CIAO DATE: 02/02

New Security Challenge or Old? Russia's Catch-22

William C. Wohlforth

GCSP - ISS at Yale University Workshop Papers: "Old and New Security Issues: Research and Policy Ramifications"
August 1998

The Geneva Centre for Security Policy

The most important security threat Russia faces, and the main threat it poses to the rest of the world, is its own implosion. If traditional security has to do with the manipulation and managment of the use of military force by states, then Russia's major contemporary problems must be understood under the "new security" rubric. Because the world has never before had to deal with the breakdown of a nuclear superpower, the security challenges Russia presents are certainly novel. But if "new security" is supposed to encompass problems that are transnational in nature and challenge state-centric analysis, then it too does not capture today's Russian question. For at the root of Russia's security problems is the absence of an effective government. To be sure, all of these problems are made more complicated by globalization. Many of them would continue to pester world politics even if Moscow had a capable government. But the root of these problems and the reason they present such great potential dangers is the absence of a capable state in Russia.

Unforunately, however, that is not the end of the story, because Russia and the West have managed, though a spectacular series of policy blunders, to create a Catch-22 for world politics: If Russia does manage against the odds to fashion an effective state that can facilitate economic growth, she is sure to become a revisionist power in world politics and thus present the most traditional of all security challenges. What makes that outcome unlikely in the next two decades is not the global trend towards democracy and liberal economics, but rather the continued decline of Russian power. And while the Russians themselves must bear most of the responsibility for the parlous state of their country, it is the prosperous and stable West, which could so easily have adopted wiser policies, that is mainly to blame for creating the Catch-22.

The Marginalization of the Old Security Agenda

Moscow's official national security concept reads like it was penned by western European peace researchers. The document, approved by President Yeltsin in December 1997, states clearly that the Russian Federation faces no significant external security threats; that the main threats are internal-secessionism, ehthnic conflicts, environmental degradation, the population's deteriorating health, declining social services, and continued economic privation; and that the relative importance of military power has receeded in favor of economic, technologicial and scientific capabilities. ₁ While only of marginal policy relevance, the document reflects a sea-change in the Russian political elite's perceptions of its role in world politics. ₂ Fifteen years of economic stagnation under Brezhnev followed by a catastrophic economic collapse in the decade after 1988 have called Russia's great power status into question. The greatest threat to the country's security is a continuation of this trend. The nation's number one task is to reverse this decline.

Russia now ranks 17th in world GDP-behind Mexico. Its defense spending now amounts to less than 9% of U.S. spending. Barring some dramatic reversal, Russia will not commit more than 3.5% of its still-shrinking official GDP to defense over the next decade. As a consequence, the number of Russia's military personnel will shrink by at least a half, resources will be shifted to internal troops, and procurement and research and development will continue to be scaled back dramatically. NATO's current quantitative conventional superiorty of 2 or 3 to 1 will soon increase to over 5 to 1. These figures hide what matters most: the West's decisive qualitative superiority in training, technology, and morale. To the East and even the South, Russia now faces or may soon face stronger powers. And Russia's nuclear arsenal, much of which is currently on critically low alert levels, will continue to shrink regardless of the coutcome of arms control negotiations.

Moreover, underlying relative power trends are bad enough to sober any but the most obtuse geopolitician.. When a country shrinks while others grow vigorously, the resulting gap becomes daunting. According to calculations of Moscow's Institute of World Economy and International Relations, the United States currently accounts for 21% of world GDP, the EU 12%, Japan 8%, China 7%, and Russia 1.7%. Under a set of assumptions quite favorable to Russia (including that it recovers now and resumes steady 6% yearly growth), in 2015 those percentages would change as follows: US, 18%; EU 16%; Japan 7%, China 10%, and Russia 2%. ₃ Those cacluations are not only favorable to Russia's economic prospects (and unfavorable to those of the United States and China), they fail to consider a whose series of challenges to Russia's recovery that transcend the current financial crisis. Chief among these long-term worries is the demographic crisis. Due to declining fertility and a catastrophic decline in life expectancy, Russia may be facing a net yearly population loss of as many as a million people. ₄

Emotional diatribes by retired generals and marginal politicians notwithstanding, under these circumstances no one seriously contemplates restoring the empire. Indeed, with the exception of South Ossetia, Moscow's use of force in the "near abroad" (Dniestr, Abkhazia, Karabakh, Tajikistan) as well as domestically in Chechnya has produced no real solution, but instead has led to a seriesd costly impasses with Russian soldiers becoming targets for parties dissatisfied with the status quo. On the global scene, the much-ballyhooed "strategic realingment" with China has come to naught for a simple reason. What has 1.7% of world GDP got to offer 7% (China), or, for that matter 8% (Japan) or 12% (EU), to make any of them risk their relationship with 21% (US)?

