Russia Experts See Thinning Ranks’ Effect on U.S. Policy
WASHINGTON
— “I have to do a TV broadcast now, can I call you back in maybe an
hour?” Angela Stent, the director of the Russian studies department at
Georgetown University, said when she picked up the phone. An hour later
she apologized again. “I’m afraid I’ll have to call you back.”
For
Ms. Stent and other professional Russia watchers, the phone has been
ringing off the hook since Ukraine became a geopolitical focal point.
“It’s kind of a reunion,” she said. “Everyone comes out of the
woodwork.”
But
while the control of Crimea by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia
has brought America’s Russia experts in from the cold, the news media
spotlight has also showed important shifts in how American academics and
policy makers think about Russia, not to mention the quality and
quantity of the people doing the thinking. Among those experts, there is
a belief that a dearth of talent in the field and ineffectual
management from the White House have combined to create an
unsophisticated and cartoonish view of a former superpower, and
potential threat, that refuses to be relegated to the ash heap of
history.
“It’s
a shorter bench,” said Michael A. McFaul, who returned from his post as
the American ambassador in Moscow on Feb. 26, as the crisis unfolded.
He said the present and future stars in the government did not make
their careers in the Russia field, which long ago was eclipsed by the
Middle East and Asia as the major draws of government and intelligence
agency talent.
“The expertise with the government is not as robust as it was 20 or 30 years ago, and the same in the academy,” Mr. McFaul said.
The
drop-off in talent is widely acknowledged. “You have a lot of people
who are very old and a lot of people who are very young,” said Anders
Aslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics
and a former economic adviser to Boris N. Yeltsin, a former president
of Russia. Mr. Aslund, who had a dozen interviews on Ukraine on a single
day this week, said people in the prime of their careers mostly
abandoned Russia in the 1990s.
“It
is certainly harder for the White House, State Department and
intelligence community to find up-and-coming regional experts who are
truly expert on that region,” said Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution and President Bill Clinton’s Russia point man. “It’s a market problem.”
Compounding
the effects has been a lack of demand for Russian expertise at the very
top of the foreign policy pyramid. Successive White Houses have sought
to fit Russia into a new framework, both diplomatically and
bureaucratically, as one of many priorities rather than the singular
focus of American foreign policy. Since Mr. Clinton empowered Mr.
Talbott, the portfolio has shrunk, and with it the number of aides with
deep Russian experience, and real sway, in the White House.
As
a result, Russia experts say, there has been less internal resistance
to American presidents seeking to superimpose their notions on a large
and complex nation of 140 million people led by a former K.G.B.
operative with a zero-sum view of the world.
Ukraine Crisis in Maps
A visual survey of the ongoing dispute, including
satellite images of Russian naval positions and maps showing political,
cultural and economic factors in the crisis.
While
President George W. Bush looked into Mr. Putin’s soul, former Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice spoke his language and President Obama sought
a so-called reset of relations, they all found themselves discouraged
that Mr. Putin, and Russia, did not behave the way they thought they
should.
Some
experts lamented that instead of treating Mr. Putin as a partner on
issues like the global economy and energy markets, the Obama
administration has taken a more transactional approach. After Mr. Putin returned to the presidency
following a stint as prime minister, dismissed new American arms
control ideas and gave asylum to Edward J. Snowden, Mr. Obama
essentially threw up his hands and declared a “pause” in the
relationship. By that point, Mr. McFaul was considered about 8,000 miles
too far from the Oval Office to affect decision making.
“When
the Russians talk to the Obama administration, they want someone who
they know speaks on behalf of the president personally,” said Andrew S.
Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
and a Russia expert formerly on the National Security Council staff.
“Now that McFaul is gone, they are not sure they have that.”
That deficiency is not an accident of history.
In
the midst of the Cold War, leading universities had whole departments
dedicated to understanding the Soviet Union. The top national security
question of the day drew the top minds, many of whom became fluent in
Russian language and culture and graduated into the government or the
spy agencies. But the breakup of the Soviet Union broke up those
departments, and the national security enthusiasts melted away with the
thawing of relations. Professors found themselves out of funding and
eventually jobs.
Last
year, the State Department ended a grant that Mr. McFaul benefited from
as a young Russia scholar and that was specifically intended for
Russian and Eurasian research. “That looks shortsighted, considering
what we are looking at lately,” Mr. McFaul said.
Video|1:07
Credit Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press
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Stephen
F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New
York University, said that if anyone had the power to save the program,
it would have been Mr. McFaul. Mr. Cohen, who recently wrote an article
titled “Distorting Russia”
for The Nation, which is edited by his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, has
embraced his role as dissenting villain in the current Russia debates,
during which he consistently argues a perspective closer to that of Mr.
Putin.
“This
is what I tell bookers,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to those who book
him for television appearances. “I will go on with somebody who
disagrees with me 100 percent, but the moment he calls me a Putin
apologist, I’m going to say” something that cannot be said on the air.
He does agree with his colleagues that the field is not what it once was. It is something the Russians have noticed, too.
During
his time in Russia, Mr. McFaul said, American indifference bothered the
Russians. “That asymmetry, that we still loomed large for them but for
us they didn’t loom large,” he said. “I felt that a lot as ambassador.”
Now
the Russia experts hope that a global crisis some believe is a result
of American naïveté and unsophistication about Russia may serve as the
catalyst for a new generation of Russia experts. Andrew C. Kuchins, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
who was himself drawn to the subject as a 13-year-old watching
President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 visit to the Soviet Union, said the
Ukrainian crisis was big enough “to capture your imagination.”
If not, the United States may be increasingly caught off guard.
“When
we’ve all retired, 10, 20 years down the road, I don’t know how many
people will be left with this area of expertise,” said Ms. Stent of
Georgetown University, who just published “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century.”
“And we can’t assume that our relationship with Russia won’t suddenly
command a lot of attention. Because as we can see, it does.”
For now, she and her remaining colleagues continue to be on call.
Mr.
Cohen, speaking on his home phone, excused himself to respond to one of
the 30 requests a day he has received, this one a CNN booker for
Anderson Cooper. “Utterly fantastic, thank you so much,” Mr. Cohen told
her. “Do you have it written down there when the car is coming to get
me?”
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