The Russian presidential elections are weeks away, and notwithstanding the surprising success—and hurried disqualification—of an anti-war candidate, the outcome is foreordained: Six more years of Vladimir Putin. The impending reelection of the man U.S. President Joe Biden called a “murderous dictator” and “pure thug” raises the question of the Biden administration’s Russia policy. Does the United States want a democratized Russia? Does Biden hope for Putin’s ouster? Without Putin, would Russia’s alliance with the People’s Republic of China crumble? Would the new axis between North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia dissolve?
The Russian presidential elections are weeks away, and notwithstanding the surprising success—and hurried disqualification—of an anti-war candidate, the outcome is foreordained: Six more years of Vladimir Putin. The impending reelection of the man U.S. President Joe Biden called a “murderous dictator” and “pure thug” raises the question of the Biden administration’s Russia policy. Does the United States want a democratized Russia? Does Biden hope for Putin’s ouster? Without Putin, would Russia’s alliance with the People’s Republic of China crumble? Would the new axis between North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia dissolve?
We have no idea. Because the Biden administration has been strangely reticent on the question of Russia’s leadership, and, indeed, the relationship it wants with Russia overall. What is the Biden administration’s Russia policy? Does it even have one?
In short, the answer is: not really.
Odd as the missing Russia policy sounds, the reality is that since the end of World War II, its absence has been the norm rather than the exception. It’s not that the United States ignored global communism, captive nations, or the threat posed by the Soviet Union; rather, throughout much of the Cold War, the aim was the consolidation of the George Kennan-authored concept of containment, rather than the destruction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Containment implied the management of the Soviet problem; a true Russia policy would have gone beyond defending against the Kremlin’s predations to imagining a different future than communist tyranny.
For decades, U.S. policy focused on competing with the Soviets, not on achieving any particular outcome for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s successors. Nor was that especially odd, particularly in the shadow of two world wars that left tens of millions dead and wounded. If the Soviets wanted to keep on crushing their own, or even killing them—you will look in vain for a contemporaneous pronouncement from a U.S. leader on the question of the estimated 30 million dead at Stalin’s hands—that was the Kremlin’s business.
The United States and Europe, unified in the newly born NATO, were mostly focused on the fate of the Soviet Union’s captive nations in Eastern and Central Europe. Not so focused, mind you, that NATO would stand up in defense of either the Hungarians (1956) or the Czechs (1968) in their efforts to offload their Soviet overlords; but at the very least, interested.
Rather, the West was most energized in stemming the spread of Soviet communism and its proxy powers. Thus, the United States found itself engaged directly militarily in Korea and Vietnam, with much of the rest of the world sorted into the bipolar Cold War construct. And though the battle against the Soviet Union had ideological elements—freedom vs. tyranny, democracy vs. communism—the foundation of U.S. policy was strategic. For its first 40 years, the Cold War was much less about values and much more about the cold calculations deemed necessary to stem the Red tide.
Various presidents tweaked U.S. policy: John F. Kennedy’s “flexible response,” Richard Nixon’s détente, Jimmy Carter’s human rights-driven retreat from confrontation. But it was Ronald Reagan who represented the watershed in U.S. Cold War Russia policy. It was Reagan who labeled the USSR an “evil empire,” with emphasis on the morality-laden term “evil.” And it was Reagan who made the fundamental decision to take the battle to the Soviets the world over—in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and other nations hitherto mysterious to the vast mass of Americans.
Like his predecessors, Reagan’s doctrinal approach was driven less by specific ambitions about the shape of a future Russia and more by a desire to erode the Soviet Union’s power, reach, and ability to foster the global spread of communism. But much more than his predecessors, he recognized that the shape of a future Russia would dictate the security of both the United States and its allies as well as the people who lived under Soviet rule.
Among the first public references to a desired outcome for Russian governance came in Reagan’s address to the Soviet people broadcast over Voice of America in 1986:
Whenever there’s a restoration of those rights to a man or a woman [Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner], as has happened recently, it helps strengthen the foundations for trust and cooperation between our countries. And by the same token, whenever those rights are denied the foundation is seriously weakened. Much more can and should be done to strengthen that foundation. We welcome progress in this area as much as we welcome it in the effort to secure nuclear arms reduction. In fact, progress here and in all key areas of our relationship is essential if we are to build on this foundation.
More fundamentally, Reagan recast the question of balance-of-power politics for the first time since Winston Churchill declared the existence of the Iron Curtain. “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic,” Reagan told an aide in 1977, and repeated again during his presidency: “It is this: We win and they lose.”
In the end, the Soviets lost on a scale that likely would have shocked even Reagan. The Warsaw Pact, the captive Soviet Empire, Moscow’s fellow traveling nations—all crumbled into ashes more dramatically than almost anyone envisioned. And perhaps because of the wholly unexpected nature of that collapse, much of the West struggled to shape a new Russia approach appropriate to the “end of history.”
