Jonathan Sclarsic:
Welcome. I'm Jonathan Sclarsic, class of 2003 and a member of the Brandeis Alumni Association Board of Directors. It's my absolute pleasure to welcome all of you here today to the alumni college session with Professor Carol Saivetz, class of 1969. Also, parent of '97 and parent of '01. And Dr. Gary Samore who will discuss U.S.-Russian relations in 2020 and beyond. We are delighted to have the opportunity to share this event with all of you, our alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members and friends around the world. Thank you for joining us.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
I'm talking to you here from Washington, DC. I'm sure we have people from all over the country, all over the world and it's just so great to be able to have the community come together to continue our learning and to continue to build our relationship with Brandeis.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
So now to introduce our speakers. Carol Saivetz, then class of '69, parent of '97 and parent of '01 is a senior advisor in the MIT Security Studies Program. She is also a research associate at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Professor Saivetz has consulted for the U.S. government on topics ranging from energy politics in the Caspian and Black Sea regions, questions of stability in Central Asia to Russian policy toward Iran.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
She's the author and contributing co-editor of five books and numerous articles on Soviet and now Russian foreign policy issues including an assessment of the reset Russian policies toward the other Soviet successor states and current U.S.-Russian relations.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
Among her research interests are energy competition in and around the Black Sea region and Russian-Turkish relations. She holds an MIA, master's philosophy and a PhD from Columbia University in political science and a certificate from what is now The Harriman Institute at Columbia. Brandeis is fortunate to have Carol's leadership also as a university trustee.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
Dr. Gary Samore is director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and professor of the practice of politics at Brandeis University. Previously he was executive director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Relations at the Kennedy School of Government which just so happens to be where I finished my master in public administration's program last year.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
During his many years working in the U.S. government, Dr. Samore served most recently as President Obama's White House coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction from 2009 to 2013.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
In that capacity, Dr. Samore chaired the interagency coordination committee that supported the negotiation of the U.S.-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty or New START in 2010. Dr. Samore received his PhD in government from Harvard University in 1984.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
So again I'm so happy to have all of you here to be part of this Brandeis event and I want to welcome Professor Saivetz and Dr. Samore.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Thank you, thank you. I guess it's my turn. I'm going to share my screen. Okay, wait. I got to go back. Hold on. I've already messed this up, so hold on a second. How do I get out of this now?
Jonathan Sclarsic:
Press the escape button. You should be able to get out of it.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Perfect. Thank you. I forgot. I got to start at the beginning. It helps to start at the beginning, don't you think? Technology. There we go. Sorry, guys. Anyhow, I'm glad so many of you could join us today. This is clearly a really important topic. Gary and I were asked to do this long before COVID and I had a whole presentation that I had thought about and everything, but clearly the pandemic has affected anything that I would have talked about.
Carol R. Saivetz:
So what I thought I could usefully do is to discuss what I see as the drivers of Russian foreign policy and then they talk about how Russia has responded to the pandemic and how the pandemic has an impact on whether or not Russia can accomplish what it hopes to do. So arguably the most important driver of Russian foreign policy is Russia's desire to regain its great power or superpower status. The Russians clearly feel humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and this is not just Vladimir Putin's thing, this is reflected in public opinion polling since the collapse.
Carol R. Saivetz:
A corollary of this is that Russia has, and the words of Steve Kotkin, always punched above its weight. In other words, it understands that it really can't compete with the West whether it's economically or even militarily and therefore it is had to resort to what I call unconventional means in order to assert its great power status.
Carol R. Saivetz:
A second driver of Russian foreign policy is the perceived need of a buffer between Russia and the West. I happen to love political cartoons and I rather liked this one. But it's kind of difficult to understand why Russia is so resentful about NATO expansion. If you look at public opinion polling just for an example, in Ukraine before 2014, most of the citizens that were polled were not seeking NATO membership. They were seeking some kind of an association agreement with the EU.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I think this has been generalized in Putin's mind to really wanting to have a kind of grand bargain between the United States between the West and Russia that some of the Russians dubbed Yalta 2.0.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Okay. Another driver of Russian foreign policy is what I call the fear of people power. If you look over post-soviet Russian history, there were revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, then came the Arab Spring that was simultaneous with demonstrations in Moscow. Very large demonstrations. Not sanctioned to demand that the corrupt Duma elections be run again. And then in 2014, obviously, and this is a picture of Maidan Square.
Carol R. Saivetz:
So this gives you a sense of what Mr. Putin is thinking about. What I wanted to do for most of my time is to talk about how COVID has had an impact on what Russia is doing. So these two pictures are the one on the right is Putin in hazmat dress going to see patients, some of the earlier patients. This quickly became a meme on the Russian equivalent of Facebook and as you can see on the left that's Putin along with the Teletubbies. The population thought he was taking extraordinary measures.
Carol R. Saivetz:
But Putin's been in power for 20 years. They just celebrated the 20th anniversary of his first election. Putin was has been looking to create a situation in which he is basically president for life. So he was supposed to be "crowned", in quotation marks, by a referendum that was supposed to have been held in April that was put off because of the pandemic. That would have reset the counting on the term limitations and brought him to 2036.
Carol R. Saivetz:
The second thing that's been postponed because of the pandemic was a parade on Red Square to celebrate the 75th anniversary of V-E Day and that too was canceled as I said in part because several hundred of the troops who were rehearsing for the parade were diagnosed positive with COVID.
Carol R. Saivetz:
So clearly COVID has had a major impact on the symbolic politics of Putin consolidating his role in Russia. But COVID is much more serious than that and I've just jotted down a few things here. We don't know how many people are sick. We don't know how many people have died. Just this past Sunday, Russia confirmed 8,500 plus new cases. The highest one-day jump and the official total as of Sunday was 344,000 people.
Carol R. Saivetz:
We do know that several high-ranking officials including the Prime Minister, including the head of Chechnya and others have been diagnosed with disease and have been in quarantine. It's very clear and here again, these are just bullets, talking points. It's very clear that Russia was very unprepared for the pandemic. Like here a limited amount of PPE, the hospitals are unprepared.
