Source: Carnegie
Speech by Andrew Kuchins, Director, Russian-Eurasian Program
Commonwealth Club, San Francisco CA, March 26, 2001
In the wake of events in the last week, I was tempted to rename this speech
"U.S.-Russian Relations: Spies are Us," or how about "2001: A
Spy Odyssey." There is a surreal quality to the fact that today a spy scandal
with Russia is once again in the headlines.
Looking back nearly 10 years ago to the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the birth of the reformist and democratizing Russian Federation, hopes were
quite high in both Washington and Moscow about the future of a U.S.-Russian
partnership that would be one of the stabilizing pillars of a "new world
order"-to borrow an oft-used phrase of the George H.W. Bush administration.
The incoming Clinton administration built on this policy direction with Russia
and spoke of a "strategic partnership" with Russia and of a "strategic
alliance" with Russian reform. Unfortunately these high hopes for U.S.-Russian
relations held by both the Bush I and Clinton administrations as well as the
Yeltsin administration in Moscow have to some degree been disappointed as the
bilateral relationship has run a rocky course over the past 10 years. Today
many peoples' minds are preoccupied with the rapidly developing "bear market";
I do not think it would inappropriate to suggest that the U.S.-Russian relationship
has been experiencing a "bear market." But unlike U.S. equity markets
which enjoyed an unprecedented boom for most of the 1990s, U.S.-Russian relations
had a very short-lived boom before a series of issues set the relationship on
a fairly steady slide downward. We are all well familiar with many of the nettlesome
issues that have set back U.S.-Russian relations-Russian disappointment with
small aid packages from the West, Bosnia, NATO expansion, Russian financial
collapse in 1998, Kosovo War, and last year the debate over national missile
defense. I recall that the last time I gave a public lecture in San Francisco
for the World Affairs Council in October 1999 I noted the difficult conditions
in Russia and the problems of the US-Russian relationship by telling the old
Russian anecdote about the outlook on the future held by pessimists and optimists:
The pessimist says that things are so bad now they cannot possibly get worse,
and the optimist replies, "Oh yes they can!!" On the Russian domestic
scene, you can make a plausible argument that the situation has improved in
the last 18 months with a degree of stabilization under President Putin and
a nearly 8% growth rate for the Russian economy in 2000. But it is harder to
make the argument that U.S. -Russian relations have improved, and at least the
atmospherics in the last two months with a major spy scandal and high-level
U.S. government officials referring to Russia as a security threat in ways we
have not heard for more than 10 years give one the sense of what Yogi Berra
called "déjà vu all over again."
Tonight it is not my task to analyze the last ten years in an effort to answer the age-old Russian question "kto vinovat'?" or "Who is guilty?"-there has been enough of that in Washington and especially during the campaign trail last year. Rather, I am more concerned with another old Russian question, "Chto delat'?" Or "What do we do now?" This was the core question that inspired a team of scholars at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about a year ago to think through how we can renew the U.S.-Russian relationship after this first turbulent post-Cold War decade. This effort was motivated by the belief that the near concurrence of a new presidential administration in Moscow and an incoming administration in Washington provided an opportune moment to reassess how things have changed since the early 1990s and what kinds of policies on relations with Russia would we recommend to a new U.S. administration. It was our view that as the incoming U.S. administration formulates its foreign policy, it would find that no issue area could more greatly benefit from a fresh look than U.S.-Russian relations. Tonight I will talk about some of the findings and recommendations from our report, but I should note, somewhat immodestly, that our group of contributors to this report is distinguished both for its expertise as well as its diversity in views. Our group discussions were…spirited, shall we say, and on some issues, like NATO expansion, we felt it best not to hold the discussion over lunch over concern that a food fight would result. This is all to say that not all the group agrees with all the recommendations. Rather we sought to provide a hard-hitting set of recommendations that point to significant areas of present and potential common interests of our two countries as well as to provide a framework for discussion, debate, and policymaking.
