Tsarnaev Brothers and America's Enemy Within

20 May 2013 | Issue 5129

By Ian Buruma

Klipping The Moscow Times

To learn more about the Tsarnaev brothers, better known as "the Boston bombers," we can dig into their family histories in strife-torn Dagestan, or examine, once again, the lethal appeal of Islamist radicalism. But I doubt that this would be enlightening.
The elder brother, Tamerlan, who died in a gun battle with the police, appears to fit perfectly the profile of what the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger calls "the radical loser." And his younger brother, Dzhokhar, recovering from gunshot wounds in a Boston hospital while waiting to be put on trial for his life, seems to have been a pathetic follower who acted less out of deep conviction than out of fraternal love.
The radical loser is the kind of young man who feels victimized by an unfeeling, uncaring world. That sour sense of rejection, felt by many confused youths, turns for some into a fierce desire for vengeance. Like Samson in the temple of Gaza, he wishes to destroy himself in a public act of violence, taking as many people as possible with him.

Exaggerated fear of outside enemies has always been a part of the political landscape of the United States.

Anything can trigger this final act: a lover's rejection, a job application denied. In the case of Tamerlan, a talented boxer, he was denied the chance to become a champion because he was not yet a U.S. citizen. Radical Islamism offered him a ready-made cause to die for.
More interesting, and in a way far more disturbing, has been the reaction in the U.S. to the Boston bombings, which killed three people and injured 264. Even after Tamerlan had died, and Dzhokhar, already wounded, was the only known fugitive, the Boston authorities decided to close down the entire city. Public transport was halted, trains to and from the city were stopped, shops and business closed, and citizens were told to stay home. Until the surviving bomber was found, Boston was reduced to a ghost town.
If two troubled young men with homemade bombs cobbled together from fertilizer and pressure cookers can have this effect on a major U.S. city, one can imagine how tempting their example must now be to other radical losers, not to mention radical groups. It shows how vulnerable a modern city can be when its leaders lose their nerve.
The authorities' overblown reaction — and that of much of the press — was all the odder for having occurred just as the U.S. Senate was voting down a bill that would have made it harder for known killers and mentally disturbed people to buy guns, or for private individuals to acquire weapons normally used only in warfare.
It seems as though Americans can tolerate a society in which schoolchildren and other innocents are regularly murdered by deranged men with weapons bought on the open market but erupt in collective hysteria when the killings are committed by people labeled as "terrorists."
This may reflect what people are accustomed to. The Spanish had grown so inured to acts of violence from Basque separatists that the murder of 191 people in Madrid by Islamist extremists in 2004 was met with remarkable sang-froid. When 52 people were killed in a suicide bombing on the London Underground the following year, the British, too, reacted with relative calm, having lived through years of Irish terrorist violence in the 1970s. Like the Spanish, they were used to it. Americans, despite the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are not.
Worse than that, a number of Republican senators, including such luminaries as John McCain, called for stripping Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is a U.S. citizen, of his legal rights and placing him before a military tribunal as an "enemy combatant," as though the 19-year-old college student were a soldier in a war against the U.S.
Exaggerated fear of outside enemies has always been part of the U.S. political landscape. The "nation of immigrants" was traditionally regarded as a refuge from danger. The evil outside world should not be able to touch the Land of the Free. When it does — Pearl Harbor or 9/11 — all hell breaks loose.
Another factor may be the need for a common enemy in a country whose citizens come from so many different cultures and traditions. Besieged by Communists or Islamists, people feel a sense of belonging. Defense of the nation against dangerous outsiders — and their domestic agents, whether real or imagined — provides a powerful bond.
Such bonds can be useful, even necessary, in times of war. But the politics of fear poses a danger to the U.S. itself. The aim of political terrorist groups, such as al-Qaida, is to provoke retaliation and maximize publicity for their cause. As common criminals, such groups' members would not achieve this goal. But by claiming to be soldiers at war with the world's biggest military power, they gain sympathy, as well as recruits, among the radical losers and the disaffected.
Former President George W. Bush once explained terrorism as the expression of hatred for American freedom. But when terrorism results in torture of prisoners, ever more police surveillance and official threats to U.S. citizens' legal rights — or, for that matter, when a crime committed by two young immigrants causes an entire city to be shut down — Americans' government is harming their freedom more than any terrorist could ever hope to do.

