The New Russophobes Are Here

...In a recent column, Will compared present-day Russia to Napoleon...

...Which is why Russia's benign behavior toward Ukraine and the Baltic states these past few years has been amazing...

...20 percent said it was Chechnya...

...it made good strategic and ideological sense...

...Russia, like almost all great powers in history, has ambitions, and in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire it is suffering some wounded pride...

...For Heilbrunn, evidence of the "recrudescence of the Kremlin's imperial ambitions" included the fact that Yeltsin traveled to Beijing this spring and signed a "strategic partnership" with Chinese leaders...

...Thirty-five percent said government payment of their pensions and salaries...

...During the Cold War, Moscow controlled an empire that stretched into the heart of Europe, maintained a huge army on German, Czech, Hungarian, and Polish soil, and posed the most dangerous threat after Hitler to America's vital national interest in a Europe free from domination by any single power...

...Soviet ideology called for eternal struggle against and eventual overthrow of the democratic capitalist system of the United States and its Western allies...

...Although on paper the army boasts a force of 1.7 million men, Lieven notes that the "real disposable strength of the army is much lower, and the number of effective combat units lower still...

...And so the alarms being raised about Russian "aggression" and "relentless expansionism" are excessively shrill...

...It has stationed troops on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan (but with the consent of the Tajik government, which is locked in a civil war with Muslim rebels...

...The Russophobes don't see it that way...

...Like a bad penny, the doctrine of Russophobia is back with a vengeance...

...But in the past few years, a post-Communist Russia has withdrawn its troops not only from Eastern and Central Europe but also from the Baltic states, Ukraine, and most of the former Soviet Union...

...To Adams, Russia was "a wall of archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal . .. and more likely to advance...

...Average Americans might see all this as good news...

...Kissinger also found the Russo-Chinese meeting alarming, although one recalls no similar anxieties on his part when Mikhail Gorbachev dramatically visited Beijing in 1989...

...Indeed, that war has figured prominently in all the Russophobic accusations about a "new aggressiveness" in Asia...

...Here are a few simple facts: The CIA estimates that since 1988 Moscow's defense spending has declined by about 80 percent...

...They depict Eastern and Central Europe as trembling before what Will calls Russia's "overwhelming military superiority...

...The Russophobia of the 1890s looked pretty foolish when Japan thrashed the Russians on both land and sea in 1904...

...Freedom House president Adrian Karatnycky believes the elections will lead to a "more authoritarian," anti-Western Yeltsin...

...It has played a rough game in Georgia, first supporting separatists there and then offering President Eduard Shevardnadze "protection" in the form of two Russian army divisions...

...Teddy Roosevelt feared that the Russians saw themselves "as huge, powerful barbarians, cynically confident that they will in the end inherit the fruits of our civilization . . . despising as effete all of Europe and especially America...

...He must have meant Napoleon on St...

...But in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, and in the former Soviet republics, most people openly wished for a Yeltsin victory in a free and fair election...

...The balloting proved free and fair, despite confident predictions of widespread government fraud by experts like Dmitri Simes...

...If we cannot afford to maintain 5,000 airplanes, let there be fewer," declared the veteran paratrooper whom Kissinger has described as advocating a "strong, nationalist foreign policy...

...For those without a scorecard, they were Napoleon's France, and Germany, twice in this century...

...The Russian government has taken a heavy-handed and at times brutal role in some of the former Soviet republics along its southern frontier...

...The Russian army today is weaker in relative terms than it has been for almost four hundred years," writes Moscow correspondent Anatol Lieven in the summer issue of the National Interest...

...In the new Russophobe's view of European history, there is little mention of the fact that two great powers on three separate occasions carried out a conscious, aggressive design for the conquest of all Europe-neither of which was Russia...

...Its leaders were prone to saying things like, "We will bury you...

...Then, as now, Russophobia combined in roughly equal measure fear of Russia's barbarian strength and a profound self-doubt about "effete" America's will to resist it...

...History, according to Kissinger, proves Russia won't be able to resist the imperial temptation: "Russia has generally excluded Eastern Europe [and] the Balkans...

...Well, most leaders would take that view of territory that had been part of their country for more than a hundred years...

...At a time when social Darwinism suffused the thoughts of serious strategists, Mahan saw in Russian foreign policy neither intelligence nor design but rather "obedience to natural law and race instinct...

...In the June 16 elections, exit pollers asked Russian voters which issue was most important to them in making their decision...

...Nicholas I imposed some very harsh terms on the Turkish Porte...

...It is time to understand that the world has changed . . . We do not have to keep up with the United States or NATO in terms of quantity...

...The new Russophobes say it doesn't matter who governs Russia, or how...

...George F. Will informs us that "expansionism is in Russia's national DNA...

...Where foreign policy is concerned, Simes says there's not much to choose between Yeltsin and Zyuganov, only shades of "dark gray and very dark gray...

