The Realist Resurgence

High over the Bering Sea where the black Arctic sky bends toward Alaska, Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers moved in for the kill last week. In rapid succession, cruise missiles dropped from beneath them like deadly spawn, fanning out toward their targets. Eleven thousand kilometers away in the warm waters south of Florida, a Russian naval squadron approached, carrying more megatons of nuclear weapons than the Cubans ever dreamed of during the missile crisis that brought the world to the edge of annihilation in October 1962. The Russians' goal: to link up with the military forces of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, who has cast himself as the successor to Fidel Castro in leading hemispheric hostility to the United States of America.

Geopolitical thriller writer Tom Clancy could set this scene. Flashbacks would provide the context: Moscow's punitive invasion of little Georgia last summer; its tanks and missiles parading in Red Square last May; its coffers filled with hundreds of billions of dollars paid by Western Europeans addicted to Russian gas and oil; and the vows of former KGB operative, former president and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to use this war chest for an ever more powerful military machine. Clancy could make it all sound like, well, the eve of World War III. But State Department spokesman Sean McCormack last month made the latest Russian operations above the Arctic and in the Caribbean, dubbed "Stability 2008," sound more like a joke. Sneering at the weakness of Russia's fleet en route to Venezuela, McCormack said, "We'll see if they actually make it there. Somebody told me they had a tugboat accompanying them in case they break down along the way."

All is not what it seems in the new cold war, if such a thing exists—and most leaders in NATO insist emphatically that it does not. The world is too interdependent, they say, to allow that sort of global standoff. Russia is not the Soviet Union. And the Western powers don't want to be drawn into a game of bluff that will only inflate Putin's prestige. "One cold war is enough," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Putin to his face at a conference in Germany last year. In Washington, where policy fell prey to political fictions for much of the Bush administration, the mantra of the moment is "realism." For too many years the White House looked at the world through a crude, dialectic lens—"with us or against us," "war or appeasement." Since Gates took over at Defense in late 2006, he has demanded from the waning administration "a pragmatic blend of resolve and restraint." U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for her part, talks about a "uniquely American realism." It has an idealistic tinge favoring friends and allies who share Western democratic values. But, that said, Rice's brand of realism readily allows an autocratic Russia, or for that matter China, to be accepted as competitive on some issues and embraced when cooperative on others.

The approach harks back to the days 60 years ago when University of Chicago professor Hans J. Morgenthau led what came to be known as the realist school of international relations. "Foreign policy must be conducted in such a way as to make the preservation of peace possible and not make the outbreak of war inevitable," he wrote. Moderate, reasonable, focused on clearly perceived national interests, he warned against "the crusading spirit," insisted on looking at the political scene from the viewpoint of other nations, and advocated compromise on any issue not absolutely vital to a country's well-being.

Such views have always been a hard sell with the U.S. public. Especially after an incident like the invasion of Georgia, Americans tend to hanker for definitive confrontations and conclusions that smell like victory. To talk about responding with what Gates calls "nonmilitary tools of national power"—what others call "soft power"—sounds soft, period. (You won't hear the phrase cross the lips of any presidential candidate.) But when you have the preponderance of power, you can husband your resources and still contain your adversary.

That was the point Sean McCormack was making about Russia's rickety fleet. Moscow is not the threat that it wants to appear. With more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and its status as the world's largest energy exporter, it cannot really be called a paper tiger. Not militarily and not economically. But in both respects it is a pretty dysfunctional bear. "The Russian military is still a lot more bark than bite," says Alexander Kliment, an analyst at the consultancy Eurasia Group. During the cold war the West used nuclear weapons as an equalizer, backing up an inferior conventional force. Now that's what the Russians are doing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country has invested most of its defense money in maintaining its nuclear weapons, while conventional forces were left to decay. "Now it's 20 years later," says Kliment, "and the better part of the Russian Navy is rusting in dry docks." The country has a single aircraft carrier, compared with a dozen in the American fleet. Russian troop strength at 1.2 million is about a quarter of what it was in 1986 and morale is low. "A Russian soldier has fewer rights than a Russian prisoner," says Valentina Melnikova, the head of the Union of Soldiers' Mothers. One Army lieutenant, who despaired after repeated attempts to point out the disastrous condition of his barracks, recently made a rap video (to an Eminem tune) showing the decrepit plumbing and filthy corridors, then posted it on YouTube. The lieutenant was ordered to transfer to Siberia.