Russia's weakness renders any serious opposition to the other major powers impossibly costly, and hence prevents the emergence of classsical security dilemmas with any of them. This basic situation is reinforced by Russia's deepening financial dependence on the west and the IMF. However much Russia's foreign-policy elites may perceive their geopolitical interests to lie a multipolar countertbalancing of US power, their economic interests point in the opposite direction. The most important single trend in world politics since 1989 is the ongoing triumph of these economic interests over Russia's traditional understanding of its security and prestige needs. The trend is likely to continue.

This is not to say that there are no traditional secuirty concerns. Despite their abject povery and dependent status, Russians still chafe against the US-led world order at several key points: in an ongoing rivalrly over positions of influence in the near abroad; Caspian oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; U.S "dual containment" of Iran and Iraq; and U.S. policy in the Balkans. On each of these issues, however, Moscow's room to maneuver is striclty limited by its weakess and ultimate dependence on Washington's goodwill.

Potenially more important than any of these problems is the one traditional secuirty problem that has recevied the least attention: strategic stability. The continued deterioration in Russia's nuclear readiness and command and control, the contraction of all Soviet nuclear forces to Russia and the consequent reduction in targets, and the continued modernization and high states of readiness of the U.S. nuclear triad raise a specter that haunted strategic planners throught the Cold War: first strike dominance. If present trends continue, Washington may soon possess a reilable first-strike capability against Russia. Russia, meanwhile, has dramatically increased its dependence on nuclear deterrence since the end of the Cold War in order to compensate for conventional military weakness and to try to hold a claim to great-power status despite economic weakness. ₅

If the strategic thinking in the Cold War was right, then a first-strike capability by one side is a threat to both. Why then does this threat go unnoticed? The answer must lie in the argument I spelled out above. The assumption must be that since Russia cannot afford the kind of crisis with the U.S. that would bring concerns over nuclear vulnerability to the fore, such a cisis will not happen. This reinforces the basic point of this section: that traditional security concerns are marginalized more by Russian decline than by deep-going change in the nature of world politics.

The New Security Agenda

Standard texts on international security are of little help in dealing with many of the key security problems Russia and its partners currently face. Consider just some of the problems now exersizing the minds of Russian and western policymakers alike:

• Financial collapse, economic crisis and chaos. Although concerns inspired by Chechnya that the Russian Federation was on the verge of disintegration now seem overblown, neither Moscow nor its major partners can ignore the possibility that the cumulation of economic and finanical crises besetting Mocow will generate major instability. If Russia were to experience major domestic turbulence and unrest in the next year or two, analysists would easily seem them as in inevitable consequence of existing conditions and policies. For many analysts, the demographic crisis alone is a sufficient indicator. For example,Nicholas Eberstadt, of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, claims that "in the modern world · significant and general increases in mortality always betoken either social instability ot regime fragility or both." ₆

  Russia faces not "significant" but unprecedented increases in mortality. It is little wonder then that fear of instability is the lodestar of US policy towards Russia. And it is the specter of a state breakdown that is Moscow's strongest policy lever over Washington. As harsh as they are, the IMF's terms for loans are better than most of its usual clients would get because policy-makers do not want to risk a social backlash or state breakdown in a nuclear-armed former superpower.

• Migration and the loss of control over regions. If in 20 years Russia will at best account for 2% of world GDP,and if its populations is doomed to shrink dramatically, it still will be the largest country in the world, with much of its territory sparsely populated, poorly developed, and rich in valuble natural resources. Neighboring lands face populatuion pressure ad resource constaints. The combination is more worrying to Russians now than classic concerns over traditional security threats. While migration pressure could emanate from many areas, including Central Asia and the Causasus, it is the Far Eastern regions that most concern Moscow planners. According to Vilia Gel'bras, a widely-cited regional expert from the Institute of Asia and Africa, "eastern Siberia and the far east have become the weakest links in Russia's geopolitical and geoeconomic structure-which is a direct threat to the country's national security." _{7   i} The region is rich in resources, sparsely populated, and weakly integrated with European Russia. Russians fear that the increasingly autonomous regions may seek to bandwagon with dynamic Asian powers, or that outside powers will make significant inroads through peaceful penetration. The five-power Shanghai agreement among Russia, China, and the Central Asian states, did quiet Russian fears of Chinese aims in Central Asia.