...Nor has Moscow taken any steps to try to regain lost positions in the Baltic region, which since the 18th century have been thought essential to Russian security...

...Even if Russian leaders devoted every waking minute, and every scarce ruble, to reinventing the Red Army, it would take ten years to bring it back to its 1980s strength...

...Demoralization and desertions are up, professionalism and combat capabilities are down...

...They don't seem inclined to try...

...Now, as it happens, when Russia's imperial drive took it eastward to China in the late 19th century, it arrived only to find the place teeming with British, French, German, and Japanese imperialists who had gotten there first...

...Exhibit number two demonstrating Russia's "new imperial" ambitions in "Asia" has been the war in Chechnya...

...There is no democracy in Russia and will be no democracy there no matter who wins...

...Are we poised to make the same kind of mistake again, stirring ourselves up about an overblown Russian threat to the exclusion of all other strategic considerations...

...Aleksandr I. Lebed, who ran a strong third on June 16 and days later joined Yeltsin's team, has made it clear that he considers a serious arms buildup out of the question...

...The once-formidable Red Army has been cut nearly in half and is starved of funds...

...Yet Kissinger is quick to indict present-day Russian foreign policy by bringing up the 1833 Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi...

...Were Ukraine or the Baltic states to be swallowed up by Russia, a new "Cold War" would indeed begin, as Kissinger suggests-and rightly so...

...No one could have predicted five years ago that Ukraine, which had experienced scarcely five minutes of independence from Russia during the previous millennium, would be as independent as it is today...

...Only in the area of submarines have the Russians even attempted to keep pace with the United States in recent years...

...Would you believe it...

...One would never know that throughout the last three centuries Europe has managed to contain some other aggressive powers-like Austria, which consistently tangled with Russia in the Balkans, or France, which under the foolish Louis Napoleon set off the unnecessary Crimean War...

...But without in any way absolving Yeltsin and his military for their brutal conduct of a war that most Russians, including Lebed, have vigorously opposed, there is nevertheless one simple point to be made: A military action on Russia's own territory cannot be considered a first step in an imperial drive for the conquest of Eurasia...

...It should be watched, influenced, deterred, and, when necessary, confronted...

...13 percent said it was crime...

...It has taken advantage of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan to solidify its predominance in that oil-rich region...

...Over the past few months, however, an army of foreign policy experts led by grand strategist Henry Kissinger has been reporting back to the op-ed pages and talk shows with gloomy news from the analytic front...

...And you can't overrun Ukraine or Poland with submarines...

...Does this mixed record constitute a reemergence of Russian imperialism...

...We can expect a continuation of Russia's "ancient imperial drives," Kissinger argues, and "relentless expansionism" no matter who is in the Kremlin...

...defense budget was a little over $260 billion this year, Russia plans to spend about $60 billion on defense...

...Heilbrunn writes that Russian leaders deem possession of Chechnya a "vital interest...

...Helena...

...Fortunately for them, and for us, those wishes are likely to be granted...

...While the U.S...

...Only two percent of Russians identified foreign policy as their main concern, and of these a plurality chose Yeltsin over the candidates with an anti-Western platform...

...the populace has "an expansionist gene...

...Heilbrunn found this meeting "ominous," somehow presaging a Russian takeover of "Eurasia...

...One of the most intemperate Russophobic outbursts was Jacob Heilbrunn's warning in the New Republic against a new Russian "drive to the East," a "return to the former dreams of Russian imperialists for a landward expansion into Central Asia, China and the Far East...

...At the same time, Russia has taken a more benign approach to other former Soviet republics...

...Russia formally recognized Ukraine's sovereignty in 1994 and has done nothing since to try to subvert the government, incorporate the heavily Russian eastern section of Ukraine, or use military intimidation to force the new nation's "Finlandization...

...That seems to be precisely why Moscow has handled its disputes in these places so gingerly...

...from the operation of the balance of power, insisting on dealing with them unilaterally and often by force...

...Nearly 70 percent of the Russian people voted against the Communist party in the first round of the Russian elections on June 16...

...President Boris Yeltsin, targeted by the Communists because of his free-market reforms, is poised to win a second term in the coming runoff against the Communist candidate Gennadi Zyuganov-and possibly by a landslide...

...But we should not build our global strategy around unfounded fears...

...And before the United States ever got around to clashing with the barbarian Slav civilization, it had to fight two world wars on Russia's side against Germany and Japan, two emerging threats the old Russophobes almost completely ignored...

...Is there much evidence that the Russian people or their leaders really want to reacquire their lost empire...

...Twenty-five percent said it was the economy...

...The elections don't matter, they say...

...The two countries have argued over the nearly worthless Black Sea fleet and border demarcations in a small part of the Crimea, but their negotiations have been peaceable...

...Fear of the Soviet Union was not Russophobia...

...It first gained prominence in the late 19th century, when grand thinkers like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Adams expressed their view of Russia as an inhuman and unstoppable force...