Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War

Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 450 pp. $49.95 hardcover. The post-cold war era, which saw immense and sometimes meandering changes in the U.S.-Russia relationship, began and ended with collapse. The first collapse took place in Berlin on November 9, 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall set off rapid chain of events that resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union and complete turnaround in Soviet-American relations. As the meek prefix suggests, the post-cold war era was period of uncertainty--both for America, which was trying to create new foreign policy to deal with nascent world order, and for Russia, which was dealing with more proximal but certainly no less immense challenges. The second collapse took place on September 11,2001, and with it America has once again found its mission in the world. One of the effects of the terrorist acts has been second transformation of U.S.-Russia relations. James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul chart the snaking path of the U.S.-Russia relationship during this great period of transition in their book Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War. Their focus is on the American side of the story, particularly on the president and his top advisers in the executive branch formulated and carried out America's Russia policy. From the post-collapse euphoria to the growing discontent of the 1990s (culminating in near-breakdown of relations by the end of 1999), and then on to the Bush-Putin relationship and the conflict over Iraq, the book weaves narrative that is both readable and analytically intriguing. There were two major schools of thought that shaped the United States' Russian policy, contend the authors. One consisted of power balancers--the realists who argued that Russia's domestic regime had no bearing on Russia's international behavior. The power balancers' chief concern was the promotion of American national interests, and Russia's cooperation in the international arena was far more important than what its leaders were doing inside the country. The second group, the regime transformers, consisted of proponents of soft power and believers in the theory of the democratic peace. They considered Russia's internal transformation to be crucial to its integration and cooperation with the rest of the world and believed in using American resources to steer that transformation toward economic and political liberalization. Together, the two groups make up the two components--power and purpose--of the book's title. In this analytical framework, the first President Bush was power balancer who sought to maintain the status quo and did want to become entangled in Russia's domestic upheavals. Clinton, on the other hand, was Wilsonian liberal who emphasized the promotion of democracy inside Russia and did hesitate to use American power and resources to do so. George W. Bush's policy has been return to realism. Especially since September 11, Bush has sought to engage Russia in the international sphere while increasingly choosing to ignore both Russia's behavior in Chechnya and Putin's autocratic tendencies in the domestic sphere. Russia is now an ally not because of its internal organization but because of shared threats. This is useful but simplified view, as the authors readily admit. There were power balancers and regime transformers in every administration; moreover, the two camps often had dissenting factions that differed in their views of how ideas of power and purpose should be applied to Russia. In the first Bush administration, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Dick Cheney's Defense Department pushed for an early recognition of the independent republics and shift from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. President Bush and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, on the other hand, preferred more prudent, cautious approach, along with a firm policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union. …