The report is structured into two parts: the first deals with the security policy agenda with Russia, and the key elements here are nuclear security and nonproliferation; NATO and Europe; the Caspian Basin and Central Asia; and Chechnya. The second part of the report addresses the domestic transformation in Russia, and this section addresses democratization including civil society and human rights, economic reform, rule-of-law, and higher education. There are two big ideas that form the conceptual backbone of our approach to Russian policy. The first is that despite the fact that the Cold War ended about ten years ago, we (both the United States and Russia), have failed to adapt our security policies to fully reflect this, and, in effect, we have not capitalized on the ample opportunities that the end of the Cold War provided to make this a much safer world. The second big idea which motivates much of the spirit of the part of the report addressing Russia's domestic transformation is that if Russia aspires to be a "great European power," a stated goal at various times by both Mr. Yeltsin and Mr. Putin, then it must realize that all great European powers today are market democracies with well established legal systems that abide by norms concerning human rights, free media, and healthy civil societies. The many frustrations with the Russian domestic transformation in the last decade have led to the conclusion that, if successful, this will be a far longer process than many had thought. There is a growing tendency in U.S. policy circles to completely avoid promoting this transformation and simply concentrating on a basket of security issues as the sum of our Russia policy. This would be a mistake since if Russia does eventually fail or more likely only half succeed in its domestic reform efforts, this will result in a Russia that is less integrated with the West and the world economy-a Russia that has less of an investment in international order and thus a Russia more likely to threaten U.S. national security on a wide set of issues. But while we cannot forget about the Russian domestic transition, we must understand that our capacity to influence it in a positive way is very, very limited while the perception by Russia of our "meddling in their internal affairs" can and has backfired to the detriment of the image of the United States not only in the minds of Russian conservative elites, but liberal elites also, as well as the broader population.
Now, my father once advised me, half seriously, that "arguing from ignorance is always best." As far as I could tell, it was advice that he himself took to heart in both his personal and professional life. You may not be surprised to learn that he was an attorney, but with this philosophy I think he had the makings of a fine political scientist as well. You know, there is something to his advise in that freedom from the constraints of petty facts allows for much greater creativity and often coherent argumentation since reality is often a very messy affair. However, being the rebellious son that I am, I choose not to follow this advise tonight, and in my remarks, I will focus on core issues on the U.S.-Russian security policy agenda, a set of issues I am more familiar with than Russia's domestic challenges. In any event, our report is far too extensive to review in one 25-minute speech, and if I tried, this talk would simply be reduced to a laundry list that would bore you and me to tears. Now there is no guarantee that you will not be falling asleep, but I have chosen a tack that I at least I find stimulating. However, I would be happy to entertain questions and comments about how the United States should approach Russia's domestic transformation during our discussion period.
Core Security Issues:
The coming decade should offer promising opportunities for the United States and Russia to bring far greater safety and security to their bilateral nuclear relationship, to radically reduce their nuclear arsenals, thus reinforcing the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Achievement of these goals, however, will require the U.S. government to definitively break out of the Cold War paradigm, a way of thinking that continues to shape much of U.S. nuclear and security policies towards Russia. Russian policy toward the United States suffers from the same malady, reinforced by the deepening weakness of its conventional forces. While important progress was made in the 1990s in the field of nuclear security-and your own Gloria Duffy worked hard and successfully in her tenure in the Department of Defense in the first Clinton Administration-in recent years this progress has stalled. It has been said over and over in Washington and elsewhere that whereas the threat from Russia during the Cold War was due to its strength, today the threat stems more from Russia's weakness. Yet U.S. strategic arms policy has never shifted to reflect this fundamentally new condition. It is time for bold initiatives that will set U.S. nuclear weapons posture on a new footing to more effectively ensure U.S. national security.
Arms Reductions
Currently both Russia and the U.S. have more than 6000 strategic weapons, and by the START II agreement this number is to come down 3000-3500. Of course, these numbers are far more than we need. We now face, as does Russia, a vastly different threat environment, yet we remain essentially in a Cold War nuclear posture. We have more than 2000 targets in the Russian Federation. This is clearly unnecessary, and only anachronistic targeting practices inherited from the Cold War could justify a U.S. nuclear arsenal of more than 1000-1500 warheads in the near future. The new administration should take the bold step of unilaterally reducing the U.S. arsenal to a level commensurate with the changed circumstances. Because of aging of its weapons force and financial constraints, the Russians are likely going down to this level anyway by 2010, and that is why they have proposed this level for a START III Treaty. Now President Bush talked about the importance of getting out of the Cold War paradigm and considering unilateral measures in his major foreign policy address on the campaign trail last May at the Reagan library. The logic to do so is powerful. If the international system is no longer defined by the U.S.-Soviet confrontation, why should the United States and Russia remain locked in this obsolete nuclear relationship? The longer run challenge for the United States and Russia will be to transform their nuclear relationship in the next decade or so to something closer to Britain and France today-much smaller arsenals that are not on hair-trigger alert to annihilate one another.
