The wider sins of omission are really about opportunity costs, about the road not taken. How might things have been different for America’s role in the world and for the Middle East if we had not invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003? What if we had tried to harness the massive outpouring of international goodwill and shared concern after the terrible attacks of September 11 in a different—more constructive—direction?
The eighteen months between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were one of those hinge points in history, whose contours are easier to see today than they were at that uncertain and emotional time. If we had avoided the debacle in Iraq, and instead projected American power and purpose more wisely, it seems obvious today that American interests and values would have been better served. That would have required a real attempt at coercive diplomacy in Iraq—not the one we employed, which was long on coercion and short on diplomacy. That would also have required patience in our diplomacy and a readiness to share in its design and execution. Instead, we opted for the more immediate satisfactions of unilateral impulses and blunt force, and kept the sharing part to a minimum. It was beyond our power and imagination to remake the Middle East, with or without the overthrow of Saddam, but we could certainly make an already disordered region worse and further erode our leadership and influence. And we did.
6
Putin’s Disruptions: Managing Great Power Trainwrecks
VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS never been at a loss for tactical surprises, and he didn’t disappoint this time. Sitting in a hotel near Red Square, we waited for the Kremlin to summon us. Well acquainted with Putin’s penchant for one-upmanship, Secretary of State Condi Rice was relaxed and a little bemused as the first hour of delay stretched into a second. Her staff circled nervously, staring at their watches. The secretary was a pro, watching a Russian sports channel on television as she waited for Putin’s inevitable trick play. It finally came as we approached the third hour. We got the call, but Putin was no longer at the Kremlin. We’d have to travel forty minutes to his compound at Barvikha, on the outskirts of the city. Diplomatic Security didn’t like these kinds of surprises, but they had no choice. Rice shrugged. “Shall we?”
When we arrived, a presidential assistant escorted us to a lavishly appointed dining room. Arrayed around the long rectangular table, with Putin at its center, was nearly the entirety of Russia’s Security Council. With a sardonic half-smile, Putin said he thought Rice, as a student of Russian history, would appreciate the setting. This was the modern Politburo, the court of the new Russian tsar. The point was as subtle as Putin himself: Russia was back.
Putin greeted the secretary and explained that the occasion for the celebration was the birthdays of Igor Ivanov, the sixty-one-year-old Security Council secretary and former foreign minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, the forty-one-year-old first deputy prime minister. It was a jovial meal, punctuated by frequent vodka toasts and liberal resort to Ivanov’s supply of special reserve Georgian wine. Russia had recently embargoed a variety of Georgian products, but Ivanov, whose mother still lived in Tbilisi, evidently had a dispensation from the tsar.
Sitting across from Putin, Rice held her own. Putin played the instigator, poking and prodding about the war in Iraq, the prisoners in Guantanamo, and other unpleasant topics. Sergey Ivanov, the urbane defense minister, piled on at one point with a few acerbic comments about Ukraine, where the afterglow of the Orange Revolution in 2004 was quickly fading. “How’s your beacon of democracy looking now?” he asked.
After dinner, Putin invited Secretary Rice to a separate sitting room. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and I joined them in front of a roaring fire. Putin and Rice got straight to business. Rice raised a couple of concerns about the ongoing negotiations over Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Putin showed off his mastery of the dreary details of poultry imports and food safety standards, but seemed bored by it all. His mood changed abruptly when the secretary raised Georgia, cautioning the Russians to avoid escalation of frictions with President Mikheil Saakashvili over the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Standing up in front of the fireplace, Putin wagged his index finger and grew testy. “If Saakashvili uses force in South Ossetia, which we are convinced he is preparing to do, that would be a grave mistake, and the Georgian people would suffer the most. If he wants war, he will get it.”
Rice stood at this point too, giving no ground to Putin and looming several inches taller than him in her heels. She repeated the risks for U.S.-Russian relations if there was conflict in Georgia. Having to look up at Rice hardly improved Putin’s attitude. “Saakashvili is nothing more than a puppet of the United States,” he said. “You need to pull back the strings before there’s trouble.” Gesturing toward the dining room next door, he added, “I’m going to tell you something that no one in there knows yet. If Georgia causes bloodshed in Ossetia, I will have no alternative to recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and responding with force.” The conversation gradually deescalated, and Putin and Rice sat back down. Putin was exasperated, but concluded calmly, “We could talk for ages about this, but that’s the point I want you to understand. If Saakashvili starts something, we will finish it.”1
Having made his point, Putin excused himself to say good night to the birthday celebrants. He passed the baton to Sergey Ivanov, who reinforced Putin’s message on Georgia. It hardly needed reinforcing. Putin’s pugnacity left an impression. This was not the Russia I had left a decade earlier, flat on its back and in strategic retreat. Surfing on historically high oil prices and nursing fifteen years of grievances, convinced that the United States had taken advantage of Russia’s moment of historical weakness and was bent on keeping it down, Putin was determined to show that he was making Russia great again and we better get used to it.
