Russia is back in the U.S. political spotlight in a way it hasn’t been since the Cold War. President Vladimir Putin is increasing Russia’s show of force around the globe – fanning the flames of the Syrian civil war as an ally to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, allegedly hacking the DNC’s emails and dropping them publicly on Wikileaks, and recently threatening Ukraine with a weapons build-up in Crimea and military exercises miming the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
In response, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has withheld any condemnation, instead expressing admiration for the Russian leadership and suggesting greater cooperation. Trump’s support for Putin may be drummed up by his coterie of advisers who have extensive business ties to the country. But toning down the GOP’s traditionally hawkish policy toward Russia—as one witness claims the Trump team did at the GOP convention last month—reflects a longstanding policy disagreement within the party.
Republican foreign policy views toward Russia—beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War—reflect the conservatives’ three different schools of thinking: realism, liberal internationalism, and a hybrid of the two, conservative internationalism. Realists and internationalists see two very different Russias. One is a misguided, corrupt country that nonetheless shares with us the status of a developed, advanced superpower (or something close to that); the other is a hostile and fundamentally anti-American government that threaten the U.S., much as it did in the Cold War.
Realists are almost exclusively concerned with U.S. interests. This view corresponds nicely with Trump’s calls for “America first” and “winning again.” Most of America’s urgent problems—the rise of Islamist-inspired terrorism, failed states, containing the rise of China—would best be met, they claim, by working with Russia, which would make a strong partner in these circumstances.
The realist camp, sidelined by the GOP since the Nixon administration, sees Trump’s lack of foreign policy experience as an opportunity to make their case. Dimitri Simes, president of The Center for the National Interest, the most widely cited realist think tank, recently outlined a case for cooperation with Russia—an approach that is defined, above all, by avoiding confrontation. According to Simes, Russia isn’t seeking conflict but just authority over its geopolitical sphere of influence. As long as America respects that, it has nothing to fear and everything to gain. Russia is actually quite rational, and that disposition should be met with an equal dose of pragmatism.
According to Simes, Russia’s current state of affairs is the natural outcome of Western economic mismanagement in the 1990s, as well as NATO expansionism and “interventionism.” He claims NATO had no right to bring aboard Eastern Europe’s former Soviet satellite states in 2004. Furthermore, American interventions in the Balkans, Iraq, and Libya threatened Russia, because the West acted unilaterally.
Simes further contends that America’s unwillingness to cooperate with Russia on intelligence sharing has severely undermined its global war against terror. “The price” for failing to work with Russia against al Qaeda in 1999 was the attacks of September 11, 2001, he states. A reluctance to share intelligence also “enabled” the Tsarnaev brothers’ attack on the 2013 Boston Marathon.
Compare this argument with the 2012 statements of then Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, squarely in the internationalist mainstream, that Russia was our “number one geopolitical foe,” and that the country challenged us “time and time again” in the United Nations. Like the liberal and conservative internationalists who advised him, Romney saw the world as split between democracies (or aspiring democracies) and non-democracies; allies and adversaries, with Russia part of the latter group.
Liberal internationalists are focused on the dissemination of liberal values. These are the efforts Trump described as “foolishness and arrogance” in his foreign policy speech this April. Stemming from the post-Cold War 90s, liberal internationalists are influenced by the democratic peace theory—that democracies don’t go to war against one another—which ultimately leads them to actively promote it. Countries that snub liberal values get the proverbial stick. And for liberal internationalists, Russia deserves the stick more than most because of its sass and outright hostility toward liberal values.
For liberal internationalists, Russia’s autocratic maneuvers are enough to put the country on the black list. Putin has journalists imprisoned or murdered for criticizing his regime. He jails potential opponents on trumped up charges, such as Mikhail Khodorkhovsky, formerly the wealthiest man in Russia, whose assets were swallowed up by the Russian government after being indicted with fraud.
A third group represents the consensus among Republican foreign policy experts: U.S. foreign policy must be a blend of realism and liberal internationalism—interests and values. Putin’s rejection of liberal tenets, such as freedom of speech and fair elections, constitute cause for concern. And this problem should be met with realist tactics, such as standing up to the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare in Ukraine with a credible deterrent in the form of NATO troops in Estonia and Latvia. Conservative internationalists are largely at odds with Trump’s rhetoric on trade and alliances but are encouraged by his toughness toward ISIS and demands for greater military contributions from NATO allies.
Conservative internationalists see Putin’s Russia as seeking to undermine the West, particularly the West’s belief in honesty, transparency, and the rule of law. They argue that Russia was never the tame, if somewhat wrongheaded, global neighbor operating with impunity in its sphere of the world. Putin’s goal is to chip away at U.S. legitimacy, and particularly the international order established by the United States after the Second World War—first among it the United Nations, as Governor Romney noted. In the words of journalist and Republican foreign policy expert Anne Applebaum, “Russia intervenes in order to create disruption and chaos in Western democracies, thereby to weaken them, thereby to weaken the European Union and NATO.” Such a country then is not only illiberal; it presents a strategic threat to America’s interests. As such, Russia cannot be trusted to help tackle common threats.
Trump and his gang of Putin admirers have unexpectedly provided the realists with an opportunity to creep back from their Reagan-era exile—to the surprise of conservative internationalists. These differing views of U.S. power and foreign policy are in theory broad and cover all regions and issues. However, the U.S. relationship with Russia is bringing this disagreement front and center and is fast becoming a litmus test of one’s place within the party. The reemergence of the realists may signal a coming détente with all the positive effects of the 1980s. Banking on Putin to be the next Mikhail Gorbachev, however, is a fantasy.
