Jacobin, Topic: Russia Beyond Supervillainy

"In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s evil genius matters less than pressures from the ultrarich, US foreign policy, and the ravages of the neoliberal Yeltsin years"

Excerpt:

"Wood’s Russia isn’t a reascendant superpower on the march. It’s a relatively weak, isolated nation teetering on the brink of instability and held together by a nationalism that has become newly powerful this decade. Its GDP per capita is around a sixth of the US’s and a quarter of the OECD average, with sluggish growth forecast for the future. Its mortality rate has long outpaced its fertility rate, with its population forecast to plunge in the coming decades. And far from a military threat, its 2015 military budget wasn’t even a tenth of that of NATO’s, let alone that of the US, while more and more of its neighboring states join the Western military alliance and China grows in power on its southern border (though Russia does still possess a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons).

Moreover, it’s a country that was virtually brought to its knees by a decade of Western meddling in its domestic politics. Wood throws out startling statistics from the nineties to remind us of the extent of Russian suffering during the Yeltsin years: Russia’s GDP shrinking more sharply than that of the US in the Depression; 60 million people living on less than $4 a day; male life expectancy dropping five years in the space of only three. Such numbers were the direct outcome of policies imposed by not just a government the US steadfastly backed and worked to reelect, but by US-led organizations like the IMF.

But it’s Wood’s reevaluation of the past three decades of US-Russia relations that may be the most interesting to readers, particularly those who have come to the “New Cold War” with only the knowledge of Russia’s 2016 US electoral misadventures and its earlier interventions in former satellite states like Ukraine.

Wood sketches out the measures that have helped create a Russia increasingly antagonistic towards the West: the broken American promise not to expand NATO eastward; Bill Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo; George W. Bush’s reckless and bloody invasion of Iraq and his accompanying expansion of US power abroad; and that administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. To that we might also add successive administrations’ refusals to sign onto Russia-backed agreements limiting the weaponization of space and cyberwarfare, the latter of which would come back to spectacularly bite the US in 2016.

As he explains, the change in Russia’s attitude was a product of a “stark imbalance of power” between Russia and the West. Suddenly weak, Russia was simply forced to grin and bear the Western expansion of power following the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was paired with a consistent rejection of Russia’s entreaties to the West, from trying to set up an anti-terror alliance with the US (one that would no doubt have meant added misery for many of the world’s Muslims, but a genuine attempt at outreach nonetheless), to Putin’s repeated suggestions that the country join NATO and both his and former president Dmitri Medvedev’s push for economic integration with Europe. As late as 2013, Russia’s official “foreign policy concept” made “relations with the Euro-Atlantic states” a top priority, and even in 2015 Putin was still pushing for an anti-terror alliance.

“Our biggest mistake was that we trusted you too much,” Putin said about the United States last year. “You interpreted our trust as weakness and you exploited that.” [...]"

Continue reading: Russia Beyond Supervillainy