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SERVING AS U.S. ambassador in Moscow was my dream job. Russia can be a hard place, especially for American diplomats, but the relationship between Russia and the United States mattered as few others did. Still struggling with its post-Soviet identity crisis, and a considerably less potent player on the international stage than the Soviet Union had been, Russia remained a force to be reckoned with. Its nuclear capacity was formidable. Its hydrocarbons were a significant factor in the global economy. Its geographic sprawl and history gave it influence across a range of international issues. Its diplomatic skill and permanent membership on the UN Security Council meant that it would have a say.
Having lived through Russia’s complicated post-Soviet transition, I was fascinated by the great historical canvas on which Russians were now trying to paint their future. Often as preoccupied with their sense of exceptionalism as Americans were, they sought a distinctive political and economic system, which would safeguard the individual freedoms and economic possibilities denied them under Communism, and ensure them a place among the handful of world powers. I liked Russians, respected their culture, enjoyed their language, and was endlessly fascinated by the tangled history of U.S.-Russian diplomacy.
Following in the footsteps of Kennan and Bohlen, and the remarkable ambassadors who succeeded them, was a daunting challenge. It almost didn’t happen. Late in my tenure as assistant secretary for near eastern affairs, Colin Powell had asked what I hoped to do next. I told him that I’d love to go back to Moscow, and he said he’d do everything he could to make that happen. He and Rich Armitage recommended me to the White House as the career Foreign Service candidate. There was precedent for noncareer appointees to Moscow, but they were the exception, and there didn’t appear to be any such contenders as the transition to President Bush’s second term unfolded in the winter of 2004–5. Nevertheless, several months passed without any decision, and I began to wonder about my chances, especially given all the reservations that my colleagues and I had expressed in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
In January, shortly after succeeding Powell as secretary of state, Rice approached me about ser
ving as ambassador to Israel instead, making a strong case that she intended to make a priority of the Arab-Israeli peace process during her tenure. I was intrigued, but burned out on Middle East issues after four long years in NEA, and not enthusiastic about relitigating many of the same policy disagreements with many of the same personalities. I decided to push hard for Moscow, and Rice agreed to back Powell’s recommendation. Eventually, the White House approved my nomination in the spring of 2005. I was confirmed by the Senate in July, and Lisa and the girls and I arrived in Moscow in early August.
Spaso House, named after the quiet little square on which it sits in central Moscow, was the immense neoclassical residence of the American ambassador and our new home. We often reminded our daughters not to get too used to its proportions or grandeur. The house we owned in Washington could easily fit into Spaso’s Great Hall. The massive chandelier hanging from the two-story-high ceiling, with its dozens of crystals weighing twenty-five pounds apiece, left us in chronic fear that a guest would be impaled and U.S.-Russian relations imperiled. Beyond the Great Hall was the State Dining Room, with a table that seemed as long as a bowling lane, and, past that, a huge ballroom. A long gallery ran around the second floor of the house overlooking the Great Hall, with a series of bedrooms with twenty-foot ceilings, and a small family kitchen and dining room. In the basement, there was a much bigger kitchen and a labyrinth of storerooms, staff quarters, and mysterious passageways.
I never tired of legendary Spaso stories. One party in 1935, on the eve of the great purge trials, attracted most of the Soviet leadership save for Stalin. Few of the senior officials on the guest list that evening survived. Featuring a variety of acts from the Moscow circus, the party became the model for the famous ball scene in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The best act was accidental—when a trainer put a rubber nipple on a champagne bottle and fed a baby bear liberally, with predictably chaotic consequences. In the early 1950s, Kennan amused himself during his brief and lonely tenure as ambassador by reading Russian poetry aloud late at night in the darkened Great Hall. He assumed that his habit would only confuse his Soviet minders, who were of course recording virtually everything that was said in Spaso. Little had changed on the surveillance front by the time we arrived, and Lisa and I always assumed that the only way to have a private conversation in Spaso was to either go for a walk in the garden or turn on the radio to mask our voices.
We had a busy residence during those three years, welcoming tens of thousands of guests. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other cabinet officers came to private lunches. We hosted three thousand Russians for the Fourth of July. During the two hundredth anniversary of U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations in 2007, we held a series of events, including jazz concerts, films, lectures, and even a fashion show with Ralph Lauren. We celebrated space cooperation with astronauts and cosmonauts. I especially enjoyed sports diplomacy—bringing the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, the Davis Cup tennis team, and the U.S. men’s junior hockey team to Spaso and Russia. We even hosted Lizzy’s senior prom, which conveniently allowed me—and my security detail—to keep her date within our sights for the duration of the evening. Lisa and I worked hard to include people from across generations and Russian society, from prominent Kremlin officials to political oppositionists and human rights activists. Barely a day went by without some event or reception. Spaso House was a huge asset, and we put it to full use.
The embassy itself was now operating out of the new chancery building, which had stood empty and forlorn during our previous tour, and whose top floors were now secure enough for classified work. The staff was still one of the largest in the world, with nearly 1,800 employees, including about 450 Americans, divided across Moscow and our consulates in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Vladivostok.