Ian Buruma is professor of democracy, human rights and journalism at Bard College and the author of "Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents." © Project Syndicate

Why Putin Wants U.S. Bases in Afghanistan

17 May 2013 | Issue 5128

By Michael Bohm

Klipping The Moscow Times

On May 9, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced he would allow the U.S. to keep nine military bases in Afghanistan after direct U.S. participation in the Afghan war ends in 2014. How has President Vladimir Putinresponded to the possibility that Afghanistan may turn into “one giant U.S. aircraft carrier,” as Kremlin-friendly political analyst Yury Krupnov recently put it?
After Karzai’s announcement, you might have expected the Kremlin to offer its usual bluster about how the U.S. and NATO are trying to create a suffocating “Anaconda ring” around Russia — from the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Georgia and Turkey to Afghanistan, South Korea and Japan. You might even have expected a dose of the anti-U.S. demagoguery about the U.S. government using Afghan bases to run a lucrative narcotics-export business, including daily flights of U.S. cargo aircraft filled with heroin destined for Russia and Europe. Or that U.S. bases in Afghanistan could be used for an attack on Russia. After all, Yury Krupnov and other conservative, pro-Kremlin analysts are particularly fond of reminding Russians that a U.S. nuclear missile could reach Moscow from the U.S. airbase in ­Bagram, Afghanistan, in less than 20 minutes.
Yet the Kremlin was conspicuously silent about Karzai’s recent announcement on U.S. bases. At the same time, however, this restraint was consistent with Putin’s general position on Afghan security, which he first articulated in February 2012 during a speech in Ulyanovsk, the home of a joint U.S.-Russian transit center to transport U.S. war materiel out of Afghanistan. During his speech — given to a group of elite Russian paratroopers, no less — Putin offered clear support for the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan.
“We have a strong interest in our southern borders being calm,” Putin said. “We need to help them [U.S. and coalition forces]. Let them fight. … This is in Russia’s national interests.”
Putin also stressed that the U.S. accepted the responsibility of defeating the Taliban, and that U.S. forces should stay there until their mission is fulfilled.
Many didn’t recognize Putin after he pronounced these words. This is the same Putin that has never tired over the past decade of accusing the U.S. and NATO of undermining Russia’s national security by extending their military infrastructure in Europe eastward to Russia’s borders.
During the 12 years that the U.S. has led the ­Afghan war, there have been plenty of opportunities for the Kremlin to exploit U.S. failures, including the fraud-ridden Afghan presidential election in 2009 and, most recently, confirmation from Karzai that the CIA has delivered bags of cash worth tens of millions of dollars to his office since December 2001, when he became the country’s leader.
Nonetheless, there was little Kremlin-sponsored mockery of U.S. attempts to “export democracy” to Afghanistan, nor did it gloat over its favorite quibble — U.S. double standards — by pointing out that the U.S., which rarely misses an opportunity to criticize Russia’s high level of corruption, is a large source of corruption in Afghanistan.
What explains Putin’s uncharacteristic restraint regarding the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan and his pragmatism concerning U.S. bases that may remain in the country after 2014?
The answer is that the security that the U.S. provides to Russia’s southern borders is so important to the Kremlin that Putin is willing, as a rare exception, to refrain from his trademark, overblown anti-U.S. rhetoric. Besides, Putin has plenty of other opportunities to play the anti-U.S card as he wishes — for example, banning U.S. child adoptions, hunting for U.S. “foreign agents” among nongovernmental organizations or blaming the opposition’s protests and the threat of an Orange-like revolution on the U.S. State Department.
There are only a few foreign-policy projects in the Kremlin’s current playbook that can help Russia extend its influence beyond its borders in a significant way. These include the proposed Eurasian Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO. These two important geopolitical projects can be realized, however, only if the former Soviet republics in Central Asia remain calm, peaceful and free of Islamic extremism.
But the CSTO hasn’t been able to agree on a collective military strategy to protect Central Asia from a likely Taliban infiltration after 2014. And Uzbekistan’s 2012 decision to leave the CSTO only made this task more difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill.
In the end, Putin understands that containing ­Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Central Asia is one of the most serious national security issues facing the country. Surely, Putin hasn’t forgotten how the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996, seven years after Soviet forces withdrew from the country, and how it established close ties to Islamic extremist groups from Central Asia, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU. In 1999 and 2000, the IMU operated out of Taliban-supported bases in northern Afghanistan to launch raids into Kyrgyzstan. The IMU was also implicated in an assassination attempt on Uzbekistan’s president in 1999.
Most important, Putin realizes that Russia has few resources on its own to prevent the Taliban and other extremist groups that are allied with it from returning to power in Afghanistan and from infiltrating Russia’s backyard in Central Asia. Putin also understands that the Americans will never be able to bring the ragtag Afghan army — which has been chronically crippled by gross incompetence, 90 percent illiteracy and a 25 percent desertion rate — up to level in which it would independently be able to prevent the Taliban from regaining Kabul.
Yet, as the U.S. prepares to withdraw by 2014, one thing is clear: Only when Putin senses a direct national security threat from Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Central Asia is he willing to take a fair and balanced look at the U.S. If only Putin would use the same pragmatism in working with the U.S. on missile defense and a whole range of other important global issues, U.S.-Russian relations would surely reach a new level of trust and cooperation.

