Minister No - By Susan B.

Glasser | Foreign Policy

29.04.2013 23:56

Minister No
In the mid-19th century, Russia was not doing well. It had just been humiliated in the Crimean War, and the other European great powers were busy intriguing about the tsarist empire's frontiers now that the Turks had stopped Russian expansion to the Black Sea. It was in response to these setbacks that Alexander Gorchakov, the prince who served as Russia's foreign minister, issued his famous diplomatic circular. "Russia is not sulking," he proclaimed. "She is composing herself." By the late 1990s, that must have sounded like a perfect retort to a Russian nationalist whose country was on the ropes. Yevgeny Primakov, a crusty old product of the Soviet diplomatic corps elevated to foreign minister by an increasingly beleaguered President Boris Yeltsin, dusted off the tsarist history books and resurrected Gorchakov as a model for a new Russian diplomacy. He cited him in speeches, wrote a long article extolling Gorchakov's clever realpolitik maneuvers, and even installed his bust in the creaky grandeur of the Foreign Ministry, a Stalinist Gothic skyscraper filled with thousands of underemployed and barely paid bureaucrats still reeling from the Soviet Union's abrupt collapse a few years earlier and the Russian state's quick descent into financial crisis, international debt, and even, on its southern frontier, civil war. So what if we had a few setbacks, Primakov seemed to be saying; Russia can still be a great power. And to prove it: Here's our very own Bismarck. It wasn't entirely a surprise then, when not quite an hour into my recent audience with the current Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, the 19th-century prince again made an appearance. I had asked the famously combative Lavrov what had changed in Russia's foreign policy since Vladimir Putin had returned to power in the Kremlin last year. I had in mind the angry recriminations between the United States and Russia once again making front-page headlines, the tit-for-tat new laws banning human rights-violating Russian officials from America -- and American citizens from adopting Russian babies. Or perhaps the tense negotiations over the bloody civil war
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in Syria, as the United States accused Russia of propping up Bashar al-Assad's murderous regime. Or the angry words exchanged near daily on subjects as diverse as missile defense, gay rights, and the arrest of the Putin-protesting punk band Pussy Riot. But Lavrov, a diplomat since the Brezhnev era who has spent a lifetime haggling, blustering, scheming, and speechifying on behalf of the battered Russian state ("his religion," one top U.S. official told me), chose to go in a different direction, right back in history to Alexander Gorchakov. He cited the princely foreign minister as an example of the blunt style in Russian politics, as a reason for why Russia has absolutely no intention of following America's lead in the Arab world -- or, by extension, anywhere else. Gorchakov, Lavrov proudly noted, had managed "the restoration of the Russian influence in Europe after the defeat in the Crimean War, and he did it without moving a gun. He did it exclusively through diplomacy." When Lavrov did get around to the question at hand, of foreign policy in Putin's Russia, he offered a sharp lecture on how the Kremlin's boss had managed to make Russia great again after the indignities of the 1990s -- and, more to the point, how a great Russia can once again afford to have an "assertive" foreign policy: As for the changes in the Russian foreign policy, yes, we have more domestic strength, if you wish. We have become stronger economically; we have been successfully resolving the social problems, raising the level of living -the standards of living -- of the population. Yes, a lot is to be done. But the change is very much noticed. And we feel the change. And Russia feels more assertive -- not aggressive, but assertive. And we have been getting out of the situation where we found ourselves in the early '90s when the Soviet Union disappeared and the Russian Federation became what it is -you know, with no borders, with no budget, no money, and with huge problems starting with lack of food and so on and so forth. It is a very different country now. And of course we can now pay more attention to looking after our legitimate interests in the areas where we were absent for quite some time after the demise of the Soviet Union. The areas he mentioned? Africa, Latin America, Asia. In other words, pretty much the entire rest of the world. The message was clear if chilling to those who remember what the assertive foreign policy of the Soviet era looked like: Russia is not sulking, and she is just about done composing herself.

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Minister No - By Susan B. Glasser | Foreign Policy

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LAVROV, AT AGE 63, is already the longest-serving of Russia's post-Cold War foreign ministers. Hard-drinking, hard-charging, a relentless and smart negotiator who has by turns infuriated and impressed his many diplomatic interlocutors over the years, he has come, more than anyone perhaps aside from Putin himself, to personify Russia's return to the world stage. Whatever you think of Lavrov personally -- "he's a complete asshole," one former official from George W. Bush's administration told me bluntly -- it's his relentless willingness to take on the United States globally, to challenge, whenever and wherever possible, America's view of itself as the indispensable power, that has earned him admirers among his often more tactful counterparts. "He's certainly got to be among the most effective foreign ministers in the world today," the foreign minister of another major emerging power told me not long ago. This resurgent Russia may have far fewer diplomatic tools at its disposal than its Soviet predecessor, but Lavrov has figured out how to leverage them to maximum advantage, first as Russia's ambassador to the United Nations for a decade and, since 2004, as foreign minister. At the United Nations, "his two objectives were always the same: veto things for the greater glory of Russia and to take the Americans down whenever possible," recalled John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who served alongside him on the Security Council. It's still Lavrov's playbook now, back in the Stalinist skyscraper on Moscow's Garden Ring.

