New Russian Focus Drops Superpower Global Reach : Diplomacy: Yeltsin's foreign policy is driven by domestic needs. Critics fear nationalism, isolationism.

By MICHAEL PARKS

Jan. 30, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW —

As Russia stretches across the world map, it looks like a slimmed-down Soviet Union, stripped now of most of its possessions in the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia and split away from its Slavic neighbors, Ukraine and Belarus, yet nonetheless a colossus astride Europe and Asia.

Yet, this Russia is showing itself to be a different country with a different government, and to have a different president with a different foreign policy than that of the old Soviet Union.

“In legal terms, we are the successor to the Soviet Union--in political terms, we are anything but that,” Gennady E. Burbulis, Russia’s state secretary and first deputy prime minister, said last week during a visit to Sweden. “Democratic Russia’s foreign policy will be one of . . . fundamental reform and fundamental change.”

Outlines of those changes are likely to emerge more clearly Friday, when President Boris N. Yeltsin makes his debut in world politics at the summit conference of members of the U.N. Security Council in New York, where his speech Friday is expected to describe the new underpinnings of Russian foreign policy.

He will also visit London, Washington and Ottawa and, next week, Paris.

“Yeltsin clearly wants to make a splash,” a senior European ambassador commented, “but it is a splash with an entirely different purpose. In the past, a Soviet president would go abroad as a result of the Kremlin’s desire for global reach; Yeltsin will be traveling to get help. . . .

“Where Soviet foreign policy was global in conception, whether the Kremlin was fighting the Cold War or making peace afterward, Russian foreign policy is driven by its massive domestic needs, including economic assistance, demilitarization, modernization and simply its people’s hunger.”

Yeltsin’s critics fear, however, that this will lead to both isolationism and nationalism as Russia concentrates on its domestic problems and then consoles itself over its loss of superpower status with an assertion of the imperialist traditions of “Great Russia.”

Although Yeltsin has yet to articulate full guidelines for Russian foreign policy, Moscow has abandoned the last of its superpower pretenses--nuclear parity with the United States, the shaping of the “new world order,” global peacemaking--to refocus on domestic political and economic problems.

Yeltsin, Burbulis and Andrei V. Kozyrev, the foreign minister, have stressed, moreover, that Russia’s nearest neighbors, the other former Soviet republics, must and will have primacy in Moscow’s foreign policy.

“Washington may be shocked, but it will find that Kiev (the Ukrainian capital) is now more important to us,” said Sergei Karaganov, deputy director of the Institute of Europe, who began to plot the likely foreign policy changes even before the Soviet Union broke up. “The Germans will find that, yes, Minsk (in Belarus) matters more (to us) than Bonn.

“The changes proceed from there. East-West relations are less important than the shape of the new Commonwealth of Independent States and our 10 partners in it.”

From there, the diplomatic circle widens slowly--to Eastern Europe and the European Community in the West, to Japan and South Korea in the East--with trade outweighing politics. The United States, as the remaining superpower and a source of economic assistance, is included in the second or third tier, too.

“Russia will regain a sense of itself as a European nation, first of all,” commented Andrei Kortunov, a leading foreign policy analyst here. “Its horizons will be continental, not global. The issues will be practical, such as ecology and trade, and not things like the ‘new world order.’

“Compared with the past, we will even seem isolationist. Central America, Africa, Southeast Asia, for example, will likely disappear from policy-makers’ maps. Our de-globalization is not only inevitable, it is under way.”

Those longtime Soviet allies throughout the Third World--Cuba, India, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya among them--are already finding themselves without friends here. Yeltsin has declared that there will be no further foreign aid, and the Russian Foreign Ministry is planning to close at least 20 of its embassies in Africa and Latin America to save money.

This week’s conference in Moscow on the regional problems of the Middle East was a throwback to the old days. Russia proceeded with the conference because it was important to the United States, to Western Europe and to potential aid donors in the Middle East. But Yeltsin himself was too busy even to host a planned reception for the delegates.

“We’re fed up with Third World adventures,” a Foreign Ministry official remarked. “There is a terrific backlash against them, however worthy the cause might have been. . . . I think we are done fooling ourselves about what we can do.”

Also gone is the old Soviet conviction that socialism was the wave of the future, that the Soviet Union would be secure as a socialist state only when its neighbors and all their neighbors were also socialist and that the advance of socialism must never be turned back.

Russia, too, will have “a set of value-oriented guidelines,” Kozyrev said recently in explaining the country’s new foreign policy. “We are adopting the same system of values that unites the West--the values of the market economy and the supremacy of the individual.”

Stanislav Kondrashov, a foreign affairs commentator for the leading Russian newspaper Izvestia, summed up the change this way: “The main man from Moscow, with his finger on that key button, is no longer a Communist or a socialist, but a reformer, a populist, a pragmatist and the first democratically elected president. And the country is already post-Soviet, post-Communist, post-socialist.”

