Russia Now Knows It Has No Option But to Join the West

Russia today is a colder and more remote country than it was a century ago, in spite of global warming and the revolution in transport. This strange fact, recently clarified by research at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is the result of the Soviet Union's efforts to fill up its vast regions, however inhospitable or distant, with cities, industries, and people. The temperature per capita charts devised by Brookings show average Russians struggling with lower temperatures as the years went by, simply because Stalin pegged so many of them out in icy parts. The economic and social costs of this cold weather imperialism are just one element of the immense overall price Russia paid, through tsarist and Soviet times alike, for its attempts to control and consolidate the mass of territories it had accumulated.

The agreements reached by Russia, the United States and Nato this month on strategic weapons cuts, a new Russian role in Nato and, possibly, on anti-ballistic missile development, may be seen in the future as marking the moment at which what had become an impossible task was finally abandoned. This is not because the agreements are far reaching or radical, because they are not, but because in their relative modesty they are symptomatic of a Russian readiness to cut its national coat according to the available cloth.

The Russian analyst Dmitri Trenin has called the transition through which his country is struggling "the end of Eurasia". In his book of the same name, Trenin describes the great "collecting of lands" of Russian history, the later colonial and strategic expansions, and the efforts to stabilise and make coherent the result. In this context, what Eurasia means is that Russia's mission is to maintain an impregnable centre of power and of independent culture straddling Europe and Asia, capable of projection into both and of resisting incursions from outside. Or, to put it more shortly, an empire by one name or another. It is well known that such ideas by no means disappeared in 1989. As late as the Kosovo war, for example, some Russians still thought that the west could be outflanked there by an audacious seizure of Pristina airport, an operation which fortunately failed, since its success would have led to deep embarrassment for both sides.

Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin imagined that Russia could, in some vaguely conceived way, "join the west" and yet continue to enjoy a polar role, equally or almost equally, with the US. What they discovered, as Trenin says, was that "Russia was to be treated according to the realities of its economic, political, social and legal systems, not the inflated ideas that its leaders had of themselves". Equality with the US was a pipe dream, and the only slightly more realistic idea that Russia would marshal an informal grouping including China, India and Iraq, which could resist at least some American and western purposes, was also unsustainable. The march of Nato and the EU towards Russia's western borders signalled "the end of the hope that sometime in the future when Russia emerges from the crisis and grows economically strong and powerful, it will be able to restore its 'natural' sphere of influence". Trenin concludes: "The harsh reality is that... there is no Eurasia left for Russia to return to."

While the ideas Trenin describes survive in some quarters in the military, the bureaucracy, the parties and the intelligentsia, Vladimir Putin has been generally accepted as the first Russian leader who truly understands the limits of Russian power - not only now but even in a future where Russian strength has been restored. Certainly his prudence means he has consistently avoided unwinnable confrontations. He saw immediately, for instance, that to try and fail to stop the Baltic states joining Nato, or to act as if the US needed a Russian licence to operate in central Asia after September 11, would be disastrous. The arms treaty just signed with the US is another example of his determination to avoid unnecessary defeats, or at least unnecessarily public defeats.

One Russian expert concluded gloomily in advance that the document would be "an empty treaty containing few figures of real significance". He was not far wrong, since it simply enshrines what the US had declared it would do anyway, while also allowing it to change its mind at will and with a minimum of notice. If a joint committee on anti-ballistic missile development does emerge after next week's summit meeting between Putin and Bush in St Petersburg, it is bound to be similarly weighted towards American interests.

The new engagement with Nato does not fall into quite the same pattern. The Americans are comfortable enough with it, but from one aspect it represents an attempt by the Europeans, with Britain and Germany in the van, to make a flagging Nato more relevant to the US. Putin appears to share with other leaders the fear that America under the Bush administration tends to be heedless to the consequences of its policies for others. It is not so much the decisions the Americans may unilaterally make but the possibility that they will make them without thinking through what might happen to other countries, in different locations, with different borders and neighbours than themselves.

"The issue for Putin," write Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill in a recent paper for Brookings, "is that the US is highly unlikely to protect Russia from any fallout it might face if events get out of hand." He has therefore chosen to align himself with other leaders, like Blair and Schröder, who also hope to influence US decisions, and the new Nato arrangement could provide a framework for such efforts. On this argument Putin has moved away from any idea that the US has plans to further demote Russia, to the distinct view that America might nevertheless inadvertently damage his country.

If Eurasia is dead, joining the west is, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has written, "Russia's only strategic option". But joining the west, as the disillusion which followed the collapse of such hopes in the 1990s proved, is not a matter of one action, one decision, or one treaty. It is a process, requiring a much more substantial convergence between Russia and the west than at present, and one in which there are large responsibilities on both sides.

Russian weakness could undermine it, as could American and European neglect or malice. The campaign against terror, which has played an important part in changing the Bush administration's attitude toward Russia, could also lurch in a direction which could seriously damage a Russia which must watch its relations with Muslims both inside and outside the federation, and which is already playing with fire in Chechnya. Trenin looks forward to a future in which Russia would become a full member of both Nato and the EU, but it is a future which he thinks could be 30 years away.

Saying goodbye to Eurasia without an immediate entry into Europe is a painful business, but the only alternative is for Russia to stay, quite literally, out in the cold.

The End of Eurasia by Dmitri Trenin (Carnegie Endowment).

m.woollacott@guardian.co.uk