Cooperative Security Between the U.S. and Russia 1985-1994
By Leon V. Sigal

Cooperation has become the watchword in Washington since September 11, and for good reason. The United States cannot track, disrupt, or destroy the terrorist network that massacred Americans without help from strangers--intelligence, bases, and investigative work. Recognizing that going it alone won't work, the Bush administration has spurned advice from the unilateralist wing of the Republican Party, swallowed its campaign rhetoric, and embraced cooperative security. It has so far withstood pressure from Ariel Sharon and Likud supporters around Washington to whack Iraq, which is intended to break up the coalition. It has even made common cause with the chief sources, protectors, and sponsors of Al-Qaeda--Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. In Northeast Asia it has begun to heal its rift with China, much to dismay of some right-wing Republicans who are spoiling for a fight with Beijing over missile defense and Taiwan.

President Bush also wants help from Russia. The question is, will he cooperate with Russia in return? This question goes beyond the immediate issue of stopping Al-Qaeda. The main threat to the survival of the United States remains the spread of nuclear arms, and the principal danger comes from Russia, not Iraq or North Korea or Iran or Al-Qaeda.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the threat that nuclear war could arise out of a superpower conflict in Europe or elsewhere evaporated. Instead, new nuclear dangers came to the fore. They persist to this day. First and foremost is the danger of nuclear leakage: that a few bombs' worth of nuclear material, neither fully accounted for nor thoroughly secured, could be smuggled out of Russia. A second is the danger of nuclear accident because Russia lacks the capacity to maintain the thousands of warheads and launchers it has, especially its tactical warheads. Third is the danger of unauthorized nuclear use if Russia increasingly relies on nuclear forces to counter threats along its borders and maintains nuclear forces on hair-trigger alert. Fourth is the danger of a nuclear brain drain: with hundreds of nuclear scientists and technicians at the mercy of the market, some may be tempted to sell their know-how to the highest bidder.

Dealing with the new nuclear dangers in Russia should be the overriding foreign policy objective of the United States since 1989. It has not been.

The only way to reduce those dangers is to cooperate with Russia and see whether it reciprocates. That requires give as well as take. Cooperation cannot be limited to nuclear matters alone. It must be comprehensive and sustained. Yet, as my book Hang Separately documents, from the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power until now, American willingness to cooperate has been fitful at best. Failure to do so has cost us dearly.

The United States did little to help Gorbachev gain politburo acquiescence to a unified Germany in NATO or arrange an end of empire in Eastern Europe. Similarly, the United States failed to give Gorbachev the political cover he sought for his retreat from Afghanistan--an international agreement on Afghanistan, backing for an internal political settlement there, or cessation of the U.S. supply of arms to the Afghan resistance. Instead President Reagan and Bush, with bipartisan support in Congress, kept up the pressure throughout 1987, 1988, and 1989, paving the way for the eventual triumph of the Taliban.

The Bush administration also rejected a "grand bargain"--timely aid to speed Russia's transformation from communism to political pluralism and freer markets--and was even slow to deliver aid for controlling loose nukes.

Only in the Persian Gulf did the United States cooperate. In assembling the winning coalition against Iraq, President Bush pledged a serious effort to make peace in the Middle East and a peace conference to include the Soviet Union as a participant.

When the United States tried cooperative security, as in the Gulf or in disarming Ukraine, it worked. It also proved a far less costly way to attain our national interests than coercion. Yet the U.S. has not tried cooperation in any comprehensive or sustained way.

As with Putin today, skepticism about Gorbachev's aims and his chances of achieving them reigned supreme among the conservative realists who held office the Reagan and Bush years. It also prevailed in the foreign policy establishment.

Ronald Reagan was a notable exception. Neither realist nor conservative, he was a true believer who thought of the world in ideological terms, as a contest between freedom and communism. By 1986, over the opposition of most administration officials, he was ready to declare victory over the "evil empire" and cooperate with Gorbachev in disarming. In an exchange of letters culminating at Reykjavik, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed on deep cuts and eventual elimination of nuclear arms, only to have others in his administration prevail on him to reverse course.

Like Reagan, George Shultz understood that nuclear radicalism made sense for American security in the post-cold war era. Shultz's reflections are worth recalling: "In light of the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union and the attendant concerns about the location and control of strategic and other nuclear weapons, I am even more convinced of the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's objectives. How much safer we would all have been if those arsenals had been declining in magnitude in a manner where we could have seen firsthand just what was taking place."

Reagan's successor had enough political leeway to follow in his footsteps, but if Ronald Reagan was a nuclear radical, George Bush was a nuclear conservative. He thought Reagan had gone too far in questioning deterrence, in valuing defense over offense, and in contemplating nuclear abolition. He wanted to restore the old nuclear verities, and he was in no hurry to negotiate with Mikhail Gorbachev, who, like Reagan, seemed all too eager to call those verities into question.

The most widely accepted of those verities, however untrue, was that American nuclear arms offset a Soviet advantage in conventional forces. That motivated the Bush administration's ill-timed campaign for a new short-range missile to replace the nuclear-armed Lance in Europe. That was also its rationale for trying to reduce Soviet conventional forces first while slowing START to a standstill. With the unilateral Soviet withdrawal on the verge of freeing Eastern Europe and calling into question the need for NATO, retaining a firm U.S. foothold in Europe was uppermost in President Bush's mind. Trying to hold the line against precipitous American withdrawal, the administration adopted a decidedly one-sided negotiating position in CFE, insisting on retaining more troops than the Soviets and making an accord more difficult to reach.

As a result, START was delayed. The treaty was not signed until July 31, 1991. It was too late. The centrifugal forces unleashed in the Soviet Union were already loosening central control over its vast and dispersed nuclear infrastructure, a risk we still live with. "The Soviet Union as we have known it is finished," a November 1990 national intelligence estimate warned. "The Soviet Union is, at a minimum, headed toward a smaller and looser union." The estimate did not rule out "a period of anarchy." Yet an N.S.C. study group chaired by Condoleezza Rice did not draw the obvious implications for nuclear arms.

In 1990, capitalizing on the army's eagerness to rid of its nuclear arms and the navy's desire to remove them from surface ships, then J.C.S. chairman Colin Powell proposed unilateral withdrawal of all but a few dozen U.S. tactical nuclear arms based overseas. To his credit, President Bush accepted Powell's recommendation over the objections of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz. But the withdrawal, scheduled for early August 1990, was put off when Iraq invaded Kuwait. It was not carried out until a few weeks after the August 1991 coup. Moscow reciprocated. Even today many missiles armed with thousands of nuclear warheads remain on hair-trigger, ready to launch at a moment's notice.

Under President Clinton, the United States resisted deeper cuts in nuclear arms, cuts that Russia was--and still is--ready to accept. Instead, it adopted what it called the "hedge strategy" against the remote possibility of resumption of the cold war. Congress was grudging in providing aid for Russian disarming. The administration even wanted to circumvent Russia with oil and gas pipelines, crimping its source of hard currency. Washington's rush to expand NATO eastward in violation of understandings with Moscow, only fueled a reaction in Russia, making broader security cooperation politically precarious. The consequence is that today Americans still live under the shadow of a potential loss of nuclear control in Russia.

Benjamin Franklin's admonition to the thirteen American colonies on the day that the Declaration of Independence was signed applies with equal force to American relations with Russia today: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

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