This has translated into full independence for the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after the collapse of the conservative putsch here in August, an end to economic subsidies for Cuba and an agreement with the United States to halt arms shipments to both sides in Afghanistan’s civil war in an effort to promote a peace settlement there.

Yeltsin cut defense spending 87% in the new Russian budget, is planning to sell surplus military equipment to help finance new housing and is discussing ways in which Russian and American specialists would cooperate in reducing the huge Soviet nuclear arsenal that Russia inherited. He has announced that Russia’s strategic missiles are no longer targeted on American cities and proposed Russian membership in NATO as a “distant goal.”

“One of the priorities of our foreign policy is our comeback in the ranks of our natural partners and allies,” Kozyrev said. “At the turn of the century, Russia occupied a worthy place in the foreign relations of such states as France, Germany and the United States. We should regain this place.

“It is also important that our foreign policy should be guided not by some global schemes but by normal economic interests. Our foreign policy will be based on all that contributes to our economic progress and to the normal life of the people of Russia.”

Although former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, had put forward as a goal the “de-ideologization” of international relations, Yeltsin is said to be planning a completely different basis for Russia’s foreign policy.

“In coming days, the world will hear a series of initiatives (from Yeltsin) that will prove everyone will benefit from the new situation here,” Kozyrev told delegates to the Middle East peace conference in Moscow on Tuesday.

Yeltsin’s advisers on arms control, for example, convinced him that Russia must make very deep cuts, some unilateral, others “in cooperation” with the United States, but few of them negotiated. As Yeltsin announced Wednesday, Russia is proposing a halt to production of the Blackjack and Bear heavy bombers, to the manufacture of air- and sea-launched cruise missiles and to the development of new weapons systems.

The advisers are willing to alter the 20-year-old treaty on anti-ballistic missile defenses to accept the Bush Administration’s modified Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” proposal. And they entertain such contrarian positions as supporting a strong U.S. Navy as essential to maintaining global stability.

In an interview on his appointment as state secretary last autumn, Burbulis said he intended to encourage such a radical rethinking of all aspects of the country’s foreign policy. The aim, he said, would be restoring Russia to its past greatness as a major power, but “not a power whose status depends on the threat it poses to others.”

Kortunov, a foreign policy specialist at the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada, a leading think tank, commented in an interview: “Russia has a blank sheet--its foreign policy can be as creative as they want. Virtually all the old Soviet positions have been destroyed, either by Gorbachev or now by Yeltsin, and there is an opportunity to deal with many practical issues.. . . Yeltsin now has to create a policy.”

Skepticism abounds in the Russian foreign policy Establishment, however, about Yeltsin’s ability to do this.

“The real agenda of Russian foreign policy is avoiding war,” Karaganov said. “Not war with the United States, but within our Commonwealth. And can we avoid fascist development of the worst kind of authority? How will we maintain open borders? How will we maintain an integrated economy?

“Those are the immediate items on our agenda. We will get back to Europe in three or four years, back to global issues in maybe seven or eight. I don’t see anyone addressing the immediate issues. Disarmament is important and deserves attention, but relations with Ukraine are critical now.”

Yeltsin and Burbulis are seen by specialists as inexperienced and naive in their goals, and Kozyrev, a career diplomat in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, is not a member of Yeltsin’s inner circle. The Russian Foreign Ministry is made up largely of former Soviet diplomats who have mixed feelings about the new approaches.

The appointment last week of Yuli M. Vorontsov, former Soviet first deputy foreign minister, ambassador to the United Nations and negotiator of the Afghan peace agreement, as Yeltsin’s chief foreign policy adviser indicated, however, that the president is moving first-class talent into his own office.

Foreign policy specialists outside the government also regard many underlying concepts of Yeltsin’s approach as poorly thought out, largely based on small steps, without a grand design.

“They are looking at NATO and the European Community as models for the Commonwealth of Independent States,” Karaganov said. “That would seem reasonable on its face for diplomats who have spent most of their careers studying European institutions.

“But our relations as Russia with Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Tajikistan, to name just four members of the Commonwealth, are rather different than those between France and Germany or England and Spain. And that points to the difficulty of having some good people dealing with problems with which they are totally unfamiliar. Remember, for us, Ukraine was never a foreign country before.”

New Approach to Diplomacy

Russian diplomacy under President Boris N. Yeltsin began striking out in new directions immediately after the conservative putsch in Moscow last August. Further changes, many of them fundamental, now appear likely in the foreign policy of what once was the Soviet Union.

Basic Changes

Abandonment of a superpower’s global reach to refocus on domestic problems

Primary attention to its closest neighbors, the other former Soviet republics

Search for economic and technical assistance from the West

Emphasis on disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation, not on balance of power and superpower parity

The Impact

Removal of U.S. cities from list of strategic targets for nuclear missiles

End to economic subsidies for Cuba

Recognition of Baltic independence after August putsch

Mutual halt with the U.S. of arms shipments to Afghanistan

Sharp cuts in military spending

Unilateral cutbacks probable in strategic nuclear arsenal