Michael Bohm is opinion page editor of The Moscow Times.

Russian and American Spies Square Off

17 May 2013 | Issue 5128

The Associated Press

Klipping The Moscow Times

AP

Russian ex-spy Anna Chapman, center, walks a Turkish catwalk flanked by two men posing as secret service agents at a fashion show in Antalya, Turkey.

WASHINGTON — The embarrassing arrest of a suspected CIA officer in Moscow is the latest reminder that, even after the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia are engaged in an espionage battle with secret tactics, spying devices and training that sometimes isn't enough to avoid being caught.
The most recent skirmish involves Russian security services ambushing a 29-year-old diplomat who they say was trying to court a spy. The Russians said Ryan Fogle was caught red-handed with a recruitment letter, a compass, two wigs and a wad of cash. The Russians published photographs of his arrest and displayed all his supposed spy gear for the world. It was intended as proof to the public that the young diplomat was in fact working for the CIA: Gotcha.
None of these tactics are new. Humiliating and outwitting the other side is a tradition that extends back decades. In 1977, the KGB arrested a pretty blonde named Martha Peterson in Moscow trying to leave a message for an important spy, code-named Trigon. Just as in the case of Fogle, the Russians were waiting with cameras when they nabbed Peterson. Eight years later, the KGB filmed the arrest of A.G. Tolkachev, a top CIA spy, which it later made available to Russian television.
In a case that made headlines across the world, the FBI in 2010 wrapped up a ring of sleeper agents it had been following for years in the United States. The Russians were not amused. Eventually the sleeper agents, including Anna Chapman, who later posed for a magazine cover in lingerie, were returned in a swap.
These are the perils of working overseas. "I was angry," Peterson recalled in interview. "I was caught with things in my possession too. That is a bad feeling."
The idea is not to get caught. But that's easier said than done. The Russians are famously adept at identifying and catching spies. The Russians have netted at least a dozen agency officers conducting clandestine activities over the years, former CIA officials said.
To reduce its exposure, the CIA goes to great lengths to train its officers to avoid what happened to Fogle — if he was doing what the Russians said.
Agency officers undergo intense training at the CIA spy farm in Virginia, taking what is known as the "field tradecraft course." It's a basic spy course in which agency officers learn to identify when they're being followed. In CIA jargon, they're taught to perform surveillance detection runs. They are supposed to perform these before a mission. The rule of thumb: If a CIA officer sees something twice over time and distance, he or she is likely being watched.
For those being deployed overseas to places like Moscow, they receive further training, including a hostile environment tradecraft course. FBI agents in Washington and New York, who have the most experience following spies, put rookie case officers through their paces. These FBI agents are also trained by the CIA. They play rough, giving the young agency officers a taste of what Fogle likely experienced. The course formerly was known as "internal operations" for CIA officers living behind the Iron Curtain.
The wives or husbands of agency officers stationed in Moscow also took the course. Everyone was expected to be prepared.
Despite precautions, Moscow is a place unto itself. Former agency officers call them "Moscow rules" because of the complex cat-and-mouse games. It can be a hard place to do business, perhaps one of the toughest places in the world to recruit agents. In the past, paranoia has swept through the CIA station in Moscow.
In the late 1980s, when the Cold War was still raging, the Moscow station was practically paralyzed, believing its officers were under constant surveillance. There was no way they could leave the station and recruit people without being spotted. Operations almost came to a halt. By the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the CIA figured out it could do business again in Moscow.
The agency officers in Moscow developed a list of quirky indicators to help determine whether they were being followed. A former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss intelligence operations, recounted that the Russians tended to use cars so inconspicuous that they were conspicuous. There were always two Russians in the car in case one needed to get out on foot. At a red light, they behaved like they were parking rather than stopping at the light. The CIA determined that certain cars with an inverted pyramid on the front grill were used by the KGB.
One former agency officer said he never took shortcuts in Moscow. He would run detection routes that could last hours. The final step involved leaving a car and riding public transportation. Then and only then, eventually moving on foot, would he secretly meet a source. Another agency officer used his wife as a decoy to distract the KGB when he left secret messages.
Sometimes the banal worked.
Persuading the Russians to stop following agency officers sometimes meant boring them. If the Russians believed it was another routine day — walking the dog, grocery shopping and taking the children to the park — they might abandon their surveillance.
To beat the Russians, they also relied on technology. The U.S. government had cracked many of the Soviet Union's encrypted frequencies they used to conduct surveillance. An agency officer using an earpiece could sometimes determine whether chatter about making a "left" or "right" was about him and safely abort his mission.
Even with precautions, Peterson said there are things a spy doesn't know. She had no idea the Russians had learned the identity of Trigon. They knew she was leaving something for him at a designated place at a bridge. They were waiting for her with cameras and flashbulbs when she arrived one summer's night in Moscow. After groping her, KGB agents found a small receiver she had hidden. She was questioned for hours then kicked out of the country.
Later, she found out the CIA had itself been compromised. In 1984, the FBI arrested Karl Koecher after learning he was a KGB mole who once worked for the CIA as a translator. Koecher had a played a role in Trigon's downfall and ultimately in Peterson's arrest.
"I had that feeling I had made a mistake. But it was clearly an ambush in my case," said Peterson, who published a book last year about her experience, "The Widow Spy."
Almost a year after she was caught, the KGB in 1978 publicly revealed Peterson's CIA employment, payback for the FBI disclosing the arrest of three Soviet spies in the U.S. Newspaper reports carried the Soviet claim that she was a "CIA agent" who was involved in a plot to poison one of their citizens. She worked for the CIA but the rest of the story was fiction.
Fogle was waylaid, too, raising questions about what happened. Former CIA officials said that little about his case makes sense. Disguises are typically used to leave the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and sneak past nearby Russian observation points. But once an officer runs the final phase of his detection route, there would have been no need for a wig, much less two.
It's also unlikely, officials said, that Fogle would have been recruiting anyone at that time. Typically, that would have happened already in another setting. You don't use the streets of Moscow to sign up a spy, they said. And the source would have been vetted before any face-to-face meeting. He would have been assessed and then developed before any recruitment.
"I say it would be extremely unusual unless you had 150 percent confidence in the relationship," said Joseph Wippl, a former senior CIA clandestine officer who has worked overseas.
Fogle could have been tempted by a provocation or dangle, something that has always worried the CIA, especially in Russia. Someone could have provided the CIA such sensational "feeder" information that the CIA couldn't resist trying to send a message to the possible recruit in a predetermined place. But the Russians would have been waiting.
Why the Russians made a show of Fogle's arrest is unclear, even as it's happened in other cases. Were they sending a message to the U.S., expressing diplomatic displeasure?
"I don't know what to make of it," Wippl said. "It doesn't add up."
The CIA has declined to comment on Fogle's arrest.
Not every blow-up like Fogle obviously makes the nightly news. In 1988, the KGB executed Soviet Gen. Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov for being a spy for the U.S. government, which had code-named him "Tophat," ''Bourbon" and "Roam." Afterward, according to two former CIA officials, the KGB sent a video of his execution to the CIA.

