‘Stop Payment’: The Case For Supporting Yeltsin By Not Disbursing Another $2.5 Billion Blank Check

Last week, the U.S. Congress passed and sent to President Clinton an appropriations measure containing a further $2.5 billion contribution from American taxpayers to Russia. With unprecedented — if not unseemly — haste, Mr. Clinton signed the bill into law and cleared the way for an early transfer of yet more U.S. taxpayer funds to Moscow.

The Worse It Gets, The More We Send?

The intensifying crisis in Russia had a curious effect on the progress of what amounts substantially to a blank check to the Yeltsin government: The very uncertainty concerning the prospects for real reform in the former Soviet Union was repeatedly cited to justify an urgent, incautious and undisciplined disbursement of these funds. With the exception of a relatively small number of legislators — ably led in the House of Representatives by Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a distinguished member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors — little interest was expressed in establishing conditions or other "tranched" arrangements to ensure that these funds do not wind up in the wrong hands and supporting the wrong sorts of Russian initiatives.

Instead, most legislators seem to have accepted unquestioningly the argument that the money had to be turned over now lest Yeltsin fall or a threat to U.S. security otherwise reemerge from Russia — one that would require still further billions in U.S. defense spending. In any other context, this might be seen for what it is: a shakedown driven by fear of the unknown. For obvious reasons, the Clinton Administration prefers to dress it up as visionary foreign policy leadership and essential solidarity with the democratic forces of reform.

Not So Fast

Events of the past few days have, however, added new urgency to the Center’s repeated calls for a more responsible approach to the expenditure of precious taxpayer resources in Russia. These include the following:

• Use of force in Moscow: The necessity of launching a violent assault on the Russian Parliament has made perfectly obvious the Yeltsin government’s present dependence upon the military and security services. It is difficult to imagine that President Yeltsin is in a position to deny these institutions virtually whatever they want as the price for their assistance. The asking price could include: keeping Poland and other East European nations out of NATO unless Russia is admitted simultaneously; extracting Western acquiescence to Russian amendments to or waivers of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty; obtaining a U.N./NATO mandate for Russia to take the lead in "peacekeeping" in the so-called "near-abroad"; and securing de facto Western acceptance of expanded Russian commercial and military involvement with Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Balkans and even Greece).

 

• Return to empire? Ominous developments in Georgia and Azerbaijan over the past month suggest that one of the things that the military and other securityapparatuses want is to reestablish the lost Soviet empire, in whole or in part. Russian armed forces are currently providing decisive material and logistic — and some actual combat — support to Abkhazian separatists in Georgia. As Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze put it on 29 September 1993, "The plan to occupy Sukhumi [the provincial capital of Abkhazia] was masterminded at Russian [military] headquarters." They are also rendering critical assistance to Armenians engaged in offensive operations against Azerbaijan.

 

As a result of these initiatives by the Russian military, the days of Shevardnadze’s government may be numbered in Georgia and a long-time communist apparatchik with close ties to Moscow, Geidar Aliyev, has taken power in Azerbaijan. Heavy-handed pressure is similarly intensifying against Ukraine, the Baltic states, Tajikistan and elsewhere in the old Soviet Union.

 

• Violations of arms control accords: In the process of bringing forces to bear in the Transcaucasus region, Russia would appear to have violated ceilings — or be about to — on the numbers of troops it can have there under the terms of the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement. The United States has in the past rejected Russian efforts to have these limits waived or eased; its acquiescence in their violation can only encourage Moscow to take further liberties with these requirements.

 

In an interview on CNN yesterday, moreover, Ambassador-at-large for Russian affairs Strobe Talbott stated that Russia was a country "armed with biological weapons" (BW). The former Soviet Union has long been suspected by intelligence analysts of having retained a covert — and illegal — BW capability. A formal declaration by a senior U.S. government official of that suspicion as fact, however, is something else again. It establishes not only that Moscow is in violation of yet another existing arms control agreement (i.e., the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention). It should also be seen as a signal lesson about the dangerous absurdity of trying to prohibit such weapons of mass destruction through accords negotiated with totalitarian regimes — or those dominated by an unchecked military.

After Yeltsin, Who?

Persistent reports are circulating about President Yeltsin’s health problems. His repeated absence from Moscow in the midst of the crisis, his allusions to concerns about continuity of government and nuclear weapons control, his increasingly stiff and slow-moving physical appearance all raise questions about the prospects for the president’s continued rule of Russia. They also raise questions about whether, as Yeltsin announced yesterday, his old guard Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin would succeed him as president if Yeltsin could not carry out his duties.

At this juncture, one point seems unarguable: The military is the most cohesive and unified political force in Russia today. If Boris Yeltsin’s health is, indeed, declining, the decision by the armed forces and other security institutions to back him in the present crisis — and to assure the defeat of the parliamentary opposition that ensued — could enable the military in due course to supplant the remaining democratic reformers with so-called "centrists" or "moderates."

These individuals — such as Civic Union’s chairman, Arkady Volsky — have long been closely associated with the military-industrial complex. Their opposition to real structural reform is no less intense than that of expendable front-men like Ruslan Khasbulatov and Alexander Rutskoi. Should they be permitted in the months ahead to expropriate power from Boris Yeltsin, the military’s agenda may be significantly, if somewhat less visibly, advanced.

Predictably, some Western "experts" — many of whom long preferred Gorbachev and the communist system to Yeltsin and his efforts to effect a wholesale transformation of his country along democratic and free market lines — are seizing the present moment to urge the Russian president to pursue accommodation with political figures like Volsky. They urge that the pace of reform be slowed and simultaneous elections for both the presidency and a new parliament be substituted for the sequential approach announced by Yeltsin a fortnight ago. Even the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate, Robert Dole (R-KA), seemed susceptible to this siren’s song in an interview last night on CNN.

The Bottom Line

In fact, it seems likely that these — or similarly ill-advised — concessions have already been made to the opponents of real structural reform in Russia via the deals President Yeltsin has had to strike with the military, KGB and internal security forces. If so, instead of clearing the way for reinvigorated reform, Yeltsin’s bloody victory over the parliament may simply set the stage for further consolidation of recent gains by the military-industrial complex at home (at the expense of free market forces) and more aggressive behavior in the "near-abroad" regions on the Russian periphery (at the expense of what remains of independent, non-communist elements in the successor states).

The Center for Security Policy believes that the real prospect of such an outcome eventuating makes it incumbent on President Clinton to adopt a more sophisticated and calibrated policy: Mr. Clinton must make clear that the unequivocal support expressed thus far for Yeltsin is a function not of the man, himself, but of the reformist policies he claims to be pursuing. Abandoning such policies — whether in deference to the military-industrial complex or to its erstwhile advocates in the parliament — cannot be allowed to proceed without an attendant reduction in U.S. financial, technological and other forms of support. Otherwise, these forms of assistance will rightly be seen as underwriting or otherwise enabling such activities or the institutions primarily responsible for them (e.g., the enormous benefit that would accrue to the military-industrial system from a revitalization of the old Soviet energy sector).

Consequently, the Center urges the Clinton Administration and the Congress to establish that those portions of the $2.5 billion in new U.S. aid to Russia that are not aimed at specific, monitorable and disciplined privatization initiatives be put on hold. These funds — and the array of sophisticated technologies that will be transferred to Russia under the President’s new export control and space cooperation initiatives — should not be released until Russia is demonstrably set on a course of genuine free market reform, pluralistic democracy, peace with its neighbors and constructive relations with other international partners.