A Turning Point? : Today’s Russian presidential election is about more than personalities--it’s also about personal security : Clinton Could Lose If Communist Wins

Nobody is watching the Russian presidential election as nervously as the White House. Whatever a defeat for President Boris N. Yelstin would mean for Russia, it would be perceived in the United States as a defeat for President Bill Clinton.

After the embarrassing defeat of Shimon Peres, the Clinton-backed candidate in the Israeli election for prime minister, another defeat of another Clinton-backed incumbent would begin to look like a pattern. Add that the Bosnia deal looks shakier by the day--and that Defense Secretary William J. Perry now talks of extending the American presence in Bosnia well past the original deadline for withdrawal. Now look at the terrible hash the administration has made of its relations with China, the fiasco of U.S. policy toward Mexico and the worsening trade relations between the United States and the European Union.

The truth is, a Yeltsin defeat in Russia may have more impact in Washington than in Moscow. How? By crystallizing a perception that Clinton has flubbed foreign policy. This would hand a key issue to Bob Dole’s floundering campaign and, by undercutting Clinton’s Rose Garden strategy of looking presidential, throw the president’s campaign off balance as the conventions approach.

The outcome of the Russian election will make surprisingly little difference to the conduct of Russian foreign policy. Under Yeltsin, Russian policy has been to increasingly distance Moscow from the West even as it tries to keep the aid pipelines from the International Monetary Fund and other Western donors open.

Russia has rediscovered its national interests. Whatever their political beliefs, most Russians cannot accept the territorial and political status quo. More than 23 million people of Russian heritage now live outside Russia’s boundaries. Many of them face discrimination, even violence, in the newly independent and sometimes unstable countries that rooted after the Soviet Union broke up. The Russian economy depends on friendly relations with areas of the former Soviet Union, and Russian politicians of all parties want to make sure that those links--with Uzbek cotton producers, Georgian farmers, Ukrainian factories--stay strong.

By contrast, the West has, so far, offered Russia no serious incentives for cooperation beyond financial aid--and the financial aid comes with strings attached. Expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will freeze Russia out of Europe’s security system. EU expansion will similarly freeze Russia out of the European economic system. Reacting both to the humiliation of the Soviet breakup and to the West’s uncompromising stance since, domestic political opinion in Russia has forced the Yeltsin regime steadily toward a harder line in foreign policy.

Russia today is busy forming a salon des refuses, a club for the kids blackballed from other clubs. Iran is eager to join; so are other countries feeling Washington’s displeasure, like China. A Gennady A. Zyuganov victory would grow club membership, but it would not change Russia’s basic direction. Indeed, the country that needs to change its foreign policy is not Russia, but the United States.

The United States has badly overplayed its hand in the last few years. Assuming that the Soviet collapse left the United States supreme in world affairs, both the Bush and the Clinton administrations began throwing America’s weight around in ways that have gradually built up serious hostility toward Washington in key parts of the world.

China, offended by U.S. stands over Taiwan, human rights and Tibet, is, in important respects, actively pursuing an anti-U.S. foreign policy. Trade friction and problems connected to U.S. bases on Okinawa continue to undermine the U.S.-Japan pillar. Incidents such as Clinton’s ill-judged personal intervention in the Michael Fay caning case in Singapore have caused other Asian governments to doubt both America’s intentions and its intelligence.

In Europe, the United States has not done much better. From the Bush administration through the present day, Washington has consistently criticized, sometimes harshly, European efforts in Bosnia, while its own record on the subject has little to recommend it. Worse still, from the European point of view, the United States is trying to bully other countries to conform their trade policies to Washington’s views of global priorities and strategies. The notorious Helms-Burton Law, which attempts to subject foreign companies that trade with Cuba to various sanctions in U.S. courts, is only the thin edge of the wedge. As European leaders warn of retaliation, the Republican Congress and the Democratic White House support pending legislation that would penalize European countries failing to observe U.S. boycotts of countries like Libya and Iran. Meanwhile, the United States talks enough about NATO expansion to drive the Russians into xenophobic frenzies, while simultaneously moving so slowly as to create suspicions in the rest of Eastern Europe that NATO will never be expanded. Closer to home, the United States continues to bungle its hemispheric relations, enraging Canada and Mexico with Helms-Burton, and by first raising, then dashing the rest of Latin America’s hopes for expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Clinton administration, like its predecessor, has fundamentally misjudged the state of world politics. Its early embrace of Yeltsin was based on the idea that modern, Western-style democracy could be built easily and quickly in Russia, and that Yeltsin was the man to do it. It also thought that it could count on Russian cooperation while offering Russia nothing on NATO expansion.

Wrong on both counts, but look at the pattern. The administration thought that creating momentum for peace in the Middle East would assure Labor’s victory in the Israeli elections. Wrong. It thought that NAFTA would be a quick fix for Mexico’s deep-seated economic and political problems. Wrong again. The administration also believed that the threat of U.S. trade sanctions would force Japan to give way on trade issues. Wrong--they didn’t. It thought that U.S. diplomatic and trade pressure would force China to liberalize domestically. Wrong once more. It similarly underestimated the difficulties of building pluralistic democracy in Bosnia. The error of that assumption becomes plainer with each passing day.

The common thread among all these errors is “hubris,” the ancient Greek word for the pride that goeth before a fall. The United States thought it could impose its values, its system and its will on every country in the world. Perhaps, unfortunately, that just ain’t so, and if the United States can’t adjust its goals and its policies to fit its real but limited resources, the result will be disaster.

If Zyuganov wins the Russian election, Republicans will try to drum up a campaign issue around “who lost Russia?” They will try to lay the blame on Clinton and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. And why not? It’s an election year.

But who lost Russia is the wrong question, and the blame should be more widely spread. The question should be: Why has the United States failed to develop a coherent foreign policy at the end of the Cold War? And the blame should be spread across both the Republican and Democratic shoulders of a foreign-policy establishment that, six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, still just doesn’t get the post-Cold War world.*