The security risks of China’s abnormal demographics

·BY ANDREA DEN BOER AND VALERIE M. HUDSON

  

At the Third Plenum held in November 2013, the Chinese Communist Party announced the establishment of a new National Security Commission designed to increase state security and social stability and provide greater coordination between internal and external security. This linkage between internal and external security is one that security scholars and policymakers have not sufficiently recognized. While external issues such as relations with Japan, Taiwan and North Korea, and concerns related to China’s military power and nuclear weapons, are of major concern to those seeking peaceful relations with China, we argue that the security risks posed by China’s abnormal demographics must be taken into account when assessing China’s security.

Fertility patterns, high birth-sex ratios and the resulting gender imbalance, when coupled with inequalities between rural and urban workers, have contributed to increases in societal instability characterized by a rise in violent crime, the numbers of secret societies and gangs, the levels of muscular nationalism, and prostitution and trafficking in women and children. These national effects, in turn, can have regional and international repercussions as they undermine national stability and security.

According to China’s 2010 Census, men currently outnumber women by at least 34 million, an imbalance in large part due to China’s fertility policy (known as the one child policy) and a preference for sons. Despite government attempts to stop the use of sex-selective technologies to manipulate the sex of offspring, birth-sex ratios remain high (118-120 male babies for every 100 female babies born in 2010). The dearth of women among the young adult population is of particular concern to demographers, who estimate that the sex ratio of the marriageable population will continue to rise and will peak between 2030 and 2045, with the effect that at least 20 percent of men will be unable to marry.

A surplus of 40-50 million bachelors throughout the mid- to late 21st century will have a significant effect on China’s stability and development as a nation: Male criminal behavior drops significantly upon marriage, and the presence of significant numbers of unmarriageable men is potentially destabilizing to societies. In the case of China, the fact that a sizeable percentage of young adult males will not be making that transition will have negative social repercussions, including increased crime, violent crime, crimes against women, vice, substance abuse and the formation of gangs that are involved in all of these antisocial behaviors.

The high concentrations of involuntary bachelors, or bare branches, in China’s poorer provinces (there are already a significant number of “bachelor villages”) may also be exacerbated by the presence of ethnic minorities in these areas, where the gender imbalance may contribute to social tensions. Those who leave the unproductive rural areas to seek employment in urban areas are faced with problems created by China’shukou (household registration) system, which denies access to economic and social benefits to illegal migrants in China’s “floating population.”

The floating population is rapidly changing the landscape of China’s urban areas, and the Chinese government is aware of both the benefits and risks posed by internal migrants. The current floating population is young — 62 percent are under 35 and the majority of them have a junior high school level of education or less, and are only slightly more male (53 percent), although the sex composition of the floating population varies by geographic area and by employment sector. In Guangdong province alone, the male migrant population outnumbers the female population by 3.1 million. The gender imbalance of migrants in these areas may mean that these areas are at risk for higher levels of crime and greater social instability.

An estimated 10 percent to 30 percent of the floating population participates in criminal secret societies known as black societies (heishehui), groups believed to account for the majority of criminal activity in China, or in “dark forces” (e’shili), the more loosely organized criminal gangs. At the moment, China views the rise in gangs and increased crime rates as local, not national, problems, although many gangs are operating both nationally and internationally, and often with the collaboration of local government officials, as demonstrated by the 2009-2010crackdown in Chongqing.

Compounding the situation is the March 2014 announcement of the state’s National New-Type Urbanization Plan, which aims to increase urbanization to 60 percent by 2020, and plans to ensure that 45 percent of those in urban areas have official urban status. This mandated aggregation of the population will not only deepen resentment among many urban and rural residents, but will also provide an improved logistical foundation for recruitment of the disaffected by groups with grievances against the current system.  The ranks of the disaffected surely include China’s bare branches, who have been fodder for such groups throughout Chinese history.