  However, perhaps the most frequently cited potential security threat in Asia is China's so-called "peaceful demographic press" arising from rapid population growth and rising unemployment in relatively poor northern areas. _ii Experts disagree on the seriousness of the problem, but, by some estimates, China's "excess" rural population in these regions numbers up to 130 million people-nearly matching Russia's entire population. Pessimists forecast a China unable to control the human exodus into Russia and Central Asia. Others deride the threat, and note that even if it is serious it calls for more cooperation with Beijing, not less. _iii In general, regional elites and publics are more alarmed about the issue while Moscow officials discount its seriousness. _iv

• Loose nukes." Moscow and the west preferred to concentrate the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons in Russia precisely in order to keep them under the firm control of a stable government. Yet there have been hundreds of reports of diversion of nuclear materials since 1991. According to highly-regarded study by the Caregie Endowment for International Peace and the Monterrey Insititute of International Studies, most of these reports concern thee diversion materials that pose little proliferation threat. ₈ . However, the fact that hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uraniam is still unaccounted for does raise concenes about the potential threat. And the report documents several clear cases of the seizure of illicitly-diverted highly-enriched uraniam and weapons-usable plutonium in 1994 and 1995. In all of the seven cases outlined in the report, the material originated in Russia and was recovered there or in Europe. But some of the most likely proliferators lie to Russia's south, where tenuous border controls are much more frequent than towards the west. If the materials can be diverted and transshiped without a European intermediary, the difficulty of detection and seizure increases.

• Uncontrolled weapons proliferation. Reports are numerous, though usually hard to substantiate, concerning illicit diversion of Russian missile technology and other sophisticated weapons. The government's inability to pay salaries even to highly-trained researchers and specialized defense workers, the overwhelming pressure to export faced Russia's arms export agency, as well as by the major defense firms, loose govermental oversight, corruption, and prevalent organized crime all raise the possibility that sophisiticated weaponry will find its way from Russia or elsewhere in the former Soviet Union to terrorist groups or rogue states. Despite the popular and press focus on nuclear material, some researvhers are more concerned biological weapons agents. Though Moscow has discontinued most of its biological weapons research, expertise and equipment left over from Soviet-era programs could provide terrorist groups or Aum Shinrikiyo style cults with highly lethal agents. ₉

• Organized crime. Like their counterparts in other countries, Russia's organized crime groups focus on the standard thugs' menu: drug trafficking, racketeering, prostitution, smuggling, theft, money laundering, contract killing, and the like. The difference in Russia, according to many observers, is the deep penetration of organized crime into normally licit activities of government and business. This raises the threat of organized crime groups trafficking in weapons of mass destruction, or even influencing state policy in ways that threaten the security of others. ₁₀ Russian organuized criminal groups operate internationally, especially in Poland, Germany, the United States, Israel and Cypress. To date, however, there is little evidence that they have made weapons trade a focus of their activities. In addition, they face the usual constraints that have always limited the international impact of organize crime: internecine rivalry among competing groups within the counrty.

• Environmental threats. Russia is beset by daunting list environmental crises: nuclear waste and rotting nuclear submarines in the Artic; the leaking MAYAK nuclear weapons complex in Chelyabinsk; insecure chemicial weapons dumps in central Russia; the pollution of the Caspian. ₁₁ Many of these problems are locted in border zones or on waterways that affect other states. Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Russia's neighbors confront environmental threats that could present the region with tough challenges. Arguably the most spectactular man-made environmental disaster on the planet is the poisoning of the Aral Sea, a building catastrophe that could set Tajiks, Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz abainst each other, inevitable involving Russia. It is easy to conjure up scenarioes of Russian ecololgical disasters threatening neighboring states, or neighbors' environmental crises or resource wars generating mass migrations for which Russia is ill prepared.

National, Transnational or International?

The traditional security agenda concening the use of force between states, which animated Russian discourse on world politics only a few years ago, has been displaced by a new set of concerns. Each of these issues is novel, none is purely national or international, and all are to one degree or another transnational. The security threats they create do cross borders, but they are not results of state policies. Most reflect unintended consequences, uncontrolled processes, or technological or environmental trends beyond the power or any single goverment to control. Thus, critics of traditional secuirty studies are right: Russia's problems appear to challenge typical state-centric modes of anlysis and policy thinking.

If this is so, then two consequences follow. First, my assigned topic for this conference is a contradiction. New security issues are transnational, yet I am required to focus on a single state. If the essence of new security problem is that they cannot be resolved by states alone, then surely they can't be analyzed productively by looking only at one state. Second, and much more importantly, western, and particulalry US, policy towards Russia is intellectually bankrupt. For, predictably, such a focus on the state is the default option taken by the United States and most other nations. The key to all the novel security challenges Russia faces, US officials argue, is a functioning government in Russia that can foster economic growth, social stability,and respect for law and order, and thus oversee large-scale activities taking place on its territory.

