Recruiting Russia for the New Containment : A joint declaration could prove vital against ethnic cleansing

The late Whittaker Chambers predicted, famously, that the last great battle of history would be fought between the communists and the ex-communists. Chambers was wrong. That battle has come and gone, and an older struggle has returned--one between the various mystic, militant, sometimes suicidal nationalisms, on the one hand, and secular, pragmatic, internationalist democracy, on the other.

Victory in this struggle, which includes but greatly transcends the Balkans war, depends crucially on a reconceptualization of Russian-American relations. For 40 years, containment of the Soviet Union was the ruling concept in American foreign policy. That now-outdated strategy must yield to one that acknowledges the new dangers that must be contained.

Boris N. Yeltsin once said gamely: “I don’t think the United States has won the Cold War. I think we all have won it.” But George Bush’s triumphant comment, “The Cold War didn’t end--it was won,” coincides all too well with a widespread Russian perception that, at home and abroad, Russia has indeed lost everything. Right-wing demagoguery feeds on such bitterness. Can the United States, in the interest of the new containment, help Russians to believe that Yeltsin was right?

One possible starting point: the Russians’ aggrieved awareness that Russian minorities are now at risk in the other republics of what was once the Soviet Union and had earlier been the Russian Empire. Can we imagine a joint Russian-Ukrainian-American declaration stating that the new world order can only be an order of multiethnic states and that any state in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union attempting, by force of arms, to establish itself on the basis of either perfect ethnic purity or total control over all ethnically affected territory should expect armed response from the three signatories?

Ukraine, by renouncing ethnic purity as a basis for its statehood, would reassure its own huge Russian minority. In exchange it would have Moscow’s reassurance that, though borders can and sometimes should be redrawn, Russians in Ukraine do not constitute per se any basis for a Russian territorial claim against Ukraine.

Both would have proof, as the might of the United States was placed behind a promise of personal safety and civil rights for national minorities and minority nations (and implicitly against the anti-Russian laws recently passed in Estonia), that the United States has not simply stepped over the body of its fallen foe.

In the Balkans, such a declaration would stand as a massive repudiation by two Slavic and historically Eastern Orthodox nations of the principle that national security requires sovereignty over all the territory where one’s co-nationals reside and of the companion principle that ethnic purity within a nation’s territory is a legitimate national-security goal. The declaration would thus kill any Serb hope of a Russian rescue.

More important, the declaration would acknowledge the worldwide problem of national minorities as the defining political challenge of our time. Just as the nationalities problem of the Soviet Union has become, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russian minority problem, so the nationalities problem of Yugoslavia has become, since the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Serbian minority problem. Neither problem can be regarded as an “internal” matter for the successor states to resolve. On the contrary, the swift, unhesitating containment of threats to these and other newly exposed minorities is to the fragile post-Cold War peace what swift, unhesitating containment of communist aggression was to the post-World War II peace.

As things stand, containment of Serbian aggression is beginning to be seen in Moscow as fallen Russia’s latest humiliation. The challenge to the Clinton Administration is, accordingly, to take the containment of this aggression as the occasion for a new and far-reaching Russian-American rapprochement. Without a new containment, there can be no new world order.