Accordingly, the process of widening Europe and enlarging the transatlantic security system is likely to move forward by deliberate stages. Assuming sustained American and Western European commitment, a speculative but cautiously realistic timetable for these stages might be the following:
- By 1999, the first new Central European members will have been admitted into NATO, though their entry into the EU will probably not happen before 2002 or 2003.
- In the meantime, the EU will initiate accession talks with the Baltic republics, and NATO will likewise begin to move forward on the issue of their membership as well as Romania’s, with their accession likely to be completed by 2005. At some point in this stage, the other Balkan states may likewise become eligible.
- Accession by the Baltic states might prompt Sweden and Finland also to consider NATO membership.
- Somewhere between 2005 and 2010, Ukraine, especially if in the meantime the country has made significant progress in its domestic reforms and has succeeded in becoming more evidently identified as a Central European country, should become ready for serious negotiations with both the EU and NATO.
In the meantime, it is likely that Franco-German-Polish collaboration within the EU and NATO will have deepened considerably, especially in the area of defense. That collaboration could become the Western core of any wider European security arrangements that might eventually embrace both Russia and Ukraine. Given the special geopolitical interest of Germany and Poland in Ukraine’s independence, it is also quite possible that Ukraine will gradually be drawn into the special Franco-German-Polish relationship. By the year 2010, Franco-German-Polish-Ukrainian political collaboration, engaging some 230 million people, could evolve into a partnership enhancing Europe’s geostrategic depth (see map above).
Whether the above scenario emerges in a benign fashion or in the context of intensifying tensions with Russia is of great importance. Russia should be continuously reassured that the doors to Europe are open, as are the doors to its eventual participation in an expanded transatlantic system of security and, perhaps at some future point, in a new trans-Eurasian system of security. To give credence to these assurances, various cooperative links between Russia and Europe—in all fields—should be very deliberately promoted. (Russia’s relationship to Europe, and the role of Ukraine in that regard, are discussed more fully in the next Chapter.)
If Europe succeeds both in unifying and in expanding and if Russia in the meantime undertakes successful democratic consolidation and social modernization, at some point Russia can also become eligible for a more organic relationship with Europe. That, in turn, would make possible the eventual merger of the transatlantic security system with a transcontinental Eurasian one. However, as a practical reality, the question of Russia’s formal membership will not arise for quite some time to come—and that, if anything, is yet another reason for not pointlessly shutting the doors to it.
To conclude: with the Europe of Yalta gone, it is essential that there be no reversion to the Europe of Versailles. The end of the division of Europe should not precipitate a step back to a Europe of quarrelsome nation-states but should be the point of departure for shaping a larger and increasingly integrated Europe, reinforced by a widened NATO and rendered even more secure by a constructive security relationship with Russia. Hence, America’s central geostrategic goal in Europe can be summed up quite simply: it is to consolidate through a more genuine transatlantic partnership the U.S. bridgehead on the Eurasian continent so that an enlarging Europe can become a more viable springboard for projecting into Eurasia the international democratic and cooperative order.
Chapter 4
The Black Hole
THE DISINTEGRATION LATE IN 1991 of the world’s territorially largest state created a “black hole” in the very center of Eurasia. It was as if the geopoliticians’ “heartland” had been suddenly yanked from the global map.
For America, this new and perplexing geopolitical situation poses a crucial challenge. Understandably, the immediate task has to be to reduce the probability of political anarchy or a reversion to a hostile dictatorship in a crumbling state still possessing a powerful nuclear arsenal. But the long-range task remains: how to encourage Russia’s democratic transformation and economic recovery while avoiding the reemergence of a Eurasian empire that could obstruct the American geostrategic goal of shaping a larger Euro-Atlantic system to which Russia can then be stably and safely related.
RUSSIA’S NEW GEOPOLITICAL SETTING
The collapse of the Soviet Union was the final stage in the progressive fragmentation of the vast Sino-Soviet Communist bloc that for a brief period of time matched, and in some areas even surpassed, the scope of Genghis Khan’s realm. But the more modern transcontinental Eurasian bloc lasted very briefly, with the defection by Tito’s Yugoslavia and the insubordination of Mao’s China signaling early on the Communist camp’s vulnerability to nationalist aspirations that proved to be stronger than ideological bonds. The Sino-Soviet bloc lasted roughly ten years; the Soviet Union about seventy.
