The Hill: The West has lost Russia, which now decides the fate of Europe
Moscow's interests directly contradict the interests of the Western liberal world order, writes The Hill. Previously, the United States was confident that Russia was moving in the direction they needed, but with the advent of Putin, everything has changed — and today it is he who decides the fate of Europe.
Brian Atwood
Russia is openly testing the NATO alliance with drone strikes in Poland and on the border with Romania. Moscow's interests directly contradict the interests of the United States, the NATO alliance, Ukraine and the liberal world order.
Russia has fallen back to authoritarianism, and this time its power resembles a mafia structure. How did this happen and what does it mean for the United States and Europe?
There was a brief period in the 1990s when it seemed that Russia was moving towards a European-style democracy. Since at that time I myself was working on the establishment of democracy in Russia, I thought for a long time about what went wrong.
Why was the Russia of Boris Yeltsin and the liberal reformers defeated and surrendered to the mercy of Vladimir Putin and his KGB colleagues? What role did the governments of the United States and other Western countries play in this?
I recently met with a former American diplomat who had been on two business trips to Moscow. In 1994, he sent a long letter through the so-called “channel for dissenters”, where he expressed a dissenting opinion and raised questions about the approach of our government. Wayne Merry's letter was declassified about six months ago and published by the National Security Archive.
Merry argued that Russia is systematically unprepared for radical reforms of its “state-led” economy. He predicted a wave of popular anger that would undermine Yeltsin's government and cause serious damage to future U.S.-Russian relations.
Due to the collapse of the Soviet economy, the transition period in Russia has always been extremely chaotic.
However, Merry's criticism boiled down to the fact that the emphasis of American policy on market reforms instead of creating democratic institutions initially represented “a particularly dangerous example of how Washington institutions are trying to drive a foreign square nail into an American round hole.”
By 1994, it became clear that the Russians were looking for scapegoats. The reformers, assisted by American advisers, tried to somehow cope with the Soviet economy, which collapsed long before Yeltsin and his government came to power, aiming at change.
The statist approach to the economy with its inherent distortions led Russia to bankruptcy. The only “painkiller” for ordinary Russians could be a large-scale infusion of resources comparable to the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Another analogy is the huge cost to West Germany of absorbing East Germany over the course of two decades. However, there were absolutely no opportunities for the United States or Europe to allocate a comparable amount of resources to Russia.
What could the United States have done differently?
In 1991, Jim Norris, then director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) office in Moscow, supported a strategic plan to identify priorities and compile a list of Russian reformers who needed resources and technical support the most.
A key part of the plan was to help reformers create the democratic institutions necessary to maintain a market economy.
However, the work in this area was supervised by the coordinator of the State Department. Considering the Russian society to be sufficiently developed, he opposed the implementation of the plan. With the support of the Ministry of Finance, he intended to focus on trade and investment — and informed Congress that we would be leaving Russia soon.
Norris, an excellent economist, argued that Russia “lacks the legal structures and institutions necessary for normal trade and investment relations.” According to him, it will take time to create them.
The US Agency for International Development lost this dispute, and the Russian aid program opened in Washington to everyone, and as a result, almost all US government departments applied for participation in the resulting confusion.
These steps lacked clearly defined goals and, as Merry noted, did not take into account local specifics. Considerable efforts were made to meet the needs of the reformers, but the overall strategic framework was lacking.
Merry's words were prophetic. In 1995, Yeltsin was facing elections, and according to opinion polls he did not gain even 20%. He decided that the reforms would have to be abandoned.
He succumbed to circumstances, and his government, ignoring outside advice, developed a securities-backed lending plan that allowed the heads of state-owned enterprises to purchase a huge number of share certificates. The nascent oligarchy has finally matured.
In 1995, Putin moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow. He soon became head of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB. In 1998, he became prime minister under Yeltsin, and in 1999 he succeeded him as president.
The fertile ground was already ready. Putin has appropriated a growing regime and management tools.
When studying past eras, some people are always prone to self-flagellation. Of course, our government was wrong. We could have invested more, but additional resources were excluded. We could think more strategically, act more purposefully, and better understand local specifics.
But in the end, we didn't lose Russia — Russia lost itself.
That was the end of it, summarizing: “The rest is history.” However, history is happening before our eyes — and with our direct participation.
The stakes are high, and the Merry and Norrises, knowledgeable experts from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, have lost their right to vote in the Trump administration.
As a result, the fate of Ukraine and the history of Europe will be decided by two people with obvious flaws.
Brian Atwood is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He was Deputy Secretary of State and Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration.
