[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and Barre Times-Argus.]
Nations get to be the way they are as a result of the broad sweep of their own histories. The Afghans are a tribal/warlord society because they have survived that way for centuries in a hostile world. The Polish are skittish because they have no natural, effective geographic defenses, and as a result, over the centuries, they have suffered land invasions from every direction.
The recent arrest and exchange of Russian spies underlines some very real Russian realities for us. Over the past millennium, the Russians have found that they are seldom immune from foreign meddling. For them, their “near abroad,” or the countries surrounding their borders, particularly to their west and south, is a national fixation, an imperative that is unlikely to change. It is their buffer against a constantly dangerous, potentially hostile world.
This is particularly important when you consider the fragile, unstable and vulnerable multinational nature of pre-Soviet Russia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is part of the Russian psyche and for us to be able to deal effectively with them, we have to know and understand that.
This reality under the recent Bush presidency was either not understood or simply ignored. Like so many administrations before it, the only reality that the Bush administration acknowledged was the reality of internal U.S. politics. In the past decade this can most clearly be seen not only in U.S. policy toward Russia, but also in our Middle East policies. We rarely, if ever, let facts on the ground influence our national security policies — intelligence, diplomatic and military. Instead, those policies are crassly governed by the effect they will have on our domestic politics.
We Americans have our Monroe Doctrine, which states essentially that any attempt by foreign countries to meddle in the Americas (our “near abroad”) will be viewed by the U.S. as an act of aggression requiring our intervention. It was last implicitly employed in the Cuban Missile Crisis, or perhaps Grenada or Panama. The Russian “near abroad” doctrine, their Monroe Doctrine, doesn’t differ materially from ours in intent.
During the eight years of the Bush II administration, we took every opportunity presented to us to stick our thumb in the Russian eye, particularly when it came to their “near abroad.”
We pursued the integration of the Warsaw Pact countries into NATO. We solicited the cooperation of the intelligence organizations of the European “near abroad,” ostensibly against terrorism and international instability. We openly spoke of and planned the extension of our “missile shield” into the Russian “near abroad,” claiming it was designed to defend us against nations like Iran, even when those nations did not have the capability to launch nuclear weapons against us. We got involved in the Georgian spat with Russia, once again successfully pushing their “near abroad” button.
All of this was wildly threatening to the Russian weltanschauung, or view of the world. In their normal state of mild paranoia, irrespective of what we said we were doing, they knew what it really meant, and it represented a direct threat to them.
The last century had a powerful reinforcing effect on the Russians’ weltanschauung. During that period, the Russians have been confronted every step of the way by a variety of alliances led by the Western countries and designed to inhibit the growth, influence and power of the Soviet Union and its successor government — and they know it.
For that reason, it is naïve and probably dangerous to fall prey to the premise that today’s Russians are going to succumb to President Obama’s “reset” of American policy and suddenly become our best friends, however well-intentioned we may be.
With centuries of national insecurity behind them, the Russian psyche is simply not capable of such an abrupt “resetting” of the bilateral relationship with America. It is naïve, even dangerous, to think that they are. Having always been beset by enemies, both real and imagined, they have learned that no matter how rosy things may look for the moment, they will ultimately fall apart. Their national life experience compels them to hedge against such calamities.
That is why the Russians “reluctantly” incorporated the KGB Illegals Directorate into their new intelligence service in the 1990s, why they permitted it to operate, why there were 10 “illegals” arrested in the United States, why more will be found elsewhere and why more will be trained and dispatched for work here in America.
Given their history and experiences, the Russians have no viable alternates. It is simply in their DNA.
Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who worked during the Cold War in East and West Europe and the Middle East, primarily against the Soviet Union and its allies.