However, even more geopolitically significant was the undoing of the centuries-old Moscow-ruled Great Russian Empire. The disintegration of that empire was precipitated by the general socioeconomic and political failure of the Soviet system—though much of its malaise was obscured almost until the very end by its systemic secrecy and self-isolation. Hence, the world was stunned by the seeming rapidity of the Soviet Union’s self-destruction.
In the course of two short weeks in December 1991, the Soviet Union was first defiantly declared as dissolved by the heads of its Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian republics, then formally replaced by a vaguer entity—called the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—embracing all of the Soviet republics but the Baltic ones; then the Soviet president reluctantly resigned and the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time from the tower of the Kremlin; and, finally, the Russian Federation—now a predominantly Russian national state of 150 million people—emerged as the de facto successor to the former Soviet Union, while the other republics—accounting for another 150 million people—asserted in varying degrees their independent sovereignty.
The collapse of the Soviet Union produced monumental geopolitical confusion. In the course of a mere fortnight, the Russian people—who, generally speaking, were even less forewarned than the outside world of the Soviet Union’s approaching disintegration—suddenly discovered that they were no longer the masters of a transcontinental empire but that the frontiers of Russia had been rolled back to where they had been in the Caucasus in the early 1800s, in Central Asia in the mid-1800s, and—much more dramatically and painfully—in the West in approximately 1600, soon after the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The loss of the Caucasus revived strategic fears of resurgent Turkish influence; the loss of Central Asia generated a sense of deprivation regarding the enormous energy and mineral resources of the region as well as anxiety over a potential Islamic challenge; and Ukraine’s independence challenged the very essence of Russia’s claim to being the divinely endowed standard-bearer of a common pan-Slavic identity.
The space occupied for centuries by the Tsarist Empire and for three-quarters of a century by the Russian-dominated Soviet Union was now to be filled by a dozen states, with most (except for Russia) hardly prepared for genuine sovereignty and ranging in size from the relatively large Ukraine with its 52 million people to Armenia with its 3.5 million. Their viability seemed uncertain, while Moscow’s willingness to accommodate permanently to the new reality was similarly unpredictable. The historic shock suffered by the Russians was magnified by the fact that some 20 million Russian-speaking people were now inhabitants of foreign states dominated politically by increasingly nationalistic elites determined to assert their own identities after decades of more or less coercive Russification.
The collapse of the Russian Empire created a power void in the very heart of Eurasia. Not only was there weakness and confusion in the newly independent states, but in Russia itself, the upheaval produced a massive systemic crisis, especially as the political upheaval was accompanied by the simultaneous attempt to undo the old Soviet socioeconomic model. The national trauma was made worse by Russia’s military involvement in Tajikistan, driven by fears of a Muslim takeover of that newly independent state, and was especially heightened by the tragic, brutal, and both economically and politically very costly intervention in Chechnya. Most painful of all, Russia’s international status was significantly degraded, with one of the world’s two superpowers now viewed by many as little more than a Third World regional power, though still possessing a significant but increasingly antiquated nuclear arsenal.
The geopolitical void was magnified by the scale of Russia’s social crisis. Three-quarters of a century of Communist rule had inflicted unprecedented biological damage on the Russian people. A very high proportion of its most gifted and enterprising individuals were killed or perished in the Gulag, in numbers to be counted in the millions. In addition, during this century the country also suffered the ravages of World War I, the killings of a protracted civil war, and the atrocities and deprivations of World War II. The ruling Communist regime imposed a stifling doctrinal orthodoxy, while isolating the country from the rest of the world. Its economic policies were totally indifferent to ecological concerns, with the result that both the environment and the health of the people suffered greatly. According to official Russian statistics, by the mid-1990s only about 40 percent of newborns came into the world healthy, while roughly one-fifth of Russian first graders suffered from some form of mental retardation. Male longevity had declined to 57.3 years, and more Russians were dying than were being born. Russia’s social condition was, in fact, typical of a middle-rank Third World country.
One cannot overstate the horrors and tribulations that have befallen the Russian people in the course of
