{"id":42182,"date":"2025-02-03T17:56:42","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T14:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/?p=42182"},"modified":"2025-02-03T17:56:42","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T14:56:42","slug":"a-secret-cable-and-a-clue-to-where-us-russia-relations-went-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/03\/a-secret-cable-and-a-clue-to-where-us-russia-relations-went-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"A Secret Cable and a Clue to Where US-Russia Relations Went Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Serge Schmemann<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was March 1994, more than two years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the debates within the US Embassy in Moscow were heated. Diplomats in the economic section, backed by the Treasury Department in Washington, argued ardently that radical free-market reforms were the only path for post-Soviet Russia, and that democracy would surely follow. Political advisers believed, equally passionately, that such \u201cshock therapy\u201d would only worsen the devastating dislocation Russians were already suffering with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian people, they warned, would end up blaming America \u2014 and democracy itself \u2014 for their woes.<\/p>\n

In the heat of the debate, E. Wayne Merry, the top political analyst in the embassy and one of the most forceful critics of shock therapy, set out a detailed case against it in a long telegram provocatively titled \u201cWhose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an essay last month about the telegram, Mr. Merry argued that America back then was falling for the old fallacy of trying to understand a foreign country \u201cby looking in the mirror.\u201d The push for free-market reforms in a country without any experience of a market economy or democracy was, he wrote, \u201can especially virulent case of Washington institutions trying to ram a foreign square peg into an American round hole.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Merry, now a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told me in an interview, \u201cWhy did I end up writing those 70 paragraphs? I had for two and a half years been writing about these issues, and was very frustrated that nobody in D.C. was interested in anything other than economic theory coming down from Harvard.\u201d He was so frustrated, he added, \u201cI decided it was my duty as head of Pol\/Int\u201d \u2014 the political\/internal department of the embassy \u2014 \u201cto tell Washington what was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the senior staff at the embassy kept dithering on how to officially attribute the cable, so out of frustration, he said, Mr. Merry sent it over what is known as the dissent channel, a back channel to the State Department set up during the Vietnam War to allow diplomats who differed with US policy to register their views. The lengthy telegram and a brief rebuttal from the State Department were duly consigned to the sealed bin of official secrets.<\/p>\n

But the cable was not forgotten. For years, Russia experts at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit institution that publishes declassified government documents, pursued what came to be known as \u201cWayne Merry\u2019s long telegram,\u201d a nod to George Kennan\u2019s celebrated 1946 \u201cLong Telegram\u201d that shaped US policy toward the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The Archive finally succeeded in publishing the telegram in December. The full text of the telegram, and its fascinating back story, is available on the Archive\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

Revisiting those debates recalls the wrenching transition of the 1990s. Russia was in shambles. Attempts at market reforms had left much of the population destitute and the government at war with itself. In October 1993, several months before Mr. Merry wrote his telegram, President Boris Yeltsin had ordered tanks and troops to roust the contentious Parliament and ruled essentially by decree \u2014 with the approval of the Clinton administration.<\/p>\n

Those were years when Russia was still open to the West, and Americans were pouring into the country as tourists, students, entrepreneurs and all manner of well-intentioned consultants. Vladimir Putin was an unknown former KGB agent working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, still a long way from power.<\/p>\n

Thirty years later, the US relationship with Russia is at its worst since the Cold War. What went awry? Mr. Putin is the main culprit for Russia\u2019s return to authoritarianism, aggression and hostility to the West. But American arrogance and presumptions cannot be dismissed.<\/p>\n

I was the Times bureau chief in Moscow through those turbulent times, watching the parade of private and public advisers earnestly trying to graft Western liberal democracy onto the carcass of the Soviet Union. Few had any idea of Russia\u2019s history or society; many made quick fortunes in the chaos. I remember one earnest official of the International Monetary Fund musing that if the fund\u2019s prescription for freeing energy prices was adopted, half the population would freeze to death.<\/p>\n

Mr. Merry\u2019s cable was a cri de coeur against this approach. \u201cEven the most progressive and sympathetic of Russian officials have lost patience with the endless procession of what they call \u2018assistance tourists\u2019 who rarely bother to ask their hosts for an appraisal of Russian needs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

American efforts, he wrote, should focus instead on a \u201cnonaggressive Russian external policy and development of workable democratic institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cable concluded with a prescient warning: \u201cIf the West, with the United States in the front rank, prefers the role of economic missionary to that of true partner, we will assist Russian extremists to undermine the country\u2019s nascent democracy and will encourage a renewal of Russia\u2019s adversarial stance toward the outside world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is that what has happened? Was America\u2019s advocacy of \u201cshock therapy\u201d responsible for the rise of oligarchs and the ascent of Mr. Putin?<\/p>\n

Debating \u201cwho lost Russia\u201d is notoriously futile. We don\u2019t know, and never will, what other direction history might have taken. Myriad forces were at play. The decision in 1994 to expand NATO, which prompted even more contentious disputes within the US government, arguably had a greater role in turning Russians against the West than misguided advice.<\/p>\n

My sense at the time was that the Russians\u2019 resentment of the West and of liberal democracy grew in large part from the souring of their overblown expectations and overly romanticized image of America. The first waves of reformers and advisers came to be associated with the humiliation and poverty that followed the collapse of the Soviet empire; Mr. Putin shared this resentment and learned to exploit it.<\/p>\n

Yet it is also true that Russians were listening to Americans in the 1990s. In fact, \u201cwe were the only ones Russians were listening to,\u201d said James F. Collins, who served as acting ambassador and ambassador to Moscow in those years. \u201cOne can\u2019t minimize the degree to which for a half-dozen years the US was the place with the answers, though admittedly there was some skepticism.\u201d<\/p>\n

One reason was that \u201cthe Soviet education system taught nothing about how markets worked,\u201d recalled Svetlana Savranskaya, who was a student in Russia in the late 1980s and later spent years trying to wrest Mr. Merry\u2019s cable from the State Department as director of the National Security Archive\u2019s Russia programs. So Russians naturally turned to America, the capitalist North Star, for guidance, many visiting the United States and returning awed by the malls and the energy.<\/p>\n

There is little point 30 years on in playing the blame game. But the story of American blithely pushing destructive advice onto alien lands \u2014 from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan \u2014 cannot be retold too often. Those distant debates are a reminder that Americans exert enormous influence. If we are oblivious to or disdainful of the needs of other people, we are capable of enormous harm \u2014 to them, and to our own country\u2019s interests and standing.<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Serge Schmemann It was March 1994, more than two years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the debates within the US Embassy in Moscow were heated. Diplomats in the economic section, backed by the Treasury Department in Washington, argued ardently that radical free-market reforms were the only path for post-Soviet Russia, and that democracy would …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42185,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42182\/revisions\/42185"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}