Unilateral measures to reduce nuclear arsenals make many in the arms control community nervous because without treaties you risk losing the verification regime which has been essential in both promoting reductions and building trust. We propose, however, that the United States and Russia take extensive measures to provide far greater transparency in the bilateral nuclear relationship in order to enhance strategic stability. Even if the Bush and Putin administrations dramatically reduced their nuclear arsenals to levels one-tenth of their Cold War peak-i.e. about 1000 warheads-nuclear deterrence will still define the core of the U.S.-Russian strategic relationship. We have to be realistic that getting to far lower numbers, let alone getting to zero, is a much longer term proposition-so we are going to be living in this nuclear deterrence world for quite awhile. Still, there is no good rationale for maintaining Cold-War hair trigger alert rates and operational conditions enabling delivery of a massive counterstrike on a few minutes notice. A premeditated strike by either side is virtually unimaginable today. The most compelling danger for the remainder of this decade is inadvertent or accidental nuclear conflict. The United States and Russia should take the initiative together to effectively increase the amount of time required to launch a nuclear strike from minutes to hours and then from hours to days. To do this will require pain-staking negotiations, but results will provide greater transparency and trust in relations, and can be designed also to help in the verification of reductions.
Today the greatest proliferation danger stems from possible leakage of weapons and/or fissile materials from the former Soviet arsenal. The most effective security cooperation from the Yeltsin-Clinton era took place through the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, or the Nunn-Lugar Program as named after their Senate sponsors. So far these programs have resulted in the deactivation of delivery systems for almost 5000 nuclear weapons, the denuclearization of three former Soviet republics, improved security over hundreds of tons of nuclear materials and employment for thousands of underfunded and underemployed former weapons scientists. All this for less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget-highly cost-effective investments in my view. Still, there is far more to be done. A recent bi-partisan report chaired by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler and ordered by the DOE identified this proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials as the greatest security threat to the U.S. The U.S. spent about $3 billion on CTR programs from 92-99, and in our report we recommend that spending be increased to the level of $1.5 billion/year for 5 years (Baker/Cutler recommends $30 billion over 10 years). The Bush Administration just proposed about a week ago that this funding actually be cut considerably below the Clinton administration had recommended. This would be a mistake. If the United States is prepared to spend tens of billions of dollars over the next 10-20 years to construct a national missile defense system to counter a threat that does not yet exist, the United States should be more than ready to spend a larger fraction of that amount to contain the most dangerous threat already in existence.
As many others and I have been saying for the last couple of years, the missile defense issue has the potential to be the next great trainwreck in U.S.-Russian relations. The Russians hold that the ABM Treaty signed 29 years ago remains the cornerstone of strategic stability in the world. The position of the U.S. has been moving in the direction with strong support from the Republican Party to assert that the ABM Treaty is a relic of the Cold War and thus an anachronism that no longer effectively promotes our security interests in the changed conditions we face today. This argument has acquired a near religious fervor by the adherents of each position, and as the wise Rabbi once said, "You are both right." A number of nations allocate considerable resources to ballistic missile programs, and it is certainly conceivable that 10-15 years from now there will be more states with the capacity to inflict more damage on the United States through delivery of WMD on ballistic missiles. The United States should engage in efforts to address this threat; it would be irresponsible not to. On the other hand, the repercussions of a U.S. decision to unilaterally withdraw from the ABM Treaty will likely be very destabilizing in the international system. Arms reductions efforts and efforts to bring greater safety to the U.S.-Russian nuclear relationship will likely be compromised. China will likely decide to build more nuclear missiles more rapidly than envisioned in current modernization plans; so far China has been very restrained in developing their nuclear forces. What China does will influence India with consequent effects on Pakistan. What China does may also lead Japan to question the credibility of the U.S. nuclear guarantee-Japan could develop nuclear forces quite rapidly if it so chose. Failure to reach agreement with Russia on the future of the ABM Treaty will certainly lead to deeper security cooperation between Russia and China, something we certainly do not want and something about which the Russians are deeply ambivalent themselves. Then, of course, there are our most important allies in Europe that nearly across the board have expressed their support for maintaining the ABM Treaty with Russia. In sum, we risk compromising our most significant allied relationships and encouraging deeper cooperation amongst our most significant potential rivals as well as likely destroying the nonproliferation regime if we do not handle the missile defense issue with the greatest wisdom and adroit diplomacy. So what does the wise Rabbi suggest.
