Yeltsin Again

I think Brad DeLong and I are talking about cross purposes with regard to Russia policy in the 1990s. I agree with him as to what the goal of America's policy should have been. In his earlier post, though, Brad was writing about why our policy didn't achieve those results and all I'm trying to say is that we should consider the possibility that we didn't achieve what Brad (and I) think we should have achieved because these weren't the actual policy goals the Clinton administration was pursuing.

They may well have been the Treasury Department's goals (it seems to me that economists generally have sound foreign policy views) but the Treasury Department doesn't ultimately set policy toward major countries like Russia.

Comments

You got a sigh from Brad. You better be careful or you might be a topic of "Why can't we have a better blogging corps?"

Posted by m.swann | May 9, 2007 11:20 AM

You got a sigh from Brad. You better be careful or you might be a topic of "Why can't we have a better blogging corps?"

Posted by m.swann | May 9, 2007 11:21 AM

He's going to call you the stupidest man alive, the next Jonathan Chait, refer to you as "colleague of noted racist Andrew Sullivan," and tell everyone to cancel their subscriptions to The Atlantic.

I'm with Brad 99% on politics and econ, but he's got to learn to cool it. A couple of times I noted minor errors in comments and he deleted them (it was something boring about how index funds work). He is really thin-skinned. He's the comic book store guy from the Simpsons.

Posted by chris | May 9, 2007 12:19 PM

You're not talking at cross purposes. You just disagree. Brad was in the administration at the time, he knows the people involved, and has some sense (presumably) of what they were thinking, and he's telling you that our policy toward Russia was not fundamentally determined by a desire to keep Russia weak. You, by contrast, have no real idea of what the administration was thinking, but are offering a hypothesis based purely on some theoretical assumptions about realpolitik and the way you believe states are inclined to behave. So why, exactly, do you think you're right?

Posted by K. Williams | May 9, 2007 12:28 PM

Come to remember, in Rubin's memoirs, he mentions how in 1997 and 1998 he was under immense pressure to help bailout Russia. He opposed it on account of moral hazzard and his (correct)assessment that any rescue package would fail.

While this doesn't address directly the issue at hand, it's interesting to note I think.

Posted by Nick Kaufman | May 9, 2007 12:44 PM

Actually, given the record of Neoliberal shock treatments (most of the former WarPac don't count because the "Old Europe" states bailed them out when they joined the EU), not only was what happened in Russia predictable, but forseeable.

Neoliberal economics is an intriguing theory, but it has NEVER lived up to its own opinion of itself.

Even the pre white house George W. Bush did not have this level of failure.

Hell, it flunked in Chile under Pinochet because of racketeering and fraud.

If it can't work under a police state because people cheat too much, it just can't work.

Posted by Matthew Saroff | May 9, 2007 1:13 PM

Like Aq Qaeda looking on as Sunni insurgents attack Americans, I think a nasty catfight between Matthew and Brad would be great sport.

So I posted the following over at Brad's blog:
---------
1) I find it hilarious that Mr Delong can NOT bring himself to mention "Caspian Sea Oil".

You know -- the area north of Afghanistan that may have the world's second largest deposits of oil.

After all, Chevron has invested around $1 Billion in the Caspian Sea area. You know Chevron -- the company that named an oil tanker after our current Secretary of State--
back when she was on its Board of Directors?

2) And guess which pudgy Vice-President served on Kazakhstan's Energy Board back in the 1990s? A Vice-President who remained remarkably mum about the joys of Democracy whenever he was in Kazakhstan.

3) Of course, Russia thinks it owns part of that oil. Which is why Russia didn't accept it when some ..er.. "sinister force" convinced the Chechynans to blow up the Russian pipeline connecting Baku to the Black Sea.

Iran claims part of the oil as well --but CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt showed us how to handle the Iranians back in the 1950s.
You simply have the CIA bribe military officers to overthrow a lawfully-elected parliament /Prime Minister and replace them with a puppet dictator and a secret police which tortures.

Plus China badly needs the Caspian Sea oil -- you can't run 1 billion Toyotas on rice saki.

For some more info on the "New Great Game" see this 2004 article in The Nation
titled "Oil and the New Great Game":
http://www.kleveman.com/centralasia/thenation160204.htm

A money quote:
"I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian," declared Dick Cheney in 1998 in a speech to oil industrialists in Washington. Cheney was then still CEO of the oil-services giant Halliburton. In May 2001 Cheney, now US Vice President, recommended in the Administration's seminal National Energy Policy report that "the President make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy," singling out the Caspian Basin as a "rapidly growing new area of supply."

Google also on "New Great Game"

4) That's hardly a "small chickenhawk feather".

