MANAGING THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION

By Strobe Talbott

Recovering from heart surgery, President Boris Yeltsin last week sent an upbeat, forward-looking letter to President Clinton. Its premise: the U.S. needs a strong Russia as a partner in the 21st century. We agree: we have a clear-cut national interest in the continuing transformation of Russia into a democratic, stable, secure, prosperous state, at peace with its neighbors, fully integrated into the global economy. That process will take a generation or more, and it will require steady support from the international community, led by the U.S.

In the five years since the tricolor flag of Russia replaced the hammer and sickle flying over the Kremlin, Moscow has made a number of difficult, courageous and correct choices, both from its own standpoint and from ours. Democracy is taking root. The rudiments of a market economy and a financial infrastructure are now in place. The ruble is stable; inflation is under control; the private sector produces 70% of the gross domestic product.

But the Russian government must keep making tough choices and sticking with them. One example is a peaceful end to the brutal war in Chechnya. Another is an urgently needed overhaul of tax collection. The complexity and inefficiency of the current system have scared off foreign and domestic investment, and Moscow's failure to take in adequate revenues has jeopardized its eligibility for loans from the International Monetary Fund. At a more fundamental level, rampant criminality threatens to undermine the Russian people's confidence in reform and in democracy itself, and could serve as a pretext for the reimposition of stultifying state controls. The best remedy for corruption is less intervention in the economy by the state, and more protection of property rights and enforcement of the law.

The U.S. is backing Russia's efforts with technical assistance and support from such financial institutions as the World Bank and the IMF. As Russia continues to make progress, the U.S. will encourage and, when possible, sponsor its integration into the community of nations that share a commitment to political and economic freedom.

For its part, Russia must keep moving in the direction of reform and demonstrate responsible international conduct, most critically in its relations with neighboring states. Many Russians feel the loss of empire like a phantom pain in a lost limb. Twenty-five million ethnic Russians live outside the borders of Russia proper, in what are now independent, sovereign countries. It is important that they feel at home in tolerant, inclusive democracies. Any grievances they have, legitimate or otherwise, could play into the hands of ultranationalists back in Russia.

So far, Moscow has kept irredentist impulses largely in check. Shortly after the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Boris Yeltsin made a historic decision to affirm the borders of the old Soviet republics as new international ones. He has at several key moments repudiated the bellicose claims of his noisier opponents. Yet plenty of questions--and among Russia's neighbors, plenty of anxieties--persist about how Moscow will handle its relations with the other 11 members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. If it develops as a genuine commonwealth of genuinely independent states, it will have the support of all its members and of the world at large. But if Russia tries to make "commonwealth" into a euphemism for domination of its neighbors, then the C.I.S. will deserve to join that previous set of initials--U.S.S.R.--on the ash heap of history.

Russia has its own concerns with another international grouping: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO has always been and will remain a mutual defense pact, but it has also always been much more than that. During the cold war, even while attending to its principal job of deterring the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO helped to consolidate civilian-led democracy in Spain and to keep the peace between Greece and Turkey. As NATO adapts its mission and expands its membership to meet new challenges and opportunities, it will be a positive factor in the promotion of democracy and regional peace. The prospect of NATO admission has already induced several central European states to accelerate internal reforms and improve relations with their neighbors. Russia, which has come to grief twice in this century because of instability in central Europe, has a security interest in these favorable trends.

Obviously, the Russians are still a long way from seeing NATO enlargement in this benign light. Our ability to work out disagreements with them over this issue is going to be an important test of the U.S.-Russian relationship. Last month President Clinton set the alliance's 50th anniversary in 1999 as a deadline for the admission of the first new members.

That goal--which we are determined to meet--gives us time to work out the terms of a mutually reassuring relationship between NATO and Russia.

Establishing such a modus vivendi will take political will on both sides, requiring each to get past the stereotypes of the cold war. For our part, that means rejecting the notion that predatory behavior is somehow encoded in Russian genes and that Russia is simply a stunted U.S.S.R. itching to return to its former size and ways. Similarly, the Russians must overcome the suspicion that America's real strategy is to weaken their country, even divide it.

If Russians fall prey to conspiracy theories and old think about American motives, such words as partnership and cooperation will, in their ears, sound like synonyms for appeasement, subservience and humiliation. The result could be that we will indeed cooperate less and compete more, on precisely those issues where it is in our common interest to cooperate more and compete less: terrorism, regional conflict, environmental degradation, arms control and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Russian policymakers, especially those still inclined to see their country's relationship with the U.S. as intrinsically a rivalry, may fall into the trap of defining what is in their national interest as anything that annoys the U.S. or causes us problems. If the reflex to score points in a zero-sum game becomes a default feature in the software of Russian foreign policy, it will only generate mistrust on our side. That kind of vicious cycle, so familiar during the cold war, would be bad for everyone, but particularly for the Russians. They would risk repeating many of the mistakes that made nine-tenths of the 20th century such a disaster for them. Most notably those mistakes included defining their own security at the expense of everyone else's and misdefining security itself as the expensive, wasteful and dangerous capacity to destroy and intimidate.

Human and natural resources, not just military might, are what will make Russia truly secure and influential in the new century. The Russian people and their leaders must believe that. They must also believe that we believe it, and that our policy toward them today is motivated by America's respectful and supportive hopes for their future.

Strobe Talbott, who served as the Clinton Administration's diplomat in charge of the former Soviet Union, is currently Deputy Secretary of State. He covered Russia regularly as a correspondent and columnist for TIME.