We need to make every effort to turn the missile defense issue from the greatest threat now to U.S. Russian relations to the greatest opportunity for real security cooperation. In June of last year, and again last month the Russians have acknowledged that there is a growing threat from missile proliferation, and that the United States, Russia, and Europe should jointly engage in discussion and analysis of the threat with the goal of developing cooperative efforts to address the threat both through political and diplomatic means as well as development of effective defensive systems. At this point the Russians, in their proposal to NATO during the visit of Lord Robertson to Moscow last month proposed such discussions and cooperation and expressed the view that Russia and Europe are more vulnerable than the U.S. to missile attacks since medium-range systems are further along in development by states, virtually all of them on the periphery of the Russian Federation (Iran, India, Pakistan, i.e.) than ICBMs which could threaten the United States. Now there has been much speculation about how genuine the Russian proposals are or whether they are more symbolic and designed primarily to delay any deployment and split the U.S. from its allies. Deputy Chair of the Duma's Committee on Defense and one of Russia's leading specialists on nuclear strategic issues, Alexei Arbatov told me in his office last month, and then repeated what he told me nearly verbatim in a press conference the following week in Moscow, that the United States and the West would be making a mistake of historical magnitude if we were not to take the Russian proposal seriously since cooperation on the missile proliferation threat and joint development of systems to deal with it carry the seeds for REAL security integration of Russia with the West. I am inclined to agree with Arbatov, but I am also aware that there is less than full agreement in Russian policymaking circles on this. Nevertheless, these discussions should be undertaken with the utmost seriousness. Right now the Bush Administration is reviewing the missile defense issue, and, indeed, policy toward Russia at large. There are some hopeful signs in that Mr. Rumsfeld has taken to referring to missile defense rather than NATIONAL missile defense, and there is talk circulating now of multi-layered systems to address the threat, and here there may be room for greater cooperation with the Russians.
But, of course, nothing is ever straightforward or simple with the Russians. While on the one hand the Russian government has expressed the desire to cooperate with the United States and Europe on addressing the missile threat, the US government for years has been concerned about the role of Russian scientists/engineers and enterprises in proliferating both missile and nuclear technologies to "states of concern," or now, once again, "rogue states." Separating out deliberate, state-sanctioned proliferation activities from proliferation activities that take place without state sanction and effectively outside state control is a very difficult problem in the chaotic post-Soviet Russia. Many unclassified, unconfirmed reports tell of Russian scientists and technology experts who have left Russia to work in North Korean, Chinese, and Iranian laboratories, institutes, and factories. There are also reports of Russians providing assistance to these and other weapons programs by electronic means while they remain in Russia. This is the "dark side of the Internet." In some cases it may be convenient for the state to have "plausible deniability" for these activities, and in other cases they may really be outside state control. This problem accentuates the importance of providing assistance for unemployed or underemployed Russian weapons scientists and technology experts as well as the need for greater U.S. human and technical intelligence assets to monitor the situation.
The issue of weapons and technology transfers will be a difficult one for the United States and Russia as this is an area where our interests to some extent simply diverge. The motivations for the Russians to engage in such transfers are two-fold: economic and national security. Arms sales are an area where Russian industry can be competitive, and the MIC is starved for resources since Russian weapons procurement has fallen so precipitously in recent years. Last year Russian arms sales amounted to about $4 billion (about 15% of US arms transfers and far below the level of the Soviet period), and the two main clients are China and India at about $1 billion/year and the decision to resume sales to Iran will make Iran probably the third largest client in a few years. The Russian problem is markets-as long as they are closed out of traditionally US and European markets, they will be pushed to sell to places we do not like. I think we need to be more creative and open to the possibility of Russians weapons manufacturers selling to states we do like-like Europe, for example where the Russians lost their greatest market share with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. We also need to understand that Russian arms sales essentially help the Russian MIC survive, and it is understandable that Russian political leaders believe that the survival of some far smaller fraction of the old Soviet military industrial complex is in Russian national interests.