On closer examination, however, both the conference organizors and western policymakers are right. As unprecedented and challenging as Russia's security problems are, at the root of all of them is the deficit of governmental order in Eurasia. It is easy to talk of the declining importance of states when you have one that functions well. Russians can't afford that luxury, and neither can the policymakers who have to deal with the problems Russia's weak state creates.

The taproot of all of Russia's problems is economic decline. Reversing that decline requires policy has to be focused.

---

Endnotes:

Note 1: For a comprehensive discussion, see Alexander A> Sergounin "Russia: A Long Way to the National Security Doctrine," Copenhagen Peace Research Institute Working Paper. The nearly complete settlement of the border dispute with China leaves only the scenarios (which Russian analysts acknowledge are highly unlikely in the near term) of a Japanese-U.S. seizure of the Kuriles, German recidivism in Kaliningrad, or territorial claims by Russia's militarily-weak neighbors in the Baltic, to exercise the imagination of Russia's security managers. No power is thought to have interests that could lead to a resort to the direct use of force against Russian territory. The Russian Federation's vast size and credible nuclear deterrent provide comfort. The most popular potential geopolitical rivals are Turkey to the South (in the view of both democrats and many nationalist), Germany and the United States to the West (nationalists), Japan and the U.S. (nationalists) or China (democrats) to the East. With the partial exception of Turkey, all of these are speculative assessments. Back.

Note 2: See Neil Malcolm, Alex Pravda, Roy Allison and Margot Light, Internal Factors in Russian Foreign Policy (Oxford, 1996); and Andrei Tsygankov, "From International Institutionalism to Revolutionary Expansionism: The Foreign Policy Discourse of Contemporary Russia," International Studies Quarterly 41: 2 (November 1997).  Back.

Note 3: See the discussion in Aleksei G. Arbatov, "The National Idea and National Security," Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia 5 (May) 1998: 5-21, and 6 (April) 1998: 5-19; translated in FBIS-SOV-98-208 and 98-216.  Back.

Note 4: Post-Soviet Geography and Economics  Back.

Note 5: On nuclear weapons and Russian;s military doctrine, see Aleksey G. Arbatov, "Russia: National Security Needs in the 1990s," Mirovaia ekonomika I mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, No. 7 (July, 1994): 5-15; FBIS-USR-94-129l and Konstantin Sorokin's review of the Russian Federation's formal military doctrine "Russia's Security in a Rapidly Changing World."Center for International Security and Arms Control, Report, 1994. Back.

Note 6: Quoted in Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky,The New World Order (Chathan, New Jersey, 1996): 88 Back.

Note 7: Vilia Gel'bras, Rossia i Kitai: Voprosy sobiraniia geoekonomicheskikh prostranstv," Polis-politicheskiie issledovanie 1995: 6: 32.  Back.

Note 8: Status Report on Nuclear Weapons Fissile Material and Export Controls: Nuclear Successor States of the Soviet Union Number 5, March, 1998. Back.

Note 9: Press reports claim that Aum Shinrikiyo has over 16,000 adherents in Russia and funds over $1 billion. At the same time, cutti g-edge virologists and other researchers from Soviet-era BW programs have reportedly received only spradic and indeaute pay and pension support. See A. J. Venter, "Keeping the lid on germ warfare," International Defese Review 1 May 1988  Back.

Note 10: For a balanced assessment, see Phil Williams, "Hysteria, Complacency, and Russian Organized Crime," Royal Institution of International Affairs, October 1996.  Back.

Note 11: Russia and Sweden signed a protocoll concerning the nuclear waste in and rotting nclear subds in July. The MAYAK complex has reportedly leaked five times more radoactive isotopes Strontium 90 and caesium 137 than all radioactivity from same isooltoipes from all the world's 500 atmospheric nuclear tests, the Chernobuyl accident, and the Sellafield nuclear plant put together, See New Scientist Dec 6, 1997; On the chemical weapons dumps, see the articles by : David Hoffman in the Washigton Post 8/16 and 8/17 1998.  Back.

---

Note i: Gel'bras, "Rossia i kitai," 32. Back.

Note ii: Former Defense Minster Pavel Grachev even claimed that "persons of Chinese nationality are conquering Russia by peaceful means." Quoted in Akaha, "Russia in Asia in 1995," 106. Back.

Note iii: Cf. Trush, "Russian Arms Sales to Beijing," with Felgengauer, "Russia and the Conflict in the Taiwan Strait." Back.

Note iv: See James Clay Moltz , "Regional Tensions in the Russian-Chinese Rapprochement," Asia Survey XXXV: 6: 512-527.  Back.