China’s demographic situation is further complicated by the increase in its aging population and the decline in the labor force. China is different from the other aging countries of the world in that a) it is not yet fully developed, b) most of its population is still poor, and c) it has the highest sex ratio in the world. By 2055, China’s elderly population will exceed the elderly population of all of North America, Europe and Japan combined, and this is exacerbated by the now declining working-age population. China’s impressive economic growth has been facilitated by its expanding working-age population: The population ages 15-64 increased by 55 percent between 1980 and 2005, but this age cohort is now in decline due to the declining fertility rate. In 2012, the working age population declined by 3.5 million and is expected to continue to decline unless there is a dramatic shift in China’s fertility rate.

Aging will have a negative effect on economic growth through higher pension and healthcare costs, fewer low-income jobs, increased wage depression, slowing economic growth and job creation, declining interest from foreign investors, lower entrepreneurship, and higher budget deficits. Labor force declines also translate into lower tax revenues for governments, and if these governments are tempted by deficit financing, global financial stability may be compromised, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Global Aging.

When we look at global aging, China’s aging, and the synergy between the likely economic effects of aging and the effects of abnormal sex ratios in China, the confluence is likely to be dangerous for the Chinese government. There appears to be an inevitable economic slowdown approaching in the global economy that will last well beyond the effects of the Great Recession of 2008, primarily due to aging trends in the most advanced economies. This global slowdown is likely to amplify the economic storm clouds already looming for China. A society with a masculinized young adult population, such as China’s, is likely to respond to significant economic hardship with heightened domestic instability and crime. As a result, the Chinese regime may be hard pressed to maintain its usual control over society and to meet this internal security challenge, the regime may well become more authoritarian.

The Chinese government realizes that they must maintain the respect of their bare branch populations: a government perceived as weak invites the contempt of its society’s young men who might also exploit vulnerabilities to undermine the regime’s control over the country. Governments quickly learn they must react swiftly and aggressively in the wake of perceived slights and insults from other countries.

A “virile” form of nationalism begins to creep into the government’s foreign policy rhetoric, and it is stoked domestically to keep the allegiance of young adult bare branches. Faced with worsening instability at home and an unsolvable economic decline, China’s government may well be tempted to use foreign policy to “ride the tiger” of domestic instability. The government’s fanning of nationalist fervor has already been seen in the dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, where large and violent protests around the country were accompanied by the dramatic public destruction of Japanese goods and strong expressed anti-Japanese sentiments.

The recent minor relaxation of the one child policy announced at the Third Plenum will do little to address the imbalance in China’s population in future, but there is hope that this is the first of further changes to reduce state control of fertility. Even if sex ratios were rectified today, young adult sex ratios in China will result in a significant gender imbalance in the adult population for the next 30 years.

The US needs to be aware of the possibility of greater internal instability if China experiences reduced economic growth, which may disproportionately affect the bare branch population. Furthermore, the U.S. needs to consider how China’s estimated 34-50 million bare branches figure in to the strategic trajectory of its relations with Japan and Russia, as well as nearby states with sizable proportions of bare branches themselves (such as India and Vietnam). U.S. policymakers should be aware that Chinese leaders may perceive a relatively short window of time for China to leverage its rise so as to maximize power and achieve its perceived national interests in the regional and international system.  China’s high sex ratios are not a matter of concern for China alone; as former secretary of state Hillary Clinton noted, “the subjugation of women is a direct threat to the security of the United States,” and in this case, she is certainly correct.

Valerie M. Hudson is professor and George H.W. Bush chair in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

 Andrea den Boer is a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. 

This is the third in a series of posts from a conference “Beyond the Pivot: Managing Asian Security Crises,” held in the Senate Hart Building on April 30, 2014, 11 a.m.-3 p.m.   For more information, visit cpost.uchicago.edu.

A fearful new world, imperiled by Russia’s subterfuge

By Anne Applebaum,  

Applebaum writes a biweekly foreign affairs column and contributes to the Post Partisan blog.

In the Western imagination, the words “war” and “invasion” carry clear connotations. From books, movies and television, we know that such events involve tanks, airplanes and artillery, as well as soldiers in uniform, advanced weaponry, sophisticated communications. They look like the invasion of Iraq or, to go back in time, D-Day.