Again, it’s not that there weren’t components to a policy. Ex-Warsaw Pact nations were slowly welcomed into NATO. There were efforts at arms control and disarmament. There was a generic effort to support Russian evolution into a more normal country and even some consideration of U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance to Moscow. But since the end of the Cold War, there has been no vision for Russia—no coherent sense of a larger policy that drives the tactical decisions made every day.
Since the Clinton administration, the pattern has been the same: Grand hopes for the integration of Russia into the “community of nations,” and then a “reset” that inevitably regresses to the status quo ante. President Bill Clinton abandoned his initial Boris Yeltsin-centered Russia policy—including qualified pledges not to expand NATO—but was soon forced by circumstance and Russia’s own choices into NATO expansion, sanctions against Russian entities, and bombing Russia’s ally, Serbia.
President George W. Bush infamously saw into Putin’s soul, cementing a friendship solid enough that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Moscow facilitated the resupply of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But the end of the Bush administration brought disillusionment, with the president pulling a nuclear cooperation agreement with Russia over intervention in the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazie in Georgia.
Ditto, almost literally, President Barack Obama, whose approach to Russia began with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton embarrassingly presenting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red “reset” button and ended with strict sanctions on Russia over its 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea.
Even President Donald Trump, the putative Russian agent who entered the White House with détente-oriented hopes and dreams, ended up implementing a strict sanctions regime against Putin, though the former president’s recent statements—and his recent invitation for Russia to invade NATO members shorting their “dues” to the alliance—may indicate a radical shift ahead for the United States. But during his term in office, Trump successfully bullied NATO members into larger defense budgets and downsized the Russian diplomatic presence in the United States over the Kremlin’s 2018 poisoning of defected Russian double agent Sergei Skripal (a downsizing that remains in force, and is even greater today)—a remarkable deterioration in bilateral relations that has only worsened since Biden’s election and Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
So, is this post-Cold War history a tale of good intentions, good policy, and regrettable outcomes? Not really.
There should be little doubt that every U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson hoped to see a free and democratic Russia—or, at the very minimum, a normal Russia that set aside imperial ambitions. But hope is not a foreign policy. And the actual policies in place, particularly since the end of the Cold War and the demise of the concept of mutually assured destruction, have little to do with Russia’s internal policies and much to do with its external relations. Even Obama’s reset was more about “important areas to discuss with the Russians” and less about the future of Russia itself.
The core problem is that Russia’s internal situation and its foreign policy are inextricably intertwined. Dictators with visions of world domination or of reconstituting the greatness of the Russian Empire of yesteryear have long shaped the Kremlin’s choices, with devastating consequences around the world. Absent a specific policy for Russia, U.S. policy will remain reactive, with constant tactical adjustments that merely manage the problem.
Isolationists and realists will inevitably argue that putting in place a long-term pro-democracy policy for Russia is little more than a neoconservative prescription for endless and inconclusive U.S. meddling. But this is a false choice. Absent a stable Kremlin, the United States and its allies will be forced into a rinse-and-repeat cycle of confrontation with Moscow’s leadership. Now it’s over Ukraine. Previously, it was over Crimea, Georgia, and Syria. There is no reason to believe the cycle will change if U.S. Russia policy remains the same.
The place to begin is a new declarative policy in favor of freedom in Russia. This means exerting much more effort to support the Russian opposition—not with money or arms, but with Washington’s “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval. It means Reagan-style elevation of the issue of human rights in Russia, more aggressive information warfare and propaganda, and, yes, ensuring that Russia loses in Ukraine.
It should also mean an end to punitive policies that ultimately unite Russia’s oligarchs behind Putin. Right now, those who have enriched themselves with the Kremlin’s blessing are having their boats and villas and bank accounts expropriated or frozen. One need not have any sympathy for these thieves to understand that lumping their fate with Putin’s only consolidates his foundation of support. Rather, it is Russia’s money that should be in our sights. The Kremlin has $300 billion in foreign reserves in foreign banks. That money should be garnished to repay damages and underwrite the rebuilding of Ukraine.
If Russia loses in Ukraine—and its loss must be central to NATO policy—the humiliation will be an albatross around Putin’s neck. But even in the event of that loss, the Biden administration (like many of its predecessors) has no policy in place to exploit Putin’s failure. Needless to say, neither does the Republican Party.
If the policy is “we win, you lose,” what will Putin’s loss look like? Will Washington be satisfied to see another ruthless kleptocrat in his place? A Russian nationalist? Or is the U.S. aim to see Russia’s fearless dissidents—think Alexei Navalny or Vladimir Kara-Murza—lead a once-great nation toward freedom? If so, it’s time to make life more unpleasant for their jailers, Putin first among them. It’s time not simply to find and freeze his many assets, but to seize them. It’s time to advertise the details of his corruption to the Russian people via the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Counterarguments that this will only back Putin into a corner fail to appreciate that he has long been in that corner, painted in with his own strokes. Indeed, his only way out is to hope that once the question of Ukraine is resolved, he will be able to reenter the community of nations, with all forgotten in the hopes of yet another reset. But no reset will stick absent fundamental change in Moscow. It’s time to orient ourselves toward facilitating that change.
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