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To the Americans with whom he has clashed, that makes Lavrov a sort of sophisticated Soviet retread in an Italian suit, an updated Mr. Nyet, as Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was dubbed for the relish with which he frequently deployed the veto at the Security Council in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s. "He's a modern version of Mr. No, a latter-day Gromyko," said David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration and now head of the U.S. democracy-promotion group Freedom House. "Like Russians in general, he wants respect, so they look for ways to exercise the veto," agreed Kramer's onetime boss, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "Unfortunately, Russia has no positive ways to exercise power right now, so it's negative," she told me. But to many others, Lavrov's endless capacity for defying the Americans is exactly the point. Russia may have few true friends in its weakened, post-Soviet state -- long gone are the generous, regime-propping subsidies from Moscow, the sweetened arms sales and the spigots of aid for fellow travelers -- but there are many emerging powers who cheer (if often behind closed doors) Lavrov's willingness to defy the superpower, to poke and prod it with evidence of hypocrisy and self-righteousness. To simply say: No. Both those who silently root for Russia and those who deplore the Kremlin's hard turn tend to see in Lavrov a global alternative to the American way. But he's not your
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Minister No - By Susan B. Glasser | Foreign Policy

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grandfather's America-hater. After Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in last year's U.S. election, called Russia the "No. 1 geopolitical foe" of the United States, Lavrov publicly mocked such "Cold War black-and-white thinking" as "absurd." And when we met, Lavrov deftly fended off any suggestion of the United States as Russia's "adversary" - this in spite of a brand-new Russian foreign-policy "concept," issued by Putin just weeks before, that proclaims the central role of Russia in the world as one of balancing. Against what, I asked Lavrov, are you balancing if not the United States? He did not answer. His response came in different form later in the interview. "I don't believe in ideology in international relations," Lavrov said. "I started, you know, to work as a diplomat during the Soviet days, and in spite of ideology being very high on the Communist Party agenda, I can assure you that in practical terms we have always been trying to be pragmatic. And this is the case now." It's certainly not a positive conception of the world; you will never hear a visionary speech from Lavrov or pleas for brotherhood, and he most decidedly does not wax poetic about anything (despite what a friend told me is his hobby of writing Russian verse). Clearly, he believes Americans are hopeless idealists, and he loves to tweak them about it, whether reminding them about the overblown initial hopes for the Arab Spring or jabbing them with evidence of how their interventions in the Middle East, from Iraq to Libya, have backfired. But his primary mission is not America-bashing -- it is Russia-promoting. "He is Mr. Nyet in the eyes of Americans. But actually he's not Gromyko; he's not Primakov. It was wrong," a longtime Russian colleague of Lavrov's told me when we met in Moscow. "Lavrov's toughness comes from a very patriotic stance. He thinks there was lost time in the '90s. He thought the '90s were humiliation for Russia, and his ambition is to restore the profile of Russia, its foreign policy." In other words, being against America is a tactic for Lavrov, not a strategy. "If he has any moral compass, my Geiger counter hasn't clicked into it," said Negroponte. "His morality is the Russian state." For the last two years, Lavrov has dramatically elevated his profile on the world stage. He has done so by almost single-handedly defying Western attempts to force some united action to stop Syria's deadly civil war. To Americans and Europeans appalled by the carnage -- there are already 70,000 dead and an estimated 3 million peohttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/29/minister_no Strona 5 z 9