With an exceptional team behind me and a fair amount of leeway from Washington, I threw myself into my new role. Real progress would be hard to come by. The Russia policy knot mostly just seemed to get tighter, with Washington increasingly preoccupied with troubles in the Middle East, and Moscow consumed by its grievances and captivated by its newfound ability to do something about them.
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WHEN I LEFT Moscow after my first tour in 1996, I was worried about the resurgence of a Russia at once cocky, cranky, aggrieved, and insecure. I had no idea it would happen so quickly, or that Vladimir Putin would emerge over the next decade as the extreme embodiment of that peculiarly Russian combination of qualities.
Neither process moved in a straight line. Boris Yeltsin had stumbled repeatedly in his second term, lurching from a desperate financial crisis in 1998 to another war in Chechnya and diplomatic embarrassment in Kosovo. Late in his term, with his health failing, and anxious to protect his family and legacy, he anointed his successor, a man who had in the span of a few years vaulted from gray anonymity in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office to a senior position in the Kremlin, leadership of the FSB, and finally the prime ministry. Putin had an unremarkable career in the KGB, but a string of St. Petersburg patrons helped him up the ladder, and he eventually earned Yeltsin’s trust. He seemed in many ways the anti-Yeltsin—half a generation younger, sober, ruthlessly competent, hardworking, and hard-faced, he offered promise for Russians tired of Yeltsin-era chaos and disorder.
Putin’s most striking characteristic was his passion for control—founded on an abiding distrust of most of those around him, whether in the Russian elite or among foreign leaders. Some of that had to do with his professional training; some had to do with his tough upbringing in postwar Leningrad. The only surviving child of parents scarred by the brutalities of World War II—his father badly wounded in the defense of Leningrad, his mother nearly dying of starvation during the siege—Putin shaped his worldview in urban schoolyards, where, as he put it, “the weak get beat.” He learned to fend for himself, mastering judo and its techniques for gaining leverage against stronger opponents. However indifferent his record had been in university and the KGB, he didn’t lack self-confidence. Nor did he doubt his capacity for reading his opponents and exploiting their vulnerabilities. He could charm as well as bully, and he was always coldly calculating.
The Russia that he inherited was full of troubles. In addition to the apparent political challenges that came with a crumbling state, the economy had descended into turmoil. After the August 1998 economic crisis, in which the stock market crashed, the government defaulted, and the ruble collapsed, unemployment and inflation soared, GDP contracted by nearly 5 percent, and oil production dropped to half its Soviet-era high. A rapid rise in hydrocarbon prices and aggressive economic reforms helped turn the Russian economy around during Putin’s first term as president. By the summer of 2005, early in his second term, Russia’s annual growth rate was averaging 7 percent, and unemployment had dropped by nearly half. Economic progress fueled Putin’s popularity and gave him space to impose his brand of political order. He tamed the oligarchs by brokering an implicit deal—if they stayed out of his business, he’d stay out of theirs. If they waded into politics, he’d wade into their pockets. He made a brutal object lesson of the billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, seizing his oil and gas company, Yukos, and sending him to prison. Others, like Boris Berezovsky, his former patron, were hounded into exile.
Putin’s obsession with order and control, and restoring the power of the Russian state, was abundantly clear and widely popular. His formula was straightforward: Revive the state and its authority over politics, media, and civil society; regain control over Russia’s natural resources to fuel economic growth; and reverse nearly two decades of strategic retreat, rebuild Russian prerogatives as a great power, and reassert Russia’s entitlement to a sphere of influence in its own neighborhood. As I put it in a cable to Secretary Rice early in my tenure, “Uncomfortable personally with political competition and openness, [Putin] has never been a democratizer.”2
Putin’s view of relations w
ith the United States was infused with suspicion, but early on he tested with President Bush a form of partnership suited to his view of Russia’s interests. He was the first foreign leader to call Bush after 9/11, and saw an opening through which Russia could become a partner in the Global War on Terrorism. He thought the war on terror would give Russia a better frame in which to operate than the “new world order” that had dominated U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War. The implicit terms of the deal Putin sought included a common front against terrorism, with Russia backing the United States against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Washington backing Moscow’s tough tactics against Chechen rebels. Moreover, the United States would grant Russia special influence in the former Soviet Union, with no encroachment by NATO beyond the Baltics, and no interference in Russia’s domestic politics. Putin quickly set out to show that he could deliver on his end of the presumed bargain. In the face of considerable misgivings from his own military and security services, he facilitated U.S. military access and transit to Afghanistan through the Central Asian states.
As Putin quickly learned, however, this kind of transaction was never in the cards. He fundamentally misread American interests and politics. From Washington’s view, there was no desire—and no reason—to trade anything for Russian partnership against al-Qaeda. We didn’t have to purchase Russian acquiescence in something that was so much in its own interest, and we certainly didn’t need to discard long-standing bipartisan priorities and partnerships in Europe to buy Putin’s favor. He also misread American behavior, tending to see contrary American actions as part of some careful, duplicitous conspiracy to undermine him, not as the product of an administration that was desperately consumed with its response to 9/11, indifferent to Putin’s calculus, and generally disinclined to concede or pay much attention to a power in strategic decline.
The Back Channel Page 22