The Foreign Service Journal, November 2014

22 NOVEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL PREVENTIVE DIPLOMACY James E. Goodby, currently Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, retired from the Foreign Service in 1989 with the rank of career minister. His diplomatic career included assignments as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (1974-1977) and Bureau of European Affairs (1977-1980), ambassador to Finland (1980-1981), vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks (1981-1983), and head of the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Confidence-Building Measures in Europe (1983-1985). In 1993 Ambassador Goodby was recalled to serve as chief negotiator for nuclear threat reduction agreements (1993-1994), special representative of the president for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons (1995-1996), and deputy to the special adviser to the president and Secretary of State for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (2000-2001). He is the author of At the Borderline of Armageddon: How American Presidents Managed the Atomic Bomb (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Europe Undivided (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998). The author thanks the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for the support provided to him during the initial research for this article while he was in residence at the Center as a Public Policy Fellow in 2005. The USSR is not coming back, but the United States must take a realistic approach to Russia, correctly framing the issues and wielding the tools best suited to strategic priorities. BY JAMES E . GOODBY COVER STORY pendence from Russia was not quite what he had in mind: “We would like to achieve synchronization of the pace and param- eters of reform processes underway in Russia and the other members of the CIS.” In other words, Moscow wanted a say in, if not a veto over, how fast political change took place in neighbor- ing states, and what form it would take. In the same speech, Putin made his famous comment: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century,” adding that “the epidemic of disintegra- tion [had now] infected Russia itself.” Putin’s domestic policies, his hard line in Chechnya and, later, in Georgia, and his regional diplomacy all testify to his belief that Russian pre-eminence in “post-Soviet space” is an indispensable element of the defense of V ladimir Putin announced his strategic doc- trine regarding “post-Soviet space,” as he calls the lands of the former Soviet Union, early in his first presidency and has stuck with it ever since. In a speech to the Rus- sian Federal Assembly on May 16, 2003, he declared: “We see the [Commonwealth of Independent States] area as the sphere of our strategic interests.” In his April 2005 speech to the same body, Putin called for unanimity within the Commonwealth of Independent States, hailing the World War II victory that unity had made possible. Though he did pay lip service to the independence of the CIS nations and their “international authority,” he hinted that inde- THE PUTINDOCTRINE AND