Putin's Russia Acts Like a Great Power Again

Russia's military occupation of parts of neighboring Georgia has sent a decisive signal that the Kremlin intends to behave as great powers traditionally have done—forcefully pursuing their interests where they can.

Moscow may now pull back troops to the separatist Georgian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, if not yet all the way back to Russia. But the display of Russian power will likely have lasting consequences for relations between the principal heir to the Soviet legacy and the United States.

This does not necessarily portend a new Cold War. That wouldn't be in Russia's interests, given its economic engagement with the West, and today's Russia has neither the ideological presence nor the appeal that the old Soviet Union held in some parts of the world. Practically, Moscow has serious constraints on its ability to project military power globally, though it still fields a sizable nuclear arsenal.

What has changed is that Russia, impoverished after the Soviet breakup, has been re-energized by state-encouraged nationalism and booming oil and natural gas revenues. Free of the need for Western largesse and with its military machine on the mend, Moscow enjoys a freedom of action that would have seemed unlikely when President Bush took office in 2001.

U.S. officials acknowledge a new perspective. "My view is that the Russians—and I would say principally Prime Minister [Vladimir] Putin—are interested in reasserting not only Russia's great power or superpower status but in reasserting Russia's traditional spheres of influence," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said recently. "Everyone is going to be looking at Russia through a different set of lenses as we look ahead."

Graham Allison, a former Pentagon official and defense thinker who heads the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, sees a pattern in Russia's moves on Georgia. "As a first approximation, this is consistent with the behavior of great powers," he says. As for Georgia, he adds, "A little guy attacking a big guy usually gets his nose broken."

The plunge in U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 may be particularly galling to Gates, who spent much of his early career as a CIA analyst on Soviet affairs. Likewise, his counterpart at the State Department, Condoleezza Rice, is trained as a Russia scholar and speaks Russian.

Rice has warned Moscow not to go deeper into Georgia and topple the pro-Western elected government led by Mikheil Saakashvili. She warns that today's Russia, which has forged stronger economic ties with the world, could not evade the consequences, as the USSR did after its infamous 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to quash a democratic opening there.

The precise interplay between Saakashvili's decision to send Georgian forces into pro-Russian South Ossetia and the Russian counterthrust is still being debated. But once underway, the Russian invasion dramatically symbolized an emboldened Kremlin. "They clearly want to demonstrate that Russia is back as a great power and should be taken seriously," says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center in Washington and a leading Russia-watcher.

Russia's willingness to risk international condemnation reflects a deeply felt set of resentments against the West—and the Bush administration in particular. The reigning, if disputed, narrative in Moscow is of a historically great power that was systematically humbled in its period of weakness by an overbearing U.S. government.

There are numerous elements to that narrative, and they date to the Clinton as well as the Bush administration. Among them: NATO's expansion into parts of the former Soviet Union over Russian objections; the U.S.-led war on fellow Slavs in Serbia in defense of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; U.S. support for the prodemocracy "color revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine; Bush's withdrawal from the landmark antiballistic missile treaty to allow for missile defenses that could handicap Russia; and the U.S. plan to build elements of a missile defense shield in the Czech Republic and Poland.

U.S. officials say the missile defense project is a response to a future Iranian nuclear missile threat to the United States and its allies and is not a shield against Russia. But the Russians see it differently. Last week, they harshly denounced a newly signed U.S. accord with Poland that will have the U.S. deploy a battery of Patriot air-defense missiles.

To top that off, Russian authorities are impatient with what they regard as years of moralistic American hectoring about creeping Russian authoritarianism.

U.S. aid and training for the Georgian Army, coupled with the anti-Russian taunts of what Moscow regards as an American client, intensified the Kremlin's disaffection. Moscow also objected to U.S. backing this year for an independent Kosovo and an effort to put Georgia and Ukraine on track for future NATO membership.

It was not just Putin who accumulated these grudges. "There is a public consensus that Russia was humiliated," says Simes. "They felt they had very little to lose."

In Washington, the impressively high-level expertise on Russia seemed to do little to forestall a crisis.

Bush has consistently seemed far more comfortable with promoting the principles of democracy, freedom, and free markets than he has with the less lofty business of calibrating foreign policy to respond to Russia's predictable interests. "The preaching and perceptions belie a naiveté, even a degree of delusion" about the building Russian-Georgian tensions, Allison argues.

The problem extends to the top echelons of the administration, according to Simes, who says that Rice neglected the early, internal warnings from senior American diplomats that any Georgian move into South Ossetia—such as what happened two weeks ago—would trigger a major Russian response.

Several factors are making it more difficult to craft an effective U.S. response. Talking with Moscow has grown more complicated because there is a new president, Dmitry Medvedev, but Putin, the former president and current prime minister, is still calling the shots.

The old pattern of disagreements between administration hard-liners and moderates has also reappeared, with get-tough advocates from Vice President Cheney's office said to be favoring moves to bolster Georgia's defenses.

Though the U.S. hard-liners may place stock in efforts to isolate Russia, the Europeans are mostly skeptical. They tend to see Saakashvili as impetuous and partially to blame for the current crisis, and they see no good alternative to continuing to engage even a surly Russia. Despite Russia's aggressiveness, the European sense is that their nations must share a continent with Russia and will continue to depend on it for energy.

Moreover, Russia could respond to pressure by making trouble on a variety of fronts for the Bush administration and its successor. Washington will need Moscow to prod and cajole Tehran if the collective effort to restrain Iran's nuclear drive is to succeed. The same need holds, to some degree, in regard to attempts to denuclearize North Korea. Russia is an important link in the chain of international cooperation against terrorism and organized crime, and it has the capacity to buck up foes of the United States from Serbia to Syria to Venezuela. A sale of sophisticated Russian weaponry to Hugo Chavez's Venezuela or to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran would create significant security issues for the next administration.

Says Allison, "The relationship is going to be dragged back into the reality zone." An angry Russia, it seems, has many more unpleasant cards to play, if it chooses to serve as a spoiler.