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ple driven from their homes -- Lavrov is a nasty if effective shill for the tyrannical Assad regime, a major Russian-arms customer representing the last vestige of Soviet power in the Middle East. By that reasoning, if Lavrov can be made to see Assad's case as hopeless, he can be made to give up on supporting him. But every Russian with whom I spoke for this article, from Lavrov himself to the most fervent political foes of the Putin government, had a different explanation: Lavrov's fight to block Western intervention in Syria is not about Syria but about Russia. It is about the principle that matters above all else to Lavrov and his boss in the Kremlin -- that Russia should be allowed to do whatever it wants on its own turf. Brutal crackdowns on protesters, crushing internal rebellions, anything it takes. When we met, I asked Lavrov about why the Americans kept thinking they would change his position on Syria, coming back to him again and again with new proposals that he promptly rebuffed. After a few sentences of reflection, he pulled a small white piece of paper out of his pocket. It was a quote from Alexander Gorchakov that he had brought expressly to share with me. "Foreign intervention into the domestic matters is unacceptable," he read. "It is unacceptable to use force in international relations, especially by the countries who consider themselves leaders of civilization." Boris Yelenin/AFP/GettyImages SERGEI VIKTOROVICH LAVROV was born on March 21, 1950, in the twilight days of Stalin, a few years before Gromyko began his long run in the job of saying no. A classic product of the later Soviet era, he was born in Moscow to an Armenian father and ethnically Russian mother from Georgia, according to diplomatic sources. Although reported to be a bright physics student, he found his way to the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, known by its Russian initials MGIMO and still today the only academic pedigree acceptable for a top Russian diplomat. After graduating in 1972, his first assignment at the Foreign Ministry was obscure -- language training in Sinhala followed by several years working with the Russian ambassador to Sri Lanka -- but then in 1981 he was sent to the Soviet mission at the United Nations, where he would spend much of his career before being named foreign minister. This was no gray apparatchik. At the United Nations, Lavrov was an outsized character who often dominated the Security Council with his cutting remarks, edgy humor, physically imposing build, and big personality. He was known for his enthusiastic smoking and love of fine scotch, as well as for heading off to Vermont to go skiing when the Turtle Bay schedule permitted. In the summers, he went white-water rafthttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/29/minister_no Strona 6 z 9

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ing. "He drank like a fish," recalled one Western ambassador who served on the Security Council at the same time. "He definitely drank well before noon." When the U.N. banned smoking in 2003, he staged his own protest, refusing to stop puffing while vehemently complaining that then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan "doesn't own this building." He was famous as well for his drawings: Colleagues, according to David Bosco's book, Five to Rule Them All, would snap up from his chair the doodles Lavrov loved to sketch during the interminable debates. "He wears fine Italian clothes and loves good wine. The Middle East drove him crazy. When we were in Kuwait he would complain about the lack of alcohol. He smoked like a chimney," recalled another former senior U.S. official who spent many hours across the table from him. "He reminds you of what diplomats used to look like in the 19th century."

Andrei Kozyrev, who would go on to become post-Soviet Russia's first foreign minister, also remembers Lavrov well, as the secretary of the Komsomol -- the Communist Youth League -- for his class at MGIMO, a few years ahead of Kozyrev. It was a prestigious title, the first of many. "He was always a socializing guy," he recalled, "always very friendly."
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I reached Kozyrev recently in retirement in Florida. Kozyrev had been tapped in 1991 by Yeltsin to run the ossified Foreign Ministry, and he was determined to give Russia a new foreign policy for a new democracy, allying with the West it was trying to emulate at home. Needless to say, it didn't stick. In 1996, with Yeltsin struggling for his political survival against a possible Communist return to power, he unceremoniously fired Kozyrev in favor of the more old-fashioned hard-liner Yevgeny Primakov. All that switching of gears made it a bewildering time for Russia's Soviet-trained diplomats: "I made a U-turn," Kozyrev said. "Then Primakov was another almost U-turn. It's like they [the career diplomats] are a very good professional driver, a chauffeur. Why should you give up driving if your passengers are changing directions? One wants to go to the west, one to the east." Kozyrev laughed out loud when I told him that Lavrov had cited the 19th-century Prince Gorchakov as a model for today's Russian diplomacy. He recalled how Primakov had also tried to resurrect Gorchakov. "They all pretend they are doing realpolitik, but it's realpolitik of two centuries ago," he said. "That's the problem with Russia: The world has changed. Europe is not at war, and no one wants to negotiate with us. The world has changed, but Russia prefers to pretend it has not." At the same time, Kozyrev was surprisingly complimentary of Lavrov. "At least it's a sophisticated choice," he said. He recalled comments in recent years by various Putin allies praising Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, author of the secret treaty with the Nazis carving up Eastern Europe. "It's better to pretend you follow Gorchakov than you follow Molotov," he said. "Lavrov is much better than that." "Still," Kozyrev added, "he's a Soviet-breed diplomat. We were all brought up in the Soviet system, which professed a kind of ideological confrontation with the West." But for Kozyrev and many other Russians with whom I have spoken, this reflexive saber rattling is not in fact about the United States so much as it is about regime survival. "They are not looking for a real 'war' of confrontation with the West. It is domestically driven," he said, and as he made the point, it was hard not to think of the tens of thousands of protesters in the streets of Moscow after Putin announced his return to the Kremlin in the fall of 2011, of the ongoing legal crackdown against the movement's leaders, and of the frequent Russian government efforts -- by Putin, Lavrov, and many others -- to blame the demonstrations on the hidden hand of the United States. "In Russian foreign policy, nationalism -- patriotism -- is defined as opposition to the West. It was also an internal political instrument for the Soviet elite. It compensates for their lack of political legitimacy."

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At least, he concluded, somewhat awkwardly, "Lavrov is able to present this ugly foreign policy in the most civilized way to the West." EPA/GRIGORY DUKOR/POOL

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