Russia's Unfinished War

13 May 2013 | Issue 5124

By Alexei Bayer

Klipping The Moscow Times

Alexei Bayer

World War II is only a vague recollection in the rest of the world. Three years ago, my wife's cousin, a heroic U.S. fighter pilot and former prisoner of war, was invited to a ceremony in Great Britain marking the 65th anniversary of victory. But most people no longer remember the date of Nazi Germany's surrender. It is as distant as the Napoleonic Wars were in the early 1880s or the U.S. Civil War was in the 1930s.
Not so in Russia, where Victory Day is still marked by a grandiose parade in Red Square reminiscent of the Soviet flexing of the military muscle, patriotic films and the ubiquitous display of black and yellow St. George's bunting, the symbol of Russian battlefield valor. One part of the nation gets teary-eyed thanking the dwindling number of veterans for the great victory, while the other, smaller part of Russia wonders why Russians are the only people on Earth for whom the war doesn't seem to have ended.
Pompous victory celebrations have been revived more recently, acquiring a certain in-your-face quality, after a hiatus in the late Soviet period, when ordinary Russians had grown deaf to the state's nonstop harping on the debt the rest of the world owed to the Soviet Union for defeating the greatest evil in history. Already in the 1980s, Communist propaganda felt embarrassed to be dusting off the war. It developed a formula which went like this: "The more time passes after the victory, the better we understand what an extraordinary accomplishment it was."
With history's hindsight, the two conflicts of the first half of the 20th century can be seen as a single war with a long truce in-between, in which the West fought to curb the rising power of Germany.
But the conflict involved another rising power, Russia, which always was, at best, a reluctant ally of the West and was often closer to Germany. Germany helped the Bolsheviks seize power in 1917 and recover from the Civil War. The two countries signed the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 and their militaries cooperated in secret. Having fallen out with Hitler in 1933, the Soviet Union then fought alongside Nazi Germany and supplied it with raw materials in 1939-41, while Germany invaded France and bombed Britain.
The world over, World War II began in 1939 and ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. In Russia, it was the Great Patriotic War, which began in 1941 and ended on May 9, 1945. Actually, it didn't end, but turned into a Cold War against the West. Communist ideologues called the postwar period "peaceful coexistence".
Germany eventually found its place in modern, democratic Europe. But even after the collapse of the Russian and Soviet empires in the 20th century and several rearrangements of the European political geography, Russia's place in the world is as elusive as ever. Russia, with its symbol of a two-headed eagle spanning East and West, seems to have fallen between two chairs. The economic revival in Asia has bypassed it. Meanwhile, it constantly turns a resentful, scowling face to Europe and the United States, even as its ruling elites buy up foreign real estate and acquire residency permits.
Russia's extended war has now lasted 99 years with no resolution in sight. When Russia once again waved its St. George's ribbons and rolled its rocket launchers on Red Square on Thursday, it should be kept in mind that it was merely marking another anniversary of an armed truce.

Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.

Why Stalin Would Be Proud of Putin

13 May 2013 | Issue 5124

By Victor Davidoff

Klipping The Moscow Times

One year ago on May 7, President-elect Vladimir Putin's motorcade traversed the empty streets of Moscow, cleared of every living soul by the police, to his inauguration in the Kremlin. This anniversary passed mostly unnoticed by the public and mainstream media. The reason is not so much that it was overshadowed by Victory Day celebrations and protest demonstrations but because there was nothing much to celebrate.
The country is not in better shape than it was a year ago, a fact that even Putin loyalists admit. Journalist Vitaly Tretyakov wrote on his LiveJournal blog: "The leaders of the ruling class are out of control. Reforms have been either unsuccessful or were transformed into business opportunities for bureaucrats. An innovative economy has not appeared, and there are no prospects for it in the near future. And the population hates the greedy ruling class more and more."
Today, it is absolutely clear that the liberal "Putin 2.0" predicted by his fans did not and will not appear. What Putin has achieved over the last 12 months fits perfectly into the description articulated by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Dublin last December: re-Sovietization.

Putin can count on staying in power as long as he wants, just like Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev or Josef Stalin before him.

In the economy, re-Sovietization means the continued strengthening of ineffective, gigantic state corporations. Meanwhile, over the same period the number of small- and medium-sized businesses has dropped. In just the first quarter of 2013, almost 300,000 small businesses —about 7 percent of the total — closed their doors, according to the Economic Development Ministry.
The only new aspect of Putin's economic policy this year was the financing of a number of military projects. The president has said many times that he believes this is one of the most important sectors of the economy. Putin's approach is in stark contrast to the policy of both Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, who saw the military as an albatross around the neck of the Russian economy.
Internationally, Putin has continued to retreat to the old bunkers of the Сold War. In his indirect reply to Clinton, Putin stated that the territory of the former Soviet Union is Russia's sphere of interest. In practice, this is used to hinder former Soviet republics in integrating into the European Union and developing stronger ties with Western countries. The "reset" with the U.S. can be considered dead in the water, and every attempt to draw Putin into the constructive resolution of international problems has been unsuccessful. This is not surprising since Russia is actually part of the problem, with Syria and Iran being two vivid examples.
Starting almost immediately last May, the State Duma quickly adopted a series of laws limiting citizens' rights. This garnered the Duma the nickname of the "mad printer" on the Russian blogosphere. The new limitations on human rights are so comprehensive that in just a year the situation has come close to that of the Soviet era.
New articles were added to the criminal and administrative codes to limit freedom of speech, assembly and association. In recent weeks, there has been a mass crackdown on nongovernmental organizations, which, according to activists, is designed to put NGOs under complete state control. Elena Panfilova, director of the Russian branch of Transparency International, predicted on her Facebook page that "sometime at the end of autumn there won't be a single independent NGO left. Not one. Some will try to curry favor with the victors. Others will die off without funding or cease operations. The holdouts will be closed, and their directors sent to the camps."
The most logical result of Putin's actions over the last year is a fall in ratings. According to recent Levada Center polls, today only 26 percent of the population wants to see him re-elected, and 55 percent hope that a new president will be elected. Meanwhile, the slogan "Russia Without Putin" is now supported by 24 percent of the population, up from 19 percent last year.
Do these figures mean that Putin has no chance of re-election? Not at all. Thanks to the Kremlin's monopoly on the mass media and the well-greased system of "managing" elections, Putin can count on staying in power as long as he wants, just like Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev or Josef Stalin before him.
Given all of this, an event that took place last week in the Siberian city of Yakutsk has special symbolic meaning. A new monument to Stalin was unveiled. Let's forget about the millions of innocent victims who died at Stalin's bidding. Let this monument be a beacon on Putin's path of re-­Sovietization.

Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist who follows the Russian blogosphere in his biweekly column.

The EU and Europe's East

13 May 2013 | Issue 5124

By Denis Corboy and William Courtney

Klipping The Moscow Times

East of the European Union, people tend to see the EU as a rich and sophisticated partner, a beacon for a better future and a strategic counterweight. Autocratic rulers in Moscow and Minsk are exceptions, yet they are torn. While tightening membership standards, the EU should improve ties with reforming countries in the East.
Views of the EU and its institutions differ across Europe. British Prime Minister David Cameron says support in his country for the EU is "wafer-thin." In Greece, Italy and Spain, unemployment hovers around 25 percent. The deep recession that has blanketed southern Europe is edging northward. The public sector in France is 57 percent of gross domestic product, helping to make its economy the least competitive in the EU. Poor governance and fractious politics in Italy increase risks. Financial bailouts may not be enough to keep Spain afloat.
East of the divide, the EU picture is brighter. A recent Kosovar-Serbian accord over the Serb-dominated area in Kosovo reflects a powerful EU pull. Estonia and Slovakia are prospering in the eurozone. Lithuania is joining, and the Czech Republic, Latvia and Poland may do so. Ukraine is eager for an EU Association agreement but may lose it if former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko remains jailed as a political prisoner. Georgia strives for closer links and admission to the EU.

Strengthened EU economic ties will enhance freedom of maneuver in the East, making it harder for Russia to exploit its energy monopoly.

Although Russia wants to become a leader of a potential Eurasian union with former Soviet neighbors, it considers itself a European power and aspires to better EU relations and access. The EU is Russia's largest trading partner and energy market, and the source of three-quarters of its foreign direct investment. The Kremlin pleads for visa-free travel to the EU, even though values increasingly diverge. Even Belarus, a target of EU human rights sanctions, wants European investment and improved contacts to offset Russian predominance.  
Current difficulties should not obscure the EU's quest for an enlarged European family or underrate the union's staying power.  Robust linkages with the East, beyond the anemic and underfunded Eastern Partnership, can encourage civil society and respect for human rights. They might also help the EU resolve some of its own problems. Greater trade and investment with the East would increase competition and opportunity across Europe and Eurasia.  This would improve consumer welfare and help expose structural impediments to growth, spurring pressures to lessen them.
Too much haste or rule-of-law compromises with the East would undermine reformers. EU Association agreements must combine economic gain with democratic conditionality. They will reduce undue impediments to private economic activity and assist countries in the East in modernizing laws and regulations to meet higher EU standards and adapt to the single market. Agreements need not imply a potential path to full EU membership. If they did, the EU would hesitate with some important countries, such as Kazakhstan if it democratized.
The East must be realistic. The EU will admit new members only if they are fully and unconditionally ready to assume common objectives and obligations. Bulgaria and Romania, which have per capita GDP that is half of the EU average, entered the union far too soon. Cyprus and Greece are disappointments. Admission should be by merit, whether in the Western Balkans or farther east.
Strengthened EU economic ties will enhance freedom of maneuver in the East, making it harder for Russia or others to exploit monopoly positions in such areas as energy, geography and transport.
Many nations in the East seek Western help in countering Russia, and nearly all pursue Western investment. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which the EU and the U.S. are negotiating, will build confidence, improve economies in the East and strengthen Western ties. U.S. political analyst Zbigniew Brzezinski may have had this in mind recently when he said the partnership would "generate new vitality, more security and greater cohesion in the West."
Temporary crises should not distract Europe from offering strategic reassurance and economic opportunity to democratizing countries in the East. A Europe whole, free and prosperous remains a compelling vision.

Denis Corboy, a visiting senior research fellow at Kings College, London, served as European Commission ambassador to Armenia and Georgia. William Courtney was U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia and special assistant to the president for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia.

Strong-Armed Tactics

05 May 2013 | Issue 5121

By Alexander Golts

Klipping The Moscow Times

It seems that disarmament talks and treaties, one of the most promising areas of U.S.-Russian cooperation, might be removed from the bilateral agenda soon. The media reports that the U.S. has initiated a program to modernize the B61 tactical nuclear bomb with advanced guidance mechanisms and to mount it on F-16 and F-35 jet fighters. But at stake here is not simply the modernization of the United States' estimated 200 tactical bombs located in Europe. After all, Russia has five times more tactical nuclear weapons.
The problem is that the decision to modernize the B61 nuclear missile effectively indicates that the U.S. is backtracking on a goal that U.S. President Barack Obama had named as a top priority when he first took office: the impossible task of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed the same lofty goal 20 years ago. But it is not surprising that the declarations by both leaders were met with a healthy dose of skepticism.