Carol R. Saivetz:
You have to realize that many of the hospitals outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg do not even have running water much less sophisticated sanitation equipment. More interesting politically, and I feel terribly sorry for these people there, but at least three doctors who have mysteriously fallen from windows, two of whom were killed and the supposition is that they were murdered basically for complaining about inadequate response in the hospitals. The latest is that Putin's promised a bonus to doctors who were on the front lines but none of the bonuses has been received and those who complained have lost their jobs, et cetera.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Another interesting sidebar is that those ventilators that Russia supposedly gave us to help, they apparently don't work and they've caught fire in several cases and there have been two big hospital fires in which patients were killed.
Carol R. Saivetz:
It's clear also that Putin is kind of following Trump's playbook. First, it was denial, then there's been a total shutdown. Unemployment is estimated to be around 30% at the moment. And Putin committed a fatal error. He engaged in an oil price war with Saudi Arabia which devalued the price of the ruble which really hurt Russian revenues most of which are derived from export of energy.
Carol R. Saivetz:
So they're sort of in the hole even before they try to subsidized business to bring the economy back and also like here, we're hearing a lot of complaints about no assistance to small business. What I also find interesting is all the commentary in the Russian media about how Putin didn't fully take charge. It sounds also reminiscent of Donald Trump. He delegated all the decisions to local officials and a lot of people comment that this was an attempt to deflect any responsibility from the Russian President.
Carol R. Saivetz:
On the other side of it. It's kind of like China where local officials are terrified to take responsibility themselves so that they're lying about the statistics and adequate preparedness, et cetera.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Finally, they are also hampered by corruption. It's very clear that the businesses that are being allowed to reopen now are those that are owned by the buddies of Vladimir Putin and they are also expecting a second wave this fall.
Carol R. Saivetz:
So when I look at how this has an impact on what's going on, it's very clear that it's exposed a major weakness in what Putin and his buddies called the power vertical, i.e. all powers coming from the top because Putin has basically abdicated power. We also know that Putin's popularity is falling at the moment of only about half of the population support him staying in power, i.e. will vote for the referendum when it's held and they've just announced this morning it will be held in July.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Only 54% of the population in a very recent survey say that they trust the government now in a highly centralized system. That's a very low number. Only 43% say that they trust the Russian healthcare system.
Carol R. Saivetz:
So Putin has been responding by a major crackdown on the opposition, a move towards what I would call Russification trying to get rid of the other ethnic territories within the Russian Federation. And so the question is what now? I guess my bet is more of the same and that somehow he'll muddle through and he'll remain in power until 2036. Other people are talking about what they call an oligarchic coup, meaning that a bunch of the people who are beholden to Putin now for their riches say to him, "You know what. We're really tired of the sanctions. We're really tired of your dragging down the economy. Go retire to Sochi with your 80 billion and let one of us take over and let us appoint somebody who will take over."
Carol R. Saivetz:
That I think is also a possibility nobody seems to be talking about, and I actually worry about this. No one seems to be talking about what happens if Putin dies in office tomorrow? What happens if he has a heart attack and dies? There doesn't seem to be any succession planning whatsoever. Now obviously, being the heir apparent or looking as if you're planning for a succession is not a great place or a safe place to be, but I'm hoping that somebody is thinking about it.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Another question is that because this is such a highly personalistic system, there's a real question, if he dies, if he decides to leave office before 2036, can this system that so many other people depend on really survive without him or will we see in a sense more chaos?
Carol R. Saivetz:
Finally, in terms of the international implications, what we've seen is first of all, an increasing military presence on the Ukrainian Russian border and these are just some pictures of trucks and everything being moved to the border. We've also seen more internal interference in Ukraine, some of which may have an impact on our election and I'm happy to talk about that during the Q&A.
Carol R. Saivetz:
We've seen an increasing militarization of the arctic. We've seen more deployments of new weapons. Gary, I'm setting you up here. We've also seen, and we know about the interference in the 2020 election. My final comments in terms of U.S.-Russian relations which was our original topic pre-COVID was is there a way forward in bilateral relations? What we see on the one hand is the United States withdrawing from the INF Treaty and from the Open Skies Treaty. And on the one hand kind of making nice to Vladimir Putin and on the other hand being critical of what Russia is doing and tearing up treaties that Putin would like to keep on the books.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Which leaves us with what's happening now and which is what Gary's going to talk about, the fate of the so-called New START Treaty. Will Trump agree to extend it? Putin has indicated that he definitely wants to keep it on the books while we continue to negotiate. Trump seems to have some kind of grand idea about bringing China in and at least making it some kind of a trilateral organization.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Let me just conclude by saying that I got involved in an interesting discussion with my students the last day of class this semester via Zoom and the question in the literature is, is it all about Vladimir Putin? Are all these things that I'm talking about just Putin or is there something inherent in Russia as Alexis de Tocqueville spoke about a century plus ago that these two powers us and Russia were somehow destined to be enemies of each other?
Carol R. Saivetz:
And I think the answer is both and I don't mean that it is a fudge, although it sounds that. But that there is this perpetual insecurity, this feeling that they are always punching above their way. But it's also combined with a very particular worldview of Vladimir Putin. Now, that's not to say, and I'll end on this note that Russia would be better off or that we would be better off without Vladimir Putin. I think it'll be different. I'm not sure it'll be better for us because we don't know who or what will follow Putin. Over to you, Gary.
Gary Samore:
Thank you very much, Carol. That was a great setup for my presentation. And thank you, Jonathan and thanks to everybody for joining us for this webinar. I'm going to go to my screen share.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I'm trying to get out of mine. I will stop share. I got it.
Gary Samore:
Okay.
Carol R. Saivetz:
There you go. Now, you're on. Sorry about that.
Gary Samore:
No problem. So as Carol mentioned, I'm going to talk about nuclear arms control between the U.S. and Russia. and implications for strategic stability and the broader bilateral relationship. So the only bilateral arms control agreement that currently enforced is the New START Treaty, Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty which was negotiated by President Obama and President Medvedev in 2010.