The other issue we need to keep in mind is how Russia perceives its security interests naturally diverges in some cases from our own, and this is natural given the very different strategic environment Russia faces. As the son of a real estate agent, in my childhood I heard the first three laws of real estate often, "location, location, location." This has direct application to international security. Russia is surrounded on its periphery in the South and East with a number of rising powers in the international system at a time when its own power has been drastically reduced. I have in mind here particularly China and India, and, to a lesser extent, Iran. Part of the Russian rationale has to do with its need to engage these states in cooperative relationships to advance its own interests. There are geopolitical reasons for these relations which are NOT primarily motivated by the desire to oppose the United States, and these weapons sales are not fundamentally motivated by the desire to counter the U.S. Clearly there fare aspects of these relationships and arms transfers that run counter to our interests, but much of their motivation has nothing to do with the United States, despite the inflammatory rhetoric of some Russian politicians and even some government officials. Now last week, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense Designate, described Russia's arms transfers, and I think he primarily had in mind those to China and Iran, as the equivalent of "giving enough rope to hang oneself," since some of these weapons transfers could come back to haunt Moscow with Russia facing threats emanating from these places. True, the United States has its own historical experience in this regard with Iran, and in the cases of sales both to China and Iran there is considerable controversy within Russia itself on these grounds.
I have no magic bullet solution regarding proliferation. I am suggesting, however, that it is important for the United States to understand the complexity of motivations on the part of Russia. Apparently Mr. Putin, himself, in a meeting of his National Security Council in late February was very critical of the failure of the government to better control leakage of critical technologies. The Putin government has made it clear that arms sales will be more aggressively supported, but if the government in turn is better able to control non-sanctioned leakage of ballistic missile and nuclear technologies, this should be applauded and supported by us. Conversely, I think we need to be very careful and discriminating about our criticism of transfers of weapons technologies to a place like Iran. If Russian sales are of systems of a more defensive nature, and now they are talking about things like tanks, armored personnel carriers, missile defense systems-much of that I think we simply need to live with as Iran does have legitimate security concerns, and most of them are directed to Iraq which is Iran's main security concern. If Russians sell Iranians more offensive systems that could threaten U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, we clearly would have stronger grounds for objections. We also need to understand that in the case of Iran, many Russian foreign policy elites with whom I recently met believe that despite U.S. criticism of Russian sales of weapons and civilian nuclear technologies now, once the U.S. normalizes relations with Iran, U.S. industry will seek to beat the Russians out of this market as well.
Finally, a few words about European security and NATO. Because of it size, military power, socioeconomic difficulties, and complicated mix of shared interests and tensions with the West, Russia clearly does not fit easily into the evolving Euro-Atlantic security architecture. Russia's cultural identity for centuries has been torn between admiration and disdain for Europe's economic and political achievements. Russia never been able to fully resolve whether it wants to join a "common European home" as former President Gorbachev put it, or remain aloof in its vast and unique Eurasian splendor. To further complicate its near-schizophrenia about the West, in the past decade Russia has experienced the most precipitous drop in national power of any great power in peacetime in modern history, and Europe is where Russian foreign policy elites feel the repercussions of the Soviet collapse most acutely. Despite the bitterness and disappointment of recent years, U.S. policymakers and analysts of Russia must not entirely discount the hard-won achievements that support the view that a more cooperative approach between the Euro-Atlantic alliance partners and Russia will be essential to maintaining and promoting European security. Former Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin along with former Finnish President Ahtisaari helped negotiate a conclusion to the Kosovo war-effectively preventing further danger of the NATO alliance unraveling over Kosovo. Russia understands that it must establish a modus vivendi with NATO as the primary security institution in Europe, and we must work hard to make that happen. The NATO enlargement process should go on, and no state should have an explicit or implicit veto over other states joining. Nevertheless, we caution NATO to be somewhat deliberate in inviting states from former Soviet territory to join, and of course I have in mind here mainly the Baltic States. In my personal view, I would advise, and we did so in the report since I had responsibility to write the section on European security, that NATO hold off on membership to the Baltic states until 2005-which effectively means extending invitations in 2003-04 rather than next year which is the earliest opportunity. This recommendation recognizes that Russia and NATO need some time to have the opportunity to establish a firmer foundation of cooperation and mutual understanding before one or all of the Baltic States become members. In my view, invitation next year would prematurely derail that possibility. Now I use the word "possibility" there quite consciously since there is no guarantee that Russia and NATO will be able to do this, and that is why the recommendation for extending the time before membership for the Balts is strictly limited.
