russian policies, many Russians assumed that the United States, the world’s most powerful nation, had “lured us into a trap, that this was done intentionally. They wanted us weakened.”31 The “fundamental attribution error”—the assumption that bad outcomes are the result of bad intentions or bad character, not difficult circumstances—was evident in Russian perceptions.
Viewed through the prism of Yellowstone National Park’s complex mix of interacting problems a century ago, however, Russia’s catastrophic experiences in the 1990s look more like good intentions gone bad than malfeasance on the part of key individual actors. Attempting to reengineer such a complex and delicate social organism was an enormously ambitious undertaking, prone to precipitating a wide range of knock-on effects difficult to anticipate. The shock therapists of the 1990s may have been guilty of overconfidence, but not of bad intentions. Their failures showed that creating a free-market democracy from scratch is neither a linear process nor a mere matter of will and perseverance. The legacy that decade left behind, however, is an important part of another set of complex system dynamics, one that today threatens to pull the United States and Russia into an unwanted, disastrous spiral of confrontation.
These brief overviews of Yellowstone’s travails in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Russia’s collapse in the 1990s provide a key lesson in what not to do when faced with a complex systems problem: do not treat it as if it were a linear problem, rooted in a single or primary cause that can be resolved through a determined effort. The Yellowstone managers initially believed the park was suffering primarily from predation—the more predation, the fewer elk, bison, and other game. Thus, they reasoned, reducing predation should solve the problem. But it did not; it caused even greater problems. Their diagnosis failed to consider the dynamics of the broader ecological system encompassing the park. The shock therapists in Russia encountered similar surprises for similar reasons, zeroing in on the economy as the primary cause of Russia’s problems, which they attempted to address with a Herculean campaign. But pressing the accelerator of economic reform did not hasten Russia’s journey toward greater prosperity and better governance, and in some ways diverted it.
This has important implications for the ways the United States has attempted to deal with Russia since the Cold War’s end. We have tended to look for primary causes of what we believe are essentially linear problems, recently attributing the growing dangers in the US-Russian relationship to the nature of Putinism and Russia’s endemic expansionism, believing resolute counterpressure will quell Russian appetites for aggression. We have attempted to seek progress through incremental steps, in the hope that making headway on some discrete problems can build momentum toward larger success. We have habitually sought to compartmentalize issues, preferring to focus on those driven by domestic politics or those that we think hold the best hopes for progress.
This incremental and compartmentalized approach makes abundant sense intuitively. Why complicate things, when one can break the problem down into its component parts and focus on what is most salient or easily achievable? It is also driven by the bureaucratic silo effect, which encourages narrow specialization while discouraging cross-organizational integration. But it has not worked in practice.32 For example, we have attempted to tackle complex issues such as Ukraine in isolation of broader factors, only to find that putting off such thorny subjects as how to structure Europe’s security architecture and how to deal with the controversies over interfering in internal governance renders progress on Ukraine all but impossible. We have hoped that US-Russian cooperation against terrorism or joint efforts to deal with the Iranian nuclear problem might build momentum in other areas, only to find in frustration that success has not proved contagious. We have largely treated Russian cyberintrusions as a technical security issue, and Russia’s subversive influence operations as an aggression challenge, only to find that cybersecurity measures cannot keep pace with the offense and that our punishments of aggression are not resolving the problem and may be making it worse. Meanwhile, our attempts to isolate and pressure Russia have had unexpected secondary effects, reinforcing Russian incentives to deepen security cooperation with China and subvert NATO and the EU. As planning expert Russell Ackoff has observed about “messes,” his term for complex systems problems, “if we do the usual thing and break up a mess into its component problems and then try to solve each one separately, we will not solve the mess.” The fundamental dictum of complex systems, that one “can never merely do one thing,” means not only that our actions will always have secondary effects but also that in order to bring about desired change, we must do several things at once.33
A more holistic approach to dealing with our complex set of problems with Russia would make for a greater challenge in managing the US interagency process, necessitating a larger number of players and deeper integration of regional and functional issues, but without one, we are likely to find ourselves continually slipping backward as we struggle for progress. The simple recognition that we are dealing not with a linear Russia problem but rather with the dangers posed by a complex system may by itself have a salutary effect on our approach. Awareness that we must change course could stimulate creative efforts to find new (albeit less direct) paths to success.34
Recognition that our problems with Russia are not linear has other implications as well. It suggests that we should approach our ambitions with a good deal more humility, acknowledging the limits of our knowledge and our capabilities, while remaining alert to the risks of unintended knock-on effects from our policies. This has particular relevance to the question of promoting democratization, an issue that has plagued the US-Russian relationship for nearly the entire post–Cold War period. George F. Kennan, the father of America’s Cold War containment policy and among the most insightful experts on Russia that our country has produced, warned against ambitious attempts to reshape foreign societies some four decades prior to the disastrous Russian reforms of the 1990s: “The ways by which peoples advance toward dignity and enlightenment in government are things that constitute the deepest and most intimate processes of national life. There is nothing less understandable to foreigners, nothing in which foreign interference can do less good.”35 His advice was premised not on disputation of the virtues that enlightened governance abroad might bring but rather on the recognition of our own limitations in diagnosing and treating the ailments of other countries. “This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable,” he later cautioned.36 Realist scholar John Mearsheimer recently put it even more plainly: “Social engineering in any country, even one’s own, is difficult. The problems are multifaceted and complex, resistance is inevitable, and there are always unintended consequences, some of them bad.”37 To this, one might add that good intentions and high ideals are not the only yardsticks by which to assess virtue; implicitly promising the attainment of outcomes that America lacks the power to effect is a moral hazard in its own right.
Reconsidering how we have approached democratization does not and should not require the United States to abandon its ideals or change its nature. Advancing the causes of liberty and justice in the world is an inherent part of what America is and what it represents. But how we advance these ideals matters immensely. If liberalization is not a linear process but one shaped within the contours of a complex, interacting set of factors, most of which we do not and cannot control, then a more humble approach is warranted. Identifying those factors in which the United States can play the most beneficial part, while attempting to minimize the prospects of counterproductive actions, might improve our dismal results in encouraging liberalization abroad. Serving as a powerful example, the “shining city on the hill” that attracts the world’s respect and emulation can be an effective way to advance democratic ideals, and it is a factor that the United States most directly controls. Attempting to impose liberal governance through pressure or coercion, however, in the belief that democratization is a linear process that follows a universal recipe for success, can lead to failures that provoke opposition abroad and prompt doubts at home about our system of governance.
Washington’s foreign policy culture is biased toward action. When problems arise, our first impulse is to “do something,” which at times can foster the impression that we regard any action as better than none. By contrast, this chapter has focused on what not to do, acknowledging the vast potential for unintentionally compounding problems in the context of complex systems dynamics. Avoiding such errors will not by itself restore US-Russian relations to health or eliminate the dangers of escalatory spirals. It will not settle genuine conflicts of interest over Europe’s security architecture, resolve fundamental differences in US-Russian values, or address the problems flowing from cybertechnology. But in a relationship woefully short on trust, a focus on learning from the common threads running through our past mistakes is something each side can do independently, without need of the other reciprocating or making concessions. The old dictum, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging,” contains valuable wisdom. Once we have stopped, we can begin to lay the foundation for new rules of the shadow war game and new mechanisms for absorbing future shocks to the system.