Gary Samore:
Under the treaty, both sides are limited in terms of their deployed strategic forces. Deployed meaning that the weapons are actually mounted on delivery vehicles and strategic meaning weapons that are primarily intended for use against each other's homeland. So against military, economic, command and control targets in the U.S. and Russia. Under the treaty, both sides are limited to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads on 700 deployed strategic launchers.
Gary Samore:
Strategic launchers means a long-range land-based missiles, long-range submarine-launched missiles and manned bombers. As of January 2020, both sides are slightly below the limits under the New START Treaty. So the US has, as you can see 1,376 warheads on 668 launchers. Russia has 1,426 warheads on 517 launchers.
Gary Samore:
The reason why we know so precisely what the actual deployments are is because the New START Treaty has a very extensive system for monitoring and verification, which includes declarations, bilateral inspections. So U.S. inspectors going to Russia. Russia's inspectors coming to the United States. Their system for monitoring testing, exchange of information and so forth.
Gary Samore:
The New START Treaty expires in February 2021, but it can be renewed for five years by mutual agreement. And I'll discuss that at greater detail at the end of my briefing. But first, I want to emphasize that there are many areas of the nuclear balance and nuclear competition between the U.S. and Russia that New START doesn't limit.
Gary Samore:
First of all, New START imposes no restrictions on what are called tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. So these are weapons normally low-yield weapons that are intended for use on the battlefield if the U.S. and Russia should ever get into a conflict in Europe for example. The U.S. has a small number, a few hundred of these battlefield nuclear weapons. Russia is thought to have a much larger Arsenal, perhaps as much as several thousand tactical nuclear weapons.
Gary Samore:
And that reflects as Carol mentioned, Russia's fear of NATO as a military force and the Russians trying to compensate by having these low yield battlefield nuclear weapons. The New START Treaty also doesn't limit what are called reserve warheads, strategic warheads that are not deployed, they're not part of the active force, but they're kept in stockpiles in both the U.S. and Russia.
Gary Samore:
Both sides have at least several thousand of these reserve warheads. I think our declared number is about 4,000. The Russians have not publicly declared, but they're believed to have at least several thousand of these reserved warheads. New START limits long range delivery systems, but it doesn't limit short and intermediate range missiles as to say missiles up to 5,500 kilometers.
Gary Samore:
There was a treaty called the INF Treaty which limited to actually ban the deployment of intermediate-range missiles, ground-based missiles, but president Trump withdrew from that treaty in August of 2019 because the Russians had violated the treaty by deploying a banned cruise missile, ground-launched cruise missile and refused to take corrective measures.
Gary Samore:
The New START Treaty is a bilateral treaty so it limits U.S. and Russian forces but it doesn't in any way limit third-party weapons, China, UK, France and others and I'll discuss that. It's very important to remember that the New START Treaty limits numbers. It's a quantitative restriction, but it doesn't prevent either side from qualitative improvements. And in fact both Russia and the United States are embarked on very expensive long-range programs to replace their current fleet of nuclear delivery systems including land-based missiles, submarines and submarine-launched missiles and manned bombers.
Gary Samore:
In the case of the United States, President Obama started the program which is likely to cost more than a trillion dollars over 30 years to replace our current ICBMs, submarines and manned bombers. And President Trump has basically continued the program that President Obama started.
Gary Samore:
New START Treaty does not limit missile defenses and in particular since the U.S. left the ABM Treaty under George W Bush, the U.S. has been developing a small-scale national missile defense system, which is mainly directed against North Korea and Iran. But the Russians are very nervous that this missile defense system might be used against them. And the particular Russian concern, which really goes back to the days of Reagan and Gorbachev and Star Wars is that the U.S. will launch a first strike on Russian strategic systems and destroy most of them because the Russian systems are vulnerable. Most of them are land-based missiles. And whatever Russian forces survive, will not be able to penetrate U.S. missile defenses.
Gary Samore:
This sounds like a crazy strange love sort of idea, but the Russian military really does worry about what they see as a strategic imbalance. And in order to overcome that imbalance, President Putin has started a variety of programs for very exotic delivery systems, such as a nuclear power long-range cruise missile and a nuclear-powered underwater drone to deliver nuclear warheads against the United States in ways that would circumvent the U.S. National Missile Defense System. So these are primarily intended as second strike weapons that won't be vulnerable to U.S. missile defense, and the New START treaty doesn't limit those exotic delivery systems.
Gary Samore:
So the big policy question that Carol mentioned is whether or not the U.S. and Russia will extend the New START treaty when it expires in February of 2021. Of course that will be only a month after the new U.S. administration takes office. Putin has already said he's prepared to extend the New START treaty for five years without any conditions. Vice President Biden has also said he would extend the treaty for five years without conditions. And both sides would use those five years in an effort to try to negotiate an additional treaty that would have presumably more reductions, would continue to maintain some kind of bilateral inspection and monitoring system and maybe include limits on some of the exotic new weapons that Russia is developing.
Gary Samore:
President Trump has said he'll only extend the New START Treaty if China agrees to a trilateral agreement. U.S., Russia, and China that would limit China's nuclear forces. Right now the Chinese have a couple of hundred nuclear weapons. So much smaller than either the U.S. or Russia but the Chinese are modernizing and potentially increasing the size of their nuclear forces in large part to be able to overcome U.S. National Missile Defense Systems.
Gary Samore:
So far China has adamantly refused to participate in any trilateral agreement on the grounds that China's forces are much smaller than the U.S. and Russia. China will not agree to any treaty limits that mandate them to have an inferior number of weapons to the U.S. and Russia and the U.S. and Russia won't accept China as an equal.
Gary Samore:
So I think the idea that we will be able to pressure or induce China to join a trilateral agreement is extremely unlikely. The Trump administration seems to hope that Russia will pressure China to join such an arrangement, but I'd really doubt the Russians are willing or able to force China to agree to participate in a trilateral agreement. So Trump of course may change his mind after the election. He may decide to extend the treaty for five years and try to use that five years to see if he can't persuade China to join, but there's at least a chance that he'll let the treaty lapse.
