Quote:
The Carnegie Moscow Center used to be a hub of Russian liberalism. Now it stands accused of being a ‘trojan horse’ for Russian influence.
Last June, three months after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula and just weeks before Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine shot down a civilian airliner, killing nearly 300 people, a small group of Americans and Russians gathered on the Finnish island of Boisto. Policy analysts and former government officials, they had come to discuss the fate of the post-Soviet country whose democratic revolution had helped sink U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest point in three decades.
The symbolism of the location could not have been lost on the meeting’s participants. Sharing an 800-mile long border with Russia, Finland has delicately managed relations with its neighbor. During the Cold War, it adopted a policy of formal neutrality, accepted Soviet interference in its domestic politics, and imposed rigorous self-censorship to avoid provoking Moscow. This phenomenon of voluntarily choosing limited sovereignty to appease a large and aggressive neighbor earned the moniker “Finlandization,” and the Soviet Union held up Finland as an example of its ability to live in peace and friendship with its neighbors. At the time of the Boisto meeting last summer, foreign policy luminaries like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and David Ignatius were trumpeting “Finlandization” as a model for Ukraine to follow.
But what was most notable about the Boisto meeting—which eventually produced a 24-point plan to resolve the crisis—was what it lacked: Ukrainians. Large powers discussing the fates of smaller ones while simultaneously locking them out of the room has an understandably ugly resonance in Central and Eastern Europe. By excluding Ukrainians, the Boisto initiative signatories lent credence—wittingly or not—to the Russian view that Ukraine is not a real country and that outside forces can determine its fate. As for the Boisto proposals themselves, most were amenable to the Kremlin line.
For instance, in calling for both sides to withdraw forces from certain conflict areas in eastern Ukraine, the signatories treated aggressor and victim as moral equals, likening Russian removal of its soldiers with Ukraine’s withdrawing troops from its own, sovereign land. (Full disclosure: I signed an open letter at the time rejecting the Boisto initiative alongside dozens of other foreign policy analysts, including, most important, Ukrainians.)
Boisto was an example of what’s known in diplomatic parlance as a “Track II” negotiation: when parties close to, but not officially representing, national governments engage in discussions about topics of mutual concern. While America and its European partners ignored Boisto, the Russian Foreign Ministry seized on it. “On our behalf, we welcome intentions of the public and academic societies to contribute into the resolution of the situation in the Southeast of Ukraine and to put an end as soon as possible to bloodshed encouraged by Kiev authorities’ forceful measures,” read a Ministry statement. Happy to promote anything that flatters its self-image as a great power and goes over the heads of Ukrainians, Moscow evidently saw promotion of the Boisto proposal as in its interests.
The Boisto Group’s meeting was sponsored by three entities: the Finnish Foreign Ministry, the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (a think tank affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences), and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, one of the largest funders of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which describes itself as “the oldest international affairs think tank in the United States.” Boisto’s first three signatories were Tom Graham, a former associate at the Carnegie Endowment, and a managing director at Kissinger Associates; Andrew Weiss, the Carnegie Endowment’s vice president for studies who also serves as a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group, and Deana Arsenian, vice president of the international program and director of the Russia program at the Carnegie Corporation. On the Russian side, the delegation included, among others, Alexei Arbatov, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center, and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, a former head of the country’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
Policy analysts who simultaneously work for major consulting shops founded by former secretaries of state (Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, respectively), Graham and Weiss—who also served as co-chairs of the Boisto initiative—are influential players in the transatlantic conversation about Russia, although it’s unclear where their analytical work stops and their business interests begin. Graham’s bio at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he is a senior fellow, states that he “focuses on Russian and Eurasian affairs” for Kissinger Associates. (Graham did not reply to an email asking him to discuss the nature of his work.) Weiss’s bio at Albright Stonebridge states that he “assists clients with issues related to Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union.” In an email, he told The Daily Beast, “My role at Albright Stonebridge Group is focused on helping Western companies and philanthropic foundations understand Russian political and economic realities,” and that, “[t]he Carnegie Endowment has strict conflict of interest policies about outside consulting, which I fully abide by.” Weiss did not elaborate on whether such policies prevent him from advising businesses trying to navigate around sanctions imposed on Russia for its behavior in Ukraine, telling me that he “can’t discuss client-specific work at Albright Stonebridge Group.”
“I don’t want to be holier than thou,” a Russia analyst at a prominent Washington think tank said when asked about Graham and Weiss’s work as business consultants while also dispensing ostensibly objective analysis. “It seems to be a direct conflict of interest. I actually think American business money is potentially more difficult to manage than Russian money, in all honesty, because I think the American corporate interests are engaging because they have an agenda with Russia and they’re much more savvy about how to exercise their influence.”
Arsenian, in her capacity as head of the Carnegie Corporation’s Russia program, has undertaken a project called “Rebuilding U.S.—Russia Relations,”, a website featuring brief articles by scholars, the vast majority of which argue for a diplomatic dιtente with the Kremlin, oppose arming Ukraine, or discourage Western sanctions against Russia. Under their tutelage, Carnegie has attempted to steer the debate over the Western response to Russia in a direction more aligned with Kremlin interests. Carnegie’s role as a convener and promoter of the Boisto plan is but one element of a dramatic shift in its agenda from an institution that once hosted some of the Kremlin’s sharpest critics to a place now urging Western appeasement of an ever more aggressive Russia.
Earlier this year, the Carnegie Corporation initiated a forum called “Rebuilding U.S.—Russia Relations,” overseen by Deana Arsenian. The vast majority of the pieces commissioned by the forum promotes the view that Russia—despite its riptide of anti-American disinformation and conspiracy theories that place the State Department and CIA at the center of every major geopolitical development—is a sometimes difficult friend to the United States.
In April 2014, posting on the corporation’s website in preface to an article in the Financial Times by Thomas Graham under the headline “Punishing an aggressive Russia is a fool’s errand,” Arsenian wrote: “The actions and the rhetoric of all involved are progressing along a dangerous path with potential negative ramifications for global peace and security.” Such a pox-on-both-your-houses moral equivalency, it’s true, is a common refrain heard among many policy intellectuals in the West who view the European Union, NATO, or U.S. policymakers as equally responsible as the Kremlin for the mess in Ukraine. But Arsenian went a step farther in justifying a policy of non-punishment for Moscow, arguing that “[f]actual information is hard [to] obtain” about events in Ukraine.
Is it, really, though? A welter of independent reporting and research conducted by nongovernmental organizations had solidly concluded quite a lot about the sequence of events concerning the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea (an Anschluss that Putin himself acknowledged after having lied about it).
Despite all these easily verifiable acts of aggression, leading Carnegie figures persist in advising against any critical Western response. Though Weiss told me that his side gig consulting with Albright Stonebridge “is focused on helping Western companies and philanthropic foundations understand Russian political and economic realities,” he insisted, “I have never advocated nor do I support the lifting (or weakening) of sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of its aggression against Ukraine.” His public statements, however, paint a more complicated picture.
Continued...........