The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 29 Similarly, everyone underesti- mated the difficulty in establishing a viable democracy in a society where it had never existed before. Institu- tions were created and elections were held, but a genuine democratic culture—founded on toleration, compromise and rule of law—could not be created overnight. Both Russian reformers and their Western supporters overpromised and underperformed. Largely for domestic political reasons, U.S. administrations exaggerated the size and significance of American assistance. Russians received a lot of advice—almost all of it well- meaning, and some of it good—but too much of it amounted to applying outside models to stubborn Russian reality. Missed Opportunities In retrospect, it also seems clear that the United States missed opportunities to engage with the new Russian authori- ties in areas of potential trouble. Washington had little choice but to back embattled Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1993, when he was compelled to suppress an armed uprising by hard-line parliamentary opponents. But Yeltsin never recov- ered, emotionally or politically, from the trauma of having to send tanks into the street to shell fellow Russians, and in subsequent years his actions became increasingly erratic. In 1993 Washington turned a blind eye when Yeltsin intro- duced a much-needed new constitution through a question- able vote count. It did the same in 1996, when dubious deals that effectively turned over large portions of the Russian economy to the new class of rich Russian “oligarchs” provided funds to help Yeltsin eke out a victory in that year’s presiden- tial election. The result associated U.S. policy with a govern- ment that many Russians saw as responsible for the poverty and turmoil of Russia in the 1990s. In the field of national security, the United States could never decide whether its primary objective was to help cre- ate a democratic and confident Russia as a full partner in the post-Cold War world or to build up the former Soviet states as independent counters to a possibly resurgent Moscow. The United States ended up trying to do both and accomplishing neither well. The two key security challenges the West faced in the decade after the Soviet collapse were dealing with the nuclear legacy and devising security architecture to meet the chal- lenges of the post-Cold War environment. The United States and Russia engaged effectively in the nuclear arena, where they had a clear common interest. Numbers of nuclear weapons were dramatically reduced, and the two countries cooperated for many years to enhance security for Russian nuclear weapons—at least until 2013, when Putin canceled the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, also known as the Nunn-Lugar Program, which was the foundation of this effort. On security architecture, the Western response was to extend the existing Cold War system of military and economic alliances eastward, rejecting—probably with good reason—the alternative model of creating a new system. It has become an article of faith in Putin’s Russia that the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and some former Soviet republics violated commitments made during the negotiations on German unification. The historical record provides no support for these beliefs, but the question remains whether NATO expansion was wise. NATO expansion by year. WIKIMEDIACOMMONS/IMAGEBYKPALION