Gary Samore:
And then the question will be whether the end of New START, the end of the limits on strategic forces and the end of a bilateral inspection and monitoring system whether that will lead to a quantitative arms race. Keep in mind that both the U.S. and Russia are already improving and modernizing their forces so there's already a qualitative arms race. But the end of New START could lead to an increase in the numbers. And I think a particular concern is that the Russians who as I've said are very paranoid and worried about what they see as U.S. strategic advantage, might very well decide to break the numbers to exceed the limits in the New START treaty over time and the U.S. might respond in kind so we could be back in a situation as we were during the Cold War where both sides were building up their numbers of nuclear forces.
Gary Samore:
So I'll end there and I'm very interested in the discussion and responding to any questions you have. Thank you.
Daniel Larson:
Thank you both. We have several questions coming in. I just want a note to everyone that if you have questions for the professors, please note them in the Q&A section in the Zoom bar on your screen and we'll try to get to as many as we can, but just given the limits of time we won't get to every question. So a question here from Divita Shur. The question is, "How similar is Russian longing for great power status? How similar is that to the feeling in Germany after World War One?"
Carol R. Saivetz:
That's a great question. There is a body of literature that talks about humiliation and revenge and it certainly seems to be applicable to Germany with leading to World War Two. I think that it's... I don't know how put it. I think it's a real driver of Russian foreign policy, but I don't think that whereas Germany was capable of rearming and had a good economy and everything else leading into World War Two. Russia is not there. Russia has so many domestic problems. Putin has not taken advantage of the last 20 years to modernize the Russian economy.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I think they understand that they would probably lose any kind of a conventional war, god forbid against the West or against the United States. They're happy to stay within certain limits and have us concede that they are the other great power. I think that's the important thing about the New START Treaty that , as I just said, solidifies their position as the other major nuclear power in the world and they'd be very happy to keep that on the book. So I think that there's some similarity, but don't draw the direct conclusion. I don't see another major military confrontation looming. Gary, you want to chime in?
Gary Samore:
So I agree with that. I mean there's a big debate about whether we should view Russian foreign policy as essentially aggressive or essentially defensive. My inclination is to see Russian policy is driven more by fear and paranoia of the U.S. and the West as opposed to an aggressive expansionist policy. But of course Russian defense, what they see is taking defensive measures is translated if you're living in the Ukraine as offensive action to control their neighbors. But I do think Russia's primary driver is their fear of the United States because they see the U.S. and the West as having military economic and political advantages.
Daniel Larson:
You touched on this notion of paranoia in Russia and we have a question here asking how deeply embedded is that Russian paranoia insofar as do we see it in the populists as well as in government and leadership?
Carol R. Saivetz:
That's a great question. You need to understand that the Kremlin controls almost all the media. So it's almost like whatever Vladimir Putin is thinking is like watching Fox News all the time which people are now calling Trump TV. So that if Putin is paranoid and has decided that Russia should be fearful of the western United States, that's what you will see propagated on all of the major TV stations and people believe it, and the public opinion revealed that if you look back, people were not afraid of the United States. Now, they see the United States is the greatest enemy of Russia.
Carol R. Saivetz:
But to go back to what I said initially, paranoia is a great word, but I think it's much more this sense of humiliation. And the public opinion polling does reveal that people resent having lost their great power status. They feel that particularly in the Yeltsin and early Putin periods that the West were just sort of pushing Russia around and wasn't respectful enough. And for the average citizen to reflect that especially in the Yeltsin period when the media were much freer, I think means that it is a deep-seated feeling.
Gary Samore:
I agree with that.
Daniel Larson:
I have a question here from Deborah Rhodey. She asks, "Does the withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty and other treaties help Putin? Does the reasons that the White House gives for withdrawal hold water?"
Gary Samore:
So unfortunately the Soviet Union and Russia have a very long history of violating treaties when it doesn't suit their interests and this goes back into the Cold War. In the case of the Open Skies Treaty, the U.S. argues that Russia has been prohibiting over flights that are allowed under the treaty. Just to explain, Open Skies Treaty which was completed in 1993 right at the end of the Cold War gives the U.S. and Russia and other parties mainly NATO countries, the right to carry out surveillance flights, manned surveillance flights over territories in order to monitor mainly conventional forces. And the U.S. has argued for some time that Russians have not allowed certain flights over certain parts of Russian territory.
Gary Samore:
As far as I can tell, that is an accurate complaint. Now, other parties to the treaty especially our NATO allies will argue that even though the Russians aren't completely fulfilling their obligations under the treaty, the other benefits of the treaty, the flights that are allowed outweigh those violations. So from Putin's standpoint, if the U.S. withdraws from the Open Skies treaty, if the Russians refuse to allow the U.S. flights that are permitted, then there's both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that it will upset NATO allies and of course the Russians always benefit when there's dissension within NATO and the Russians are I think one of the reasons why they like Trump is because he's not been good for the Alliance. So from Russia's standpoint, anything that weakens NATO is a good thing.
Gary Samore:
On the other hand, the disadvantage if the U.S. withdraws from the treaty is that Russia won't be able to engage in over flights, which they presumably use to spy on the United States. Now, the Russians do have satellites just like the U.S. has, but the Russians are probably more dependent on manned flights than we are because they don't have as advanced and extensive a system of overhead satellites. So to some extent, the Russians will lose some of the advantage of the treaty if the U.S. withdraws, and that may leave the Russians to comply with the U.S. demands. I mean, we don't know. It'll take six months for this to play out because that's the period of time in which the U.S. has to give notice before withdrawing from the treaty.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I agree.
Daniel Larson:
You touched on NATO just there in your response. Since we have a question here from Leo. Question is, "Much of Russia's tensions with the West are specifically related to NATO which affects the question, what is the justification for the continued existence of NATO after the Soviet collapse? Is it really paranoid for Russians to be weary of the West when NATO still exists today and continues to expand membership by incorporating former Warsaw Pact nations?"