So far, the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine looks nothing like these battles. This war involves not soldiers but local thugs and volunteers, some linked to the ex-president, Viktor Yanukovych , some from criminal gangs and some who mistakenly think they are fighting for some form of benign local autonomy.

They are being led not by officers in uniform but by men from Russian military intelligence and special forces, some wearing camouflage without insignia, some communicating with “activists” by telephone. They are supplied with Russian logistics and a few Russian automatic weapons, but for the most part not tanks or planes. There is no “shock and awe” bombing campaign, just systematic, organized attacks on police stations, city councils, airports.

Unlike the planners of D-Day or Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Russians organizing the invasion of Ukraine don’t need an immediate victory. They have flexible goals, and they are prepared to adjust their strategy depending on how much resistance they encounter. In the long term, Russia clearly hopes to annex eastern and southern Ukraine; maps to that effect have begun to circulate.

But in the meantime, the Kremlin may settle for disrupting Ukraine’s presidential elections, scheduled for May 25, or for destabilizing Ukraine’s shaky provisional government, perhaps forcing an economic crash. The Russians may hope to provoke a civil war, or something that appears to be a civil war, which would then require a Russian “peacekeeping mission.”

Many of these tactics are familiar, though we haven’t seen them for a long time. In 1945, Soviet secret policemen, given the task of transforming disparate Eastern European nations into communist puppet states, also began by organizing local thugs and volunteers — criminals and war-damaged sociopaths as well as people who mistakenly believed they were fighting for a form of benign socialism — into paramilitary and secret police forces, exactly like the ones operating in eastern Ukraine. Then as now, they led from the shadows. Then as now, they adjusted their strategy depending on how much resistance they encountered and how much support they received.

But the 21st century is not the 20th century. When Polish communists, backed by Soviet communists, falsified the results of a national referendum in 1946, there weren’t many international observers around to complain. In the past few days, by contrast, the Internet has lit up with photographs of “pro-Russian activists” carrying Russian-made RPGs, as well as audio clips of Russians barking orders. The effect of these revelations, however, has been to encourage the Russians to lie more brazenly and aggressively. The Russian foreign minister continues to insist that “Moscow is not interested in destabilizing Ukraine,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin has called on the United Nations to condemn Ukraine’s weak and confused attempts to defend itself. Russian television — watched by many in eastern Ukraine — continues to denounce nonexistent violence coming from “fascist Kiev” and is even showing politicized weather reports: Dark clouds are gathering over Donetsk while there is sun in Crimea. These language games and disinformation campaigns are now far more sophisticated than anything the Soviet Union ever produced.

This combination — old-fashioned Sovietization plus slick modern media — is genuinely new, so much so that it’s fair to say we are witnessing a new kind of war, and a new kind of invasion. Thirteen years ago, in the wake of 9/11, the United States suddenly had to readjust its thinking to asymmetric warfare, the kinds of battles that tiny groups of terrorists can fight against superior military powers. Later, we relearned the tactics of counterinsurgency in Iraq.

But now Europe, the United States and above all the Ukrainians need to learn to cope with masked warfare — the Russian term is maskirovka — which is designed to confuse not just opponents but also the opponents’ potential allies. As I’ve written, the West urgently needs to rethink its military, energy and financial strategies toward Russia. But more specific new policies will also be needed to fight the masked invasions that may follow in Moldova or, in time, the Baltic States if this one succeeds.

Americans and Europeans should begin to rethink the funding and governance of our international broadcasters in order to counter the new war of words. We should also begin to reinforce the local police forces of the states that border the new Russian empire; NATO’s F-16s cannot fight thugs who are storming the town hall. This isn’t just about spending money: We need more special forces, more “human” intelligence, not just more ships and planes. Above all, we need to be prepared, in advance, for what may come. It’s a new world we are now entering, and we need new tools to cope with it.

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Has the Ukraine crisis been defused?

