Russian History and the Passing of the Utility of Pipeline Politics

The Harvard historian Richard Pipes has triggered an interesting debate on the Internet with a long piece that leads the Weekend section of The Wall Street Journal. The piece lays out familiar Russian history -- how and why Moscow is so vexed by independent-minded neighbors; why its people go along with political repression; and its dogged pursuit of a status as "a force to be reckoned with, a country to be respected and feared." Pipes goes on to suggest policy prescriptions, including a recognition that Russians are likely to react badly to a feeling of encirclement, and a renewed attempt to persuade Moscow to adopt western political and economic values.

The piece is important not because it's perfectly presented -- I'm puzzled for example by the continued notion that somehow Russians are going to become like the West -- but because we get someone of Pipes' stature laying out once again the historical record. I myself hear dismay from Russia watchers get up in arms over the suggestion that some recent events there -- the impunity of murderers, and the public acquiescence to it all -- follow an arc going back several centuries. To them, I suggest a fresh read of Pipes. Below, I'm posting a video from a speech I just delivered at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, arguing that time has perhaps passed by the utility of current U.S. oil policy on Russia, specifically that of pipeline politics.



At the American Conservative, Daniel Larison argues inaccurately that Pipes is merely advocating a continuation of two-decade-long U.S. policy. For instance, Larison takes Pipes to task for failing to insist on a break in NATO expansion, when the piece in fact suggests the opposite.

At the Squirrel's Nest, we get an attempt at the long view from Terry McGarty, a Massachusetts startup investor and one of Pipes' former Cambridge colleagues. McGarty quotes a well-known criticism of NATO expansion by George Kennan, one of the best diplomats the U.S. ever turned out. Kennan asserted that, among other things, NATO expansion would restore the atmosphere of the Cold War, and impale Duma ratification of Start II. Today, no one can project backward with certainty how events would have unfolded absent NATO expansion, but, in the context of Russian history, as Pipes well lays out in his piece, even in the most optimistic of circumstances there would have been at minimum the danger of Moscow creeping back into the vacuum of its former Eastern European satellites. And in a more pessimistic turn of events, eastern and central Europe could have been in similar circumstances to Ukraine and Georgia today, confronting an angry, assertive Russia at their border. Finally, Kennan wholly misjudges the Russian position on nuclear arms. Russian politics could change down the road, but since Mikhail Gorbachev the country has favored almost any nuclear arms control deal; none of the serious nuclear arms accords discussed in the post-Soviet era was ever imperiled as far as Moscow's signature was concerned. Kennan had that backwards -- they were upended in the U.S., by the Bush administration.