Carol R. Saivetz:
There's a huge debate in the Western political science literature about NATO expansion and whether or not it was the expansion of NATO that basically provoked the war in Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass. I think that on the United States part that we were sort of delightfully oblivious as to how Russia would respond if indeed we did expand NATO and there are several very good books that detail the decision-making certainly about the first round of NATO expansion in during the Clinton administration and talked about various camps and finally persuading the president. It's a classic case of bureaucratic decision-making.
Carol R. Saivetz:
But I think something else happened on the other side. On the Russian side in the '90s, Russia was particularly weak, disorganized trying to figure out sort of where Russia was. You need to remember Russia never existed in its current borders ever. And there is this historic sort of imperial legacy, and I think that Russia was sort of looking elsewhere as we did this. When we get to the 2000s, we get the second round of NATO expansion and of course we get under Vladimir Putin, a stronger Russia more able to push back.
Carol R. Saivetz:
My argument would be, again, that I think that we were oblivious and that we thought that we could somehow swayed Russian concerns about NATO expansion at the same time as... We not only pushed for it, but there were countries that were pushing for it as well. And then the question becomes, I guess it's more philosophical question, who are we to tell the former Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe that they cannot ever join NATO and they shouldn't even be looking in our direction? Or who are we to tell the Ukrainians that they shouldn't want an association agreement with the EU.
Carol R. Saivetz:
And this could be a whole long spiel on my part. But let me just say one last thing. When it comes to Ukraine particularly, Putin seems to have conflated any kind of EU expansion, EU sort of aggrandizing its sphere of influence, if you will and what the Ukrainians were looking for was a free trade agreement and even more importantly visa-free travel to the west. As I said during my talk, the Ukrainians were not interested in joining NATO. They are now because Putin's policy has backfired.
Carol R. Saivetz:
If at all there was a threat from what Ukraine was doing is that Russia could possibly have feared that the Black Sea Fleet Basin in Sevastopol which is in part of Ukraine might have been turned over at some point to the west. But that is the only place in which I see really a legitimate fear of sort of a visceral military fear to NATO expansion. Gary, jump in please.
Gary Samore:
So I just want to add to Carol's last point. I think the Russians view NATO expansion as part of a much broader threat that includes economic integration between border states of what the Russians call the near abroad and the West, as well as the establishment of political freedoms all of which pose an existential threat to Putin's Russia. I mean Putin's Russia is in danger if all the countries around Russia developed close economic ties with the West and established democracies with political freedoms.
Gary Samore:
So from that standpoint, I think Putin has a very legitimate fear that the more that Russia expands, the more that the Western model of governance and economy is established as a preference, the more Russian people especially in Moscow and more cosmopolitan parts of Russia will be drawn toward that model, which of course is diametrically opposed to the current Russian system and therefore poses a grave threat to Putin survival and the survival of the current Russian system.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Can I just jump back in? I think that particularly when it comes to Ukraine, you have to remember that when Putin "ran", in quotation marks for president again in 2012, one of his key platform planks was something called the Eurasian Economic Union. And the Eurasian Economic Union was some kind of customs union, free trade agreement supposedly among the post-Soviet states and Russia. It is basically meaningless in terms of its economic heft without Ukraine. So the fact that Ukraine was tilting towards some kind of agreement with the European Union meant that it was a real loss for Putin's sort of pet scheme.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Another thing just to re-emphasize what Gary just said is that if you have an association beaming with the EU, there's transparency and pricing. There's reduction of tariffs, et cetera and the Russians are terrified of that kind of transparency. There's a joke among Russia specialists about one of the things that Russia has to export is corruption. If you join and subscribe to all the rules of the EU, you are supposed to be eliminating or at least reducing the corruption which means that Russia no longer has those avenues in to influence the politics in any of these countries. So it's an existential threat, obviously not militarily, but it's an existential threat in terms of the values that keep Vladimir Putin in power and the values that we in the West subscribe to.
Daniel Larson:
Thank you, both. We have a question here from Nancy. Nancy asks that, Dr. Saivetz you mentioned that Putin might try to consolidate power by letting go of non-ethnic Russian territory. If that's the case, why is Putin building up the military infrastructure along the border with Ukraine?
Carol R. Saivetz:
Okay. If I said that, I misspoke. The Russian Federation itself, let's leave aside the Ukrainian issue. The Russian Federation itself is composed of 89 separate entities, many of which are ethnically titles. In other words, there are Bashkirs and Tatars, and other peoples within the Russian Federation. What Putin seems to be doing is making it harder for those peoples to learn their native languages. He is reducing the autonomy of some of these 89 entities that are part of the Russian Federation and the move is to Russification, use of the Russian language in those places.
Carol R. Saivetz:
He's even trying not so much, can't make them disappear, can't move them out of Russia, but to say, "Okay, you're no longer an autonomous entity. You're part of the larger piece of Russia that is next door to you." And there's been a lot of pushback against that and I actually think it's a dangerous policy for him to be pursuing. When it comes to Ukraine, that's much more of an imperial legacy. I mean, after all the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus got together in late 1991 and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union.
Carol R. Saivetz:
So Ukraine in that sense is gone. What Russia would like I think is some kind of diktat over Ukrainian foreign policy particularly in order to... It's not a new Soviet Union. That's not accurate but in order to have like an old-fashioned sphere of influence, that's why they're talking about Yalta 2.0, when supposedly the Soviet Union and the West divided up Eastern Europe. I think that's what Putin would be very happy with.
Daniel Larson:
This kind of a new question, but it's from an anonymous questioner. "What do you see as Russia's future role in the Middle East conflict?" I think the question is specifically referring maybe to Syria here.
Gary Samore:
Yeah. It's a very good question and one of the things Putin has very successfully done is to reassert Russians' role in the Middle East as the U.S. has begun to disengage. And I think Syria is really the best case for Putin who's used a relatively modest amount of military force in order to establish Russia as an important player and managing the very complicated politics of Syria where Russia has really been able to play the Israelis, the Iranians, the Syrians, the Turks, all the different parties that intersect in Syria.