Unfortunately, during the 90s, the expansion of membership and mission of NATO consumed so much attention of policymakers. At a time when traditional security risks associated with great power rivalry in the Euro-Atlantic region have dramatically declined, disputes over NATO in the 1990s undermined cooperative efforts to address growing nontraditional security problems. Today and tomorrow, problems like state weakness, environmental degradation, epidemic disease, safety and security of nuclear materials, migration flows and adverse demographic trends, crime and corruption, and other issues present far more immediate threats to Russian and broader European security. These threats are transboundary in nature and so present an immediate threat to the Euro-Atlantic region at large. Policymaking communities, nongovernmental organizations, and scholars need to devote far more resources to address these shared problems with shared solutions. And again, because of proximity of location, more European security issues with Russia do not directly involve the United States. For this reason also, the expansion of the European Community further east will have far more real impact on Russian interests, especially economic, than will NATO expansion, Russian analysts and policymakers need to spend more time on these issues than fulminating over the dangers of NATO. There are many indications that Mr. Putin understands this, and that is why Russia's relations with Europe have taken precedence over those with the United States, and I think this is a natural development as we get further away from the Cold War. Remember, "location, location, location."
Conclusion
Now, there is one highly significant development of the past ten years or more which to some extent was either unexpected or not well understood that greatly alters the structural environment of the US-Russian relationship. What do I mean? An asymmetry in power between the US and Russia, using the size of the economy as the key measurement, existed at the start of the 1990s, but this asymmetry has widened by a great margin with the US on an unprecedented roll during the decade while the Russian economy was getting rolled, if you will. This means the Russian Federation relatively carries far less economic, military, and political power in international affairs than ten years ago and consequently is less of a foreign policy priority for the United States. This is a message that the new Bush administration has been conveying to the Russians in a number of ways, from restructuring of the National Security Council to give Russia a lower priority to showing very little enthusiasm for a Putin-Bush meeting anytime soon. I was in Moscow a few weeks ago for meetings with a number of government officials, Duma members, and foreign policy specialists, and they are hearing the message, and they do not really care for it. There is a danger of our overdoing it, however. I think the current administration needs to be more careful in how they talk about Russia than we have seen so far. At this point they seem to be propagating the image of Russia almost entirely in negative terms as a growing threat for the U.S., a proliferator of missiles and WMD, an incubator for crime and corruption, a nation of spies, etc. Demonization of Russia and the creation of an "enemy" image that seems to be part of the Bush Administration message to this point are simply not constructive. Especially when our Russia policy is under review as it is now, there seems little point in getting out in front of policy with such negative rhetoric. Obviously there are problems with regard to many areas in our relationship, but the overall reality and motivations of Russia are far more complex and mixed. To paraphrase the old Buick advertising slogan, "Mr. Bush, this is not your father's Soviet Union!"
And while relations between the US and Russia have gradually become lower priorities in each capital, and again, I stress that this is a natural phenomenon as we move further from the Cold War era of superpower confrontation-an era that may look more anomalous in historical terms-that does not mean that our bilateral relationship must be destined to be adversarial.
I have tried to suggest in my remarks this evening some areas where we share common interests-and there are a number of others I have not mentioned-and upon which we should build real cooperation in our mutual interests. We are now ten years past the Cold War, yet we still call this era the "post-Cold War." One alternative terminology suggested ruefully by one of my colleagues was that this may be regarded as the "interwar period" like the 1920s-30s came to be known. Indeed, two wars with Germany had to be fought in the first half of the last century before Germany was successfully assimilated in a new international system. Will we have to engage in another Cold War, albeit mini Cold War, to get it right with Russia? This would be a colossal mistake and waste of resources, not to mention exceedingly dangerous. In many respects we were very fortunate that the Cold War never became "hot." In a second round, we may not be so lucky. And on that cheery note, I will conclude my prepared remarks.