Although I do catch the whiff of the barnyard around here. Or is it academic "international relations" that I smell?

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Posted by Don Williams | May 9, 2007 1:27 PM

Well, Matt is a blogging colleague of Andrew "I was happy with Bush when I thought I was in on the con" Sullivan...

And Sullivan still has yet to perform his public groveling apology to Paul Krugman for criticizing Paul for being... less shrill and anti-Bush in 2000 than Sullivan is now...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Blogging Corps?

In the making of U.S. policy toward Russia in the 1990s, there are four players (a) the Treasury, which means Rubin-Summers-Lipton; (b) the Congress, which is unwilling to vote any Marshall Plan-scale aid package; (c) Strobe Talbott at the State Department; and (d) Bill Clinton.

I saw Clinton in action: Clinton felt that he might have turned into Yeltsin had he been born in the Soviet Union, empathizes with Yeltsin, and is willing to cut him enormous slack. I didn't see Talbott in action doing anything other than agreeing with Clinton, but I presumed that Talbott had talked to Clinton privately beforehand, and it was extremely rare for *anybody* to do anything other than agree with the president in any meeting large enough for me to be a part of it. I saw Congress in action, and they were unsympathetic to the argument that $10 billion in aid now might well save us $500 billion in military spending in a decade. And I saw the Treasury.

My sense is that AEI and PNAC and Condi Rice and company saw the U.S. victory in the Cold War as a chance to act toward Russia like Clemenceau had acted toward Germany in 1919: a chance to permanently enfeeble the hated adversary. My sense is that simply wasn't a consideration among the players in the Clinton administration.

The extent to which AEI and PNAC and Condi Rice and company influenced the thinking of Gingrich, Dole, and company in the Congress is not something that I saw.

Posted by Brad DeLong | May 9, 2007 3:51 PM

"My sense is that simply wasn't a consideration among the players in the Clinton administration."

My reading of the history tends to agree with your observations.

I think Matt's got some weird blind spots in regards to Russia.

Posted by Petey | May 9, 2007 3:54 PM

Talbott suggested Rice as ambassador to Moscow, that's a lost more damning and illustrative than sharing a bloghead with Andrew Sullivan.

Posted by Ed Marshall | May 9, 2007 5:06 PM

Re Brad Delong's comment "My sense is that simply wasn't a consideration
among the players in the Clinton administration."
-----

1) Caspian Sea oil has been a prize for decades -- it arguably was a major reason why Adolf Hitler was stupid enough to invade southern Russia.

2) It was no different in the Clinton Administration. If Clinton was interested
in helping the Russian economy, he would not have allowed the Turks to shut off the Bosphorous to Russian oil tankers headed to Europe. Russia was supposed to have free passage of the Bosphorous due to a 1929 treaty.

3) The record shows that Madalaine Albright was practically wetting her pants at the idea of seizing the Caspian Sea oil. Look , for example , at this 1998 TIME article on the Caspian Sea "Great Game":
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,988272,00.html

Some extracts:
------------
"But the title, which means "head of all Turkmen," belongs to one Saparmurat
Niyazov, President of Turkmenistan, a parched former Soviet republic that happens
to sit atop immense oil deposits and the fourth largest natural-gas reserves
in the world. So last week Niyazov got the imperial treatment from the Clinton
Administration and a host of U.S. businessmen eager to start exploiting those
riches in earnest.

Niyazov was put up at Blair House, across the street from the White House, an
honor reserved for true VIPs. He got 45 minutes with Clinton in the Oval Office and conferred with Cabinet officers and CIA Director George Tenet. More than two dozen oil and equipment companies kicked in to sponsor a dinner in Niyazov's honor at a downtown hotel, and 300 of America's top government decision makers,
business executives and lobbyists thronged the ballroom."
---------
"While American energy companies joined the Caspian rush early, the U.S. government
was slow to get organized. Some of Washington's top power brokers and law firms went to work for Caspian governments or U.S. companies, selling, consulting, lobbying or opening doors. Among them were former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney,
former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, and John Sununu, who was George Bush's
chief of staff.

Perhaps the most active Washington name is former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, now a consultant for Amoco. He has long been a mentor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and he has warned the White House for years that the U.S. was making a strategic mistake
in paying so little attention to the new central Asian nations.

Albright and her senior State Department colleagues sat down for a full-dress
CIA briefing on the Caspian last August. The agency had set up a secret task
force to monitor the region's politics and gauge its wealth. Covert CIA officers,
some well-trained petroleum engineers, had traveled through southern Russia,
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to sniff out potential oil reserves.
When the policymakers heard the agency's report, Albright concluded that
working to mold the area's future was "one of the most exciting things that we can do."

Posted by Don Williams | May 9, 2007 5:08 PM