Gary Samore:
I think Russians' diplomacy has been pretty agile. And what made all that possible was that the U.S. under Obama and then under Trump, decided that we would not involved in the Syrian civil war. That created a power vacuum and Putin has very successfully exploited that. But I do think there's a limit to how far Russia can extend its influence in the Middle East, and in particular in the Persian Gulf. As Carol mentioned, the Russian relationship with Saudi has really soured over oil disputes and at the end of the day, it's the American Navy and Air Force that preserves the peace in the Persian Gulf through our very extensive base system that we have in the region. And the Russians really don't have anything comparable nor do I think they're likely to develop anything like that in the near future.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I totally agree. What's interesting to me as I've been following it is that as Gary said, Russia has done a pretty good job so far of balancing all the competing interests within Syria, but it seems as if some of those alliances and some of those agreements are beginning to fray. I mean Russia is not happy about the Turks going in and wanting to have sort of a Kurdish free zone on the border between Turkey and Syria and Russia and Turkey are at loggerheads now over Libya.
Carol R. Saivetz:
The Russians and the Iranians don't exactly trust each other even though they have worked well together. One of Putin's other goals is sort of to be the leader of the Russian-speaking world. And you have to remember that a quarter of the Israeli population is Russian-speaking. Their former Soviet and Russian emigre is to Israel. And so he's really interested in business ties and in the economic relationship and he's not about to say to Syria, "Okay, retaliate to your heart's content as Israel bombs Hezbollah sites in Syria, et cetera."
Carol R. Saivetz:
He's been walking a real tightrope there and I think it's going to get more complicated and not less complicated. One of the other things, one last point that seems to be happening is that there have been some reports in the Russian press that Russia is kind of annoyed with Assad. Assad does not take advice easily and it's been rumored that there's some kind of a rift. I don't have many details because they haven't been revealed.
Carol R. Saivetz:
The piece of this that's fascinating is that Putin has been allowing one of his buddies, Mr. Prygoshin to field his mercenary forces both in Libya and in Syria. And there's some speculation that some of this rift between Assad and Russia has to do with Prygoshin's goals of taking over some of the oil refineries in Syria, and whom Prygoshin is backing in Libya. So freelancing is great up to a point. It gives Russia plausible deniability in certain actions, but it's getting to the point where Prygoshin gets too big for his britches. It's going to complicate foreign policy.
Daniel Larson:
We have a question here about identity. Rick Gold asks, "How much progress has Russia made in addressing the feeling of humiliation that its leaders and people felt following the fall of Soviet Union?"
Carol R. Saivetz:
Gary, you want to start? I don't mean to-
Gary Samore:
You are better equipped to answer this.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I don't mean to monopolize this at all. I don't think they've progressed all that far. I think that as I said there's public opinion polling from as recently as sort of the early decade of the 21st century that says people resented that Russia was no longer being taken seriously, no longer was being treated as a great power. Putin has attempted to redress that, but he's redressed that by annexing Crimea and he's annexed by fighting and sending troops into Syria. And the problem is at the same time Putin has not transformed the Russian economy. It's still very dependent on the export of arms, nuclear technology and oil and natural gas.
Carol R. Saivetz:
The economy is not diversified. After 2014, the sanctions that were imposed by the West have definitely hurt the Russian economy. Purchasing power is down. People are more impoverished. There's a slow transformation. There is a nascent middle class which I think would help. But most recent public opinion polling people kind of saying sort of, "We can't eat Syria." I mean it's a very colloquial way of putting it like, "You can't redress my feelings of inadequacy and humiliation by sending more troops to Syria. I don't buy it because I can't buy the groceries that I need for next week."
Carol R. Saivetz:
So I think until there's a real transformation, Putin is going to have this kind of sort of knee-jerk support from the bulk of the population, but I think deep down inside there's still great distrust and discomfort really.
Gary Samore:
So I have a question for Carol whether there's a generational divide between older Russians who remember the days of glory when the Soviet Union was a great power and they acutely feel the humiliation of having lost the Cold War, and younger people who like most young people they wanted the good life and thereafter economic development and personal freedom, and I don't know whether the polling shows that kind of division.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I've been surprised. I might have expected that the younger generation would be more liberally inclined would be looking to be more like their peers in Western Europe, et cetera. And it doesn't really hold up. They would like economic stability, economic growth. I think they care far less about the sort of superpower nonsense and Russia's overseas adventures and everything. That's why I said I think Putin really had a missed opportunity if in the early 2000s when he was still talking kind of Medvedev's game of modernization and everything that if he had actually pursued diversification of the economy, I think he'd have generated a lot more pride in the country and a lot more support for his regime ultimately.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I think the average younger Russian doesn't care so much about whether it's quasi-authoritarian or not as long as it's not a dictatorship. But they'd like to live well and they'd like to be free to travel and things like that which are things that they are at risk of losing because of the economic policies that he's pursued.
Daniel Larson:
So our next question, this might be more for Gary, but we'll se. This is a question from Howard Daniels. Howard asks, "Is there any possibility in the current political climate of revising a New START program to reduce the arsenals of both sides?"
Gary Samore:
So that's certainly what the United States would like to do. In the last year that I worked for Obama, we developed a proposal which he made to Putin in 2013 offering to reduce the level of strategic forces from 1,550 to something closer to 1,000. So a one-third reduction on both sides. And Putin adamantly rejected that proposal and the Russian argument was we can't reduce our number of strategic offensive systems as long as U.S. missile defense is unconstrained.
Gary Samore:
Because from the Russian standpoint, the smaller their offensive forces, the more vulnerable they are to a first American strike that would destroy 80 or 90% of those missiles and leave the remainder vulnerable to U.S. missile defense. So I think that that dynamic of Russian refusal to accept lower limits, as long as the U.S. has an unconstrained missile defense system, which we need in order to defend ourselves against North Korea and Iran, I think that dynamic is going to prevent any dramatic reductions for the time being in future arms control negotiations.