If the Kremlin were truly worried about the 200 U.S. tactical nuclear bombs in Europe, it would be trying to negotiate with Washington on reducing both sides' arsenals.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq taught the world a lesson that it already had known for decades: possession of nuclear weapons provides national security and serves as the great equalizer on the global arena.  In a sense, it is like the famous long-barreled revolver that was popular in the Wild West of the 19th century. As the saying goes, "The Lord made all men different, but Samuel Colt made them equal." It is nearly impossible to  convince states who are serious about becoming nuclear powers to give up their ambitions, but two presidential terms provides ample time for Obama to make significant strides toward reducing the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, both of which hold 90 percent of all such weapons in existence.
After signing the New START agreement in 2010, Washington proposed negotiations to reduce tactical nuclear weapons. Strategic weapons are controlled by limiting the number of carriers: aerial bombers as well as missiles based on both land and submarines. But tactical nuclear weapons can be delivered by numerous means: bombs, cruise missiles, artillery systems and aircraft, which means that reductions can only be achieved by limiting the total number of nuclear warheads. In addition, monitoring compliance with future tactical arms reduction agreements would require allowing inspectors to monitor each country's nuclear warhead storage depots. That would be a windfall for diplomats because negotiating the terms for such inspections would alone take years. The U.S. proposed that the two countries start small by exchanging data on the number of tactical nuclear weapons each holds.
But Russia immediately balked at this suggestion, demanding that negotiations on tactical nuclear weapons begin only after the 200 tactical nuclear bombs located in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Turkey are removed. The problem is that NATO member states are divided on this question. Germany and Belgium would like to get rid of the nuclear weapons, while other NATO states believe the bombs provide crucial nuclear deterrence and collective security in Europe. In any case, long and arduous negotiations within NATO would be required before any bombs could be removed.
By making the removal of all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons located in Europe a prerequisite to talks, Russia effectively rejected the call for negotiations. Washington effectively confirmed that Russia's condition to remove all tactical bombs was a non-starter by announcing its program to and proceeded to upgrade its B61s. Obviously, those 200 nuclear bombs will now remain in Europe for a long time to come.
Pro-Kremlin analysts contend that although Moscow holds from five to 10 times as many tactical nuclear weapons located on Russian territory, their range is too limited to reach Washington and New York. But modern Western F-16s and F-35s could easily fly to Central or Eastern European countries, from which they could strike Moscow and St. Petersburg with tactical nuclear weapons. If the Kremlin were seriously worried about such a threat, however, it would have engaged in negotiations in hopes of achieving the removal of some of those bombs in exchange for additional reductions to Russia's nuclear arsenal. Yet the Kremlin is not looking for solutions. Rather, it is constantly searching for ways to draw the West into protracted and futile debate over imaginary problems to bolster its image as a major power and to manipulate the political landscape toward its own short-term and ill-conceived advantage. This means that it is highly unlikely that there will be any real results from discussion about reducing tactical weapons in Europe and Russia.
Even worse, the New START treaty, the crown jewel of Obama's nuclear reduction policy, might now be in doubt. Deputy Defense Minister Yury Borisov recently announced that the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, the manufacturer of the Topol-M, Yars and Bulava missiles, was taking a serious look at developing a railways-based nuclear missile program. These weapons were one of the greatest headache for Pentagon strategists in the late 1980s because, unlike silo-based missiles, they are difficult to detect from satellite surveillance. Railway-based missiles can be placed at virtually any point across Russia's vast territory and hidden from U.S. view. It is no coincidence that railway-based nuclear weapons were shelved 10 years ago to close that confrontational, Cold War chapter in U.S.-Russian relations. Thus, if an official decision is made to revive that system, it could destabilize the strategic balance between Russia and the U.S., especially since U.S. senators insisted on prohibiting the redevelopment of railway-based missiles as a condition for ratifying the New START.
As a result, the prospect for U.S.-Russian cooperation on nuclear arms reductions is as cloudy as ever.

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.

