A World of New Security Dilemmas

To say that the collapse of the Soviet Union has radically transformed the Eurasian security environment is to state the obvious. To explain its implications is another matter. Several major attempts have been made that deal primarily with the implications for the world in general and the West in particular. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, Paul Kennedy’s “imperial overstretch” thesis, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “grand chess board” strategy easily come to mind when considering post-Cold War geostrategic thought. If one narrows the focus to the former Soviet Union, only a few books have appeared, and, other than to chronicle and explain the history of important developments, they have become quickly outdated. ¹ Security Dilemmas in Russia and Eurasia, therefore, is a welcome and useful addition to this new, yet limited, list.

During the Cold War, the large, strategic questions were well-developed and understood: the symmetry of nuclear force, the balance of conventional forces in the three major theaters of the Soviet periphery—Europe, Southwest Asia, and the Far East—and Soviet power projection and political influence in the third world. The bipolar nature of the Cold War security structure made two-person game theory, and other such analytic tools, applicable. True, very little was known about Soviet thinking on the central security issues, and Western analysts often made up for this paucity by mirror-imaging, and other simplifying techniques to accommodate their lack of knowledge. But in the main, East-West security studies were highly developed. Today this is no longer true. The dramatic reconfigurations of alliances, the emergence of new states, and the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist view of a “two-camp” global struggle have left Western security analysts facing a new and staggeringly complex environment.

Thus, it is unclear how to interpret these new strategic and military complexities. New research is needed to analyze fully the implications arising from these considerations, and new questions must be answered. For instance: has the old Soviet military so fully disintegrated that its remnants may not pull together, gather strength, and eventually merge into a new and capable military? Will the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) become the vehicle for the resurrection of some imperial equivalent to the Soviet Union, or will it secure the independence of its members? Will the CIS collapse entirely only to be replaced by stabilizing, bilateral security ties between Russia and other key members, or will it become a new zone of balance of power politics among the newly independent states? Will the CIS lapse into numerous wars and instability? Will outside powers, such as China, Japan, India, Turkey, the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, insert themselves into CIS security affairs? Could a new “great game” emerge over influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus? Finally, just how strategically significant are these states for Europe and the United States—can the West afford to ignore them?

Security Dilemmas in Russia and Eurasia touches on some of these larger issues—but fails to address the majority, and especially the most significant ones. Russia’s future is simply too obscure to make such attempts. The book’s major strengths lie in its identification and treatment of a multitude of lesser issues, primarily the security dilemmas of several of the newly independent states. This is no mean achievement. The area is so new, involving so many new actors, embracing so many different tensions and problems, that cataloguing them and providing some lower level analysis are essential preparation for dealing with the larger issues.

The book’s scheme, while eminently sensible, is probably too ambitious. As Bluth states, Security Dilemmas’ task is “to analyse the evolution of the security policies of all these states on four levels: ambitions, capabilities, processes, and impact on European security.” The book’s sixteen chapters, written by thirteen authors, more or less adhere to this approach. Russia receives the most treatment with four...