Gary Samore:
Now, we might get some modest reductions of a couple of hundred, but really dramatic reductions are just not possible in my view as long as the U.S. needs to maintain a missile defense system against North Korea and Iran.
Gary Samore:
Furthermore, both Moscow and Washington are wary about reducing our level to the point where the Chinese might quickly catch up. The Chinese have maybe a couple of hundred strategic systems, but China clearly has the resources if they wanted to, to match the U.S. and Russia. And neither the U.S. nor Russia wants China to be an equal in the sphere of nuclear weapons. I don't expect to see major reductions in the next 10, or 15, or 20 years.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Can I ask Gary a question? And we're going to reverse roles here. If part of their unwillingness to achieve any further reductions has to do with missile defense systems, do you foresee any possibility for any kind of an agreement on that issue first before we get to actually counting how many missiles and weapons to each other?
Gary Samore:
So I think it's a really good question and I think there's a substance answer and a political answer. In substance, I think it's possible to recreate something like the ABM Treaty which allowed both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to maintain limited missile defense systems that were big enough to protect against small countries like North Korea, but not so big that they could actually jeopardize the nuclear deterrent of bigger countries like Russia and China.
Gary Samore:
So I think in theory you could renegotiate an ABM Treaty that allowed us to have enough of a missile defense system so we could protect ourselves against a North Korea, which is not going to have more than a couple of dozen ICBMs at best, without threatening Russia. The problem with that answer is that politically I just don't see the U.S. Senate having 66 votes to ratify any new arms control treaty that limited missile defense. As a practical matter, I just don't think it's possible to recreate the ABM Treaty as long as the Senate is about evenly divided between the Democrats and Republicans.
Daniel Larson:
You've touched quite a bit on the nature of... Or specifically rather about projectile weapons, but we have a question here from Dianne Perry asking about what strategy is needed to prevent Russian cyber interference and other cyber weaponry?
Gary Samore:
It's a very good question and not an area that I'm an expert in. Obviously, both the U.S. and Russia are very active in developing offensive cyber operations against each other. So you can assume that the U.S. is trying to develop capabilities to negate Russian military systems through cyber sabotage and you can assume that the Russians are doing the same thing to us as well as critical infrastructure.
Gary Samore:
So I think that the only effective way to defend against that is strong cyber defenses. I don't think it's possible to have an agreement that will be very effective in terms of both sides exercising restraint in terms of developing capabilities. So I think the best answer is really strong defense, cyber defense.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I agree.
Daniel Larson:
So we have time for a couple more questions. Question here from Alan Cohen. Alan asks, "Do you feel that the ineffective response to COVID insofar as totalitarianism on one hand keeping everyone inside," is Alan's words here, "and exemplifying how poorly prepared the health system is on the other could lead to an effective push for regime change in Russia if indeed the death rate becomes as bad as it is in the United States?"
Carol R. Saivetz:
Russia has no history really of people taking to the streets and overthrowing regimes. It just hasn't happened. The regimes have morphed, et cetera. I mean, even the Bolsheviks were really a minority overtaking a very weak government in 1917. I think Putin is going to have a lot to answer for given the lack of healthcare and given what we know now has been this inadequate response, whether he will throw money at it and placate people. I mean, I see the sort of bifurcated response. On the one hand, I think he'll say, "Well gee, we'll spend more money on hospitals and everything else," which will be constrained by the foreign policy adventures on the one hand and on the other hand, dissidents, people will take to the streets to complain.
Carol R. Saivetz:
The loudmouths like Navalny and others, I think that they're in for incarceration or being detained, sham trials, et cetera. I don't see it leading to any kind of overthrow of the regime. As I said, the only other thing that I could foresee is what I called an oligarchic coup. Could some of the people with all the money who support Putin say, "Come on, Vlad. It's time. Go to Sochi. Go to your doctor and we'll take over. We'll protect you and we won't prosecute you." Kind of like what happened at the end of the Yeltsin period. That is the only change in leadership that I foresee in the near future.
Daniel Larson:
So a couple more questions here. "Do the Russians see the Chinese as a strategic threat?" That's a question from Divita Shur and that bookends on to another question which is from Ruth Wolff asking, "How big is the Chinese nuclear arsenal?"
Gary Samore:
You want to go first, Carol?
Carol R. Saivetz:
I was going to leave the floor to you. It's fine. You go ahead and I'll answer.
Gary Samore:
All right. So let me answer the second question first. We don't really know how big China's nuclear arsenal is because the Chinese unlike the U.S. and Russia are not constrained by an inspection and monitoring system. So all of our estimates on the size of China's nuclear arsenal based primarily on intelligence information, some of which of course is not public. But I think most estimates would put the Chinese nuclear forces, deployed strategic forces in the range of a couple of hundred nuclear weapons.
Gary Samore:
And the Chinese, unlike the Russians, up to now have always been content with having a fairly minimal retaliatory capability. In other words, the Chinese calculation has been that if sufficient forces survive a first strike, so that they can attack a couple of dozen American cities that's sufficient for deterrence that the United States is not going to attack China at the risk of losing a dozen or two of the biggest American cities.
Gary Samore:
So up to now, China's nuclear forces have been quite limited in terms of what they're capable of building. And the focus has really been on building survivable systems. So that means building road mobile, ICBM as opposed to silo based systems and building more modern submarines that are quieter, longer range and so forth. Now, as I said, it's possible that at some point the Chinese could change their philosophy and try to match the U.S. and Russia.
Gary Samore:
And again, the Chinese are capable of doing that if they want to put the resources into that, but up to now they simply have not decided to pursue that kind of nuclear strategy. Their nuclear doctrine is very much based on assured retaliation rather than some kind of war fighting capability.