2 Prescriptions to Help Resolve the Global Crisis

05 May 2013 | Issue 5121

By Kaushik Basu

Klipping The Moscow Times

One thing that experts know, and that non-experts do not, is that they know less than non-experts think they do. This much was evident at the just-completed Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group. They were three intense days of talks that brought together finance ministers, central bankers and other policymakers.
Our economic expertise is limited in fundamental ways. Consider monetary and fiscal policies. Despite decades of careful data collection and mathematical and statistical research, on many large questions we have little more than rules of thumb. For example, we know that we should lower interest rates and inject liquidity to fight stagnation and that we should raise policy rates and banks' cash-reserve ratios to stifle inflation. Sometimes we rely on our judgment in combining interest rate action with open-market operations. But the fact remains that our understanding of these policies' mechanics is rudimentary.
These rules of thumb work as a result of evolution. Over time, the wrong moves are penalized, and their users either learn by watching others or disappear. We get our monetary and fiscal policies right the same way that birds build their nests right.
As with all behaviors shaped by evolution, when the environment changes, there is a risk that existing adaptations become dysfunctional. This has been the fate of some of our standard macroeconomic policies. The formation of the eurozone and a half-century of relentless globalization have altered the global economic landscape, rendering once-proven policies ineffective.
When Sweden's Riksbank was founded in 1668, followed by the Bank of England in 1694, the motivation was that a single economy should have a single central bank. Over the next three centuries, as the benefits of instituting a monopoly over money creation became more widely recognized, a slew of central banks were established, one for each politically bounded economy.
What was not anticipated was that globalization would erode these boundaries. As a result, we have returned to a past from which we tried to escape: a single economy with multiple money-creating authorities.
This is clearly maladaptive, and it explains why the massive injections of liquidity by advanced-country central banks are failing to jump-start economies and create more jobs. After all, in a globalized economy, much of this liquidity spills across political boundaries, giving rise to inflationary pressures in distant lands and precipitating the risk of currency wars, while unemployment at home remains dangerously high, threatening to erode workers' skills. The long-run damage could be devastating.
What was evident at the World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings was that virtually all policymakers are distressed, and no one has a complete answer. Neither do I. But here are two simple ideas that could help to mitigate the crisis.
First, in the absence of a single global central-banking authority, a modicum of monetary-policy coordination among major economies is required. We need a group of the major economies — call it "G Major" — that announces monetary policies in a coordinated fashion.
To see why, consider the case of Japan. Japanese policymakers have good reason to try to promote some inflation and even correct some of the yen's secular appreciation over the last six or seven years. But in today's unilateral world, other central banks would soon respond by injecting liquidity, prompting the Bank of Japan to act again. These actions are usually justified as policies for boosting domestic demand, but they end up fueling a surrogate, low-grade currency war.
If, however, the G Major economies issued quarterly announcements of significant upcoming policy changes — for example, a small round of quantitative easing by country X, a larger liquidity injection by countries Y and Z, and so on — markets would be reassured that a currency war was not being fought. Exchange-rate movements would be minimal and only as intended, and volatility would be contained because tit-for-tat injections would no longer occur and speculation would wane. Moreover, liquidity injections would be likely to have a greater impact on demand because synchronization would reduce leakage across national boundaries.
The second recommendation pertains to the mechanics of liquidity injection, much of which takes place nowadays — in Europe, Japan and elsewhere — through asset purchases. The U.S. Federal Reserve, for example, is currently purchasing assets, many of them mortgage-backed, worth $85 billion each month.
Liquidity injections and low interest rates have a microeconomic effect that has received little attention. They lower the cost of capital vis-a-vis the cost of labor, which causes a relative decline in demand for labor. This is very likely exacerbating the unemployment problem. In any case, it is certainly not mitigating it.
One solution is to channel part of the liquidity injections toward countering this factor-cost asymmetry. Thus, for every $100 of new liquidity we could use $60 to purchase assets and the remainder to give firms a marginal job-creation subsidy, which could be especially effective in economies with flexible labor markets that enable short-term hiring.
Even if the employment subsidy were offered only for, say, one year, firms would be tempted to use more labor during this time.Since the current bout of high unemployment is self-reinforcing, once the equilibrium is broken for a while, the economy could move to a higher-employment equilibrium permanently without the need for any further government support.
This prescription has one problem. Asset purchases have no balance-sheet effect because assets replace money. Subsidizing labor, by contrast, is a pure injection of liquidity. But for precisely that reason, an employment subsidy is likely to be more effective in boosting demand, which implies that a smaller injection of this kind is likely to boost demand as much as a larger asset purchase would.
Among the few certainties in crafting economic policy is the need to adapt to external change. Our challenge is like that of Industrial Revolution-era moths, which adapted to their new soot-laden environment by becoming darker and thus better able to hide from predators. In a globalized economy, national policymakers should not be left circling light bulbs.

Kaushik Basu is senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and professor of economics at Cornell University. © Project Syndicate