Russia, still rising

WORLD POLITICS

Russia, Still Rising

By G. Arnold

American news media have not paid much attention to Russia for many years, but developments in that nation do occasionally get noticed. National Public Radio, for example, recently reported about Russia’s apparent efforts to reassert itself among the world powers. A new NPR Morning Edition story takes particular note of the Kremlin’s renewed attention to its military. As the story suggests, many people see this as evidence that Russia is determined to return, in some way, to the glory days of the Soviet Union, when it was clearly a superpower. The NPR story is largely dismissive of such views, however, and makes generous use of quotations from Pavel Felgenhauer, a well known critic of the Russian government and a writer on military issues for Novaya Gazeta, an opposition paper in Russia. After hearing the piece, one does not get the sense that there is much cause for concern. Indeed, Felgenhauer is quoted as saying, “This [Russian] system is unworkable, and this military is not very good for anything at all.”

The NPR piece is respectable journalism, and stories such play an important part in bringing developments in Russia to national attention. Still, the way the story is presented may unintentionally dampen what little American interest there is in Russia’s quickly changing place in world affairs. And that would be unfortunate. (See a previous Bread and Circus story here.)

Americans are not exactly overflowing with knowledge about Russian affairs. Indeed, the picture that many Americans have of a chaotic, beaten, and toothless Russia from the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union has not been very accurate for some time. To the contrary, there seems little doubt that Russia has the capacity to assert itself much more than has been the case since the early 1990s. It has infrastructure, highly developed research and development capabilities, enormous (and largely untapped) gas and mineral wealth, and a population with a strong sense of national identity. And what’s more, published reports indicate it still has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads that are still operational. (The United States has just over 4,000.)

Still, Russia is not the Middle East and it is not China. So it receives scant attention in the news. I suspect that Americans know far, far more about Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears than they do about the vast Russian nation.

Perhaps Americans largely ignore developments in Russia because they feel secure in the knowledge that it would be difficult for any other power to catch up to the U.S. in military terms. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute recently concluded that the United States alone accounted for roughly 45 percent of the world’s total military spending last year. The Institute calculated that total worldwide military spending was $1.34 trillion (that’s $1,340,000,000,000 ). That’s a lot of cash. The breakdown, as reported in Forbes, listed American spending on weaponry at $547 billion, compared to Russia’s comparatively paltry expenditure of $35.4 billion on weaponry.

But Russia is on the move, and appearances can be deceiving. Considering that the American press pays practically no attention to Russia these days, I wonder if the few recent news stories about Russia will shed much light on what little discussion there is about the topic in the United States. It is surely seems true that the Russia military machine has many problems. But it seems equally true that the Russian government’s emphasis on its military in recent months — combined with its ongoing assertiveness in foreign affairs in Europe and the Middle East, its abundant resources, and its national will — represents more than a casual development.

But the United States remains focused on other things. There’s a strong sense of complacency with regard to thinking about Russia. Too many Americans seem to think that nation is only a concern of the past. But what is needed is more, not less, awareness of Russia’s evolving place on the world stage. The time for the United States to develop and articulate a better way of interacting with Russia is now, not later when some unanticipated new crisis presents itself.

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G. Arnold is an editor of Bread and Circus on-line magazine. A version of this article appeared in his VCB blog.