Gary Samore:
On the first part of the question, I think the answer is yes, the Russians do view China as a strategic threat, but their first enemy, the wolf closest to the door is the United States. And for now, Russia sees China as an ally in terms of countering and weakening the United States. So there's a working relationship between Moscow and Beijing to counter the United States and they work together quite effectively on issues like Iran and North Korea in order to basically oppose U.S. policies.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I totally agree. There's been a lot of discussion about this, what seems to be a burgeoning Russian-Chinese alliance, but I think alliance is much too strong a word. I think that there's sort of a kind of classical realist sense of, "Well, we're going to get together because we both oppose what the United States is doing and we oppose U.S. unilateralism." Having said that, I think the Russians are wary of the Chinese. They're wary of Chinese influence in the Russian Far East.
Carol R. Saivetz:
I can't see the Russians for example if there's a problem in the South China Sea, I can't see the Russians going to bat for the Chinese if there's some kind of, I don't know altercation in the South China Sea as I said. And I also can't see the Chinese wanting to have anything to do with what's happening in Ukraine. So I think that there are real limits to that relationship and I would say that the Russians need the Chinese at the moment much more than the Chinese need the Russians. And let's just leave it there. There's a whole other topic.
Gary Samore:
I agree with that.
Daniel Larson:
So we have our final question here, before we turn things over back to Jonathan to close this out. This is a question here from Michael Shaffer. Michael asks, "One of the great mysteries of the day is the nature of the personal and diplomatic relationship between Putin and Donald Trump." He describes this as, "A great mystery of our era and the source of a great deal of speculation." So the questions are, "Does Putin still see Trump as a positive asset given his personal and political limitations? Is the internal chaos of the Trump administration actually advantageous to Russia or just a stabilizer? And do you anticipate continued Russian covert assistance for the Trump reelection effort?"
Carol R. Saivetz:
Do you want me to start on that one? That's a big-
Gary Samore:
Go ahead. Please do. You know the mind of Putin better than I do.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Well, I think you can answer it on several levels and I don't want to offend anybody in our audience, but I'm going to get a little bit political here. I do honestly think that Putin has something on Trump. And I might not have believed it until I saw Trump performance at the Helsinki Summit now, I guess two years ago. And I think it probably has to do with money laundering and it probably has to do with not doing due diligence in terms... I mean one of the sons bragged that a lot of their real estate was being built by Russians, are being funded by Russians, et cetera, et cetera.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Going beyond that, I think Trump is a disrupter and takes great pride in being a disrupter. And as Gary alluded to earlier, anything that Donald Trump does that berates NATO or that disrupts the EU or causes any kind of transatlantic rupture, works to Russia's advantage. I sometimes wonder though whether Putin isn't a little wary of what he wished for when he helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016, because Trump is now boxed into a corner.
Carol R. Saivetz:
On the one hand, I think he would like to do more for his buddy Vlad. On the other hand, congress will not let him and that includes the Republicans in Congress. So we have seen Trump for example sell javelin missiles to Ukraine which is something Obama administration never did their anti-tank weapons which makes the Ukrainian army much more potent against the Russians and Donbass. And there have been several other issues where even as Donald Trump is professing his great love for Vladimir Putin and we should get along, et cetera, et cetera, it's really not working out necessarily to Putin's advantage.
Carol R. Saivetz:
And going back to the COVID thing for a minute, the Russians made a great play of giving us, donating to us the ventilators and some PPE. It turns out it was a sale. It was not a charitable contribution. We are now giving apparently. I don't think it's a sale, PPE, ventilators, et cetera to the Russians because there are a couple of weeks behind us as the COVID epidemic has spread.
Carol R. Saivetz:
There's a human cry in Congress at the moment about if our cities in the United States don't have enough equipment, why are you giving all this stuff to Russia? So I think it puts Trump in this corner of what he'd like to do versus the response to what we now know were Russian activities in 2016 and beyond.
Gary Samore:
I agree with Carol that Trump has been a disappointment to Putin on a number of issues including weapons sales to Ukraine, and as I've discussed arms control. Putin not happy that Trump withdrew from the INF treaty and is now threatening to let the New START Treaty expire. On the other hand between Trump and Biden, I have to believe that Putin would see Trump as a friendlier president that Biden is associated in Russia's mind with strong American support for Ukraine, because that was by his job in the Obama administration and support for NATO and the U.S. alliance system.
Gary Samore:
So I think from Putin's standpoint, Trump is clearly the preferable candidate. What the Russians will do to support Trump I think is still unclear. No doubt they'll continue to influence campaign through social media. That's going on now. But whether the Russians will try to interfere with the election itself by manipulating registration or votes, I'm more skeptical of that, but we'll find out, won't we, in a couple of months.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Well, one of the things that they have done is that a Russia friendly judge in Ukraine has just technically opened a case against Biden and Burisma, so it feeds that whole narrative about that's the real crime. It feeds the Senate investigations apparently into Hunter Biden's activities. So Russia can certainly manipulate certain political actors in Ukraine as well to try to influence our election.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
Well, I want to take back to just wrap things up and say huge thank you to Professor Saivetz, to Dr. Samore. That was incredibly enlightening discussion. There's obviously so much for us to pay attention to as events unfold in the next few months, next few years with respect to activities of Russia, the treaties and of course the election here in the United States. So this was incredibly valuable to hear.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
I want to thank everybody for joining us today. This was, again, really terrific. It's so amazing to hear all the different voices from the Brandeis community come in with these incredible questions. I know that there are so many people out there who are learning together. We invite you to join us for more upcoming programs next week on June 2nd with Professor Yehudah Mirsky on the topic of 21st Century Jury and the Anvil of Tribes and Universalism, and on June 4th with Professor Nancy Scott who will discuss Georgia O'Keeffe, Art and Music Suffrage in the Southwest, Commemorating the Centennial of the 19th Amendment.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
So there's a lot of great Brandeis programming. Please continue to join us to see what's out there and to contribute to this great community. Thank you, again to our speakers and to everybody. And we look forward to seeing you all again soon. Take care.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Thanks a lot, Jonathan.
Jonathan Sclarsic:
Thank you.
Gary Samore:
Thanks, everybody.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Bye.
Gary Samore:
Bye, Carol.
Carol R. Saivetz:
Thank you.