David Ignatius

Has the Obama administration really found the famous “exit ramp” in Ukraine that will provide an eventual diplomatic resolution of the crisis? It’s too early to know, but there were certainly signs of progress Thursday in Geneva, where seven hours of negotiations produced what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called “a compromise, of sorts.”

President Obama doubtless will get brickbats from congressional Republicans if he’s seen to be making concessions they’ll claim ratify Moscow’s bullying in Ukraine. But this has always been a fight that mattered more to Russia than to the West. President Vladimir Putin showed in recent days that he was prepared to take Ukraine to the brink of civil war to get his way. Even if Obama had been ready for that confrontation, Europe wasn’t.

If the deal holds, it’s likely to open the way for what many U.S. strategists have seen as the most stable path for Ukraine — a country that looks east and west at the same time. The Euromaidan protests last winter showed that western Ukrainians want passionately to be part of Europe. The Russian-speaking protesters who massed in eastern Ukraine may have been orchestrated by Moscow, but they feel deep ties with Russia. What Thursday’s initial deal says is: Stand down.

Compromise is always hard to swallow. President John Kennedy was so worried about public reaction to the secret deal he made with Moscow to avert the Cuban missile crisis that details were suppressed until long after his death. Yet that negotiation is remembered now as Kennedy’s finest moment. Obama will be lucky if Ukraine is remembered similarly, as a dangerous confrontation that was defused.

The consequences of the alternative path, of an ever-escalating crisis, were highlighted this week by Australian historian Christopher Clark, author of “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.” In a lecture at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Clark compared the Ukraine crisis with the 1914 catastrophe.

Clark noted the similarities between 100 years ago and today. There was a “weary titan” then in Britain, just as some see in today’s United States. And in both cases, there was the shock of an unanticipated crisis in a fragile Eastern European country, which propelled nations toward the brink. The big difference is that despite Russia’s aggressive moves in Ukraine, Western nations responded with what Clark called “caution and circumspection” rather than lockstep escalation.

Clark was asked about one of his book’s most interesting sub-themes, which is that the conflict a century ago was in part a “crisis of masculinity.” European leaders were so determined to be “firm” and “upright” about commitments that they drove straight into a wall.

This got me to thinking about the central personalities in this drama, Putin and Obama. There is something of the summer of 1914 about Putin. It’s not clear whether he sees himself as the tsar or the gamekeeper when he’s photographed hunting tigers, or shooting whales with a crossbow, or going bare-chested when fishing or riding horses. But he’s evidently a man with something to prove, confident and insecure at the same time.

Putin wants to be the bad boy. As Obama said memorably of him: “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.”

Obama, in contrast, has shown himself once more to be the opposite of a macho politician. He is reserved and analytical, occasionally caught shirtless on vacation but rarely photographed with the top buttons of his shirt undone. He’s the good boy in the class, sometimes to a fault.

Far from marching off the cliff, Obama stayed safely on the sidewalk. If he’d been guiding one of the major European nations in that summer of 1914, one senses that he might have avoided the reflexive mobilization for war that proved so disastrous. That sense of caution would have been derided as “weak” in 1914, as Obama is now. As Clark observes, hawkish arguments always tend to resonate better in crises than dovish ones.

“The protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing . . . blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world,” Clark writes in the book’s concluding passage.

Whatever his faults, Obama is no sleepwalker. He has been acutely aware of the dangers in Ukraine. He appealed for, and finally demanded, de-escalation by Putin. The macho bully seized Crimea and may well gain effective control of eastern Ukraine. The wary diplomat appears, for now, to have averted war. Each side can reasonably claim success.

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Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

By David Ignatius, 

Published: April 18 

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The U.S. has treated Russia like a loser since the end of the Cold War.

Dismissive actions by the United States, met with overreactions by Russia, have poisoned the relationship.

By Jack F. Matlock Jr., E-mail the writer Jack F. Matlock Jr., ambassador to the U.S.S.R. from 1987 to 1991, is the author of “Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended.”

One afternoon in September 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz settled in a chair across the table from Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in a New York conference room. Both were in the city for the United Nations General Assembly.

As he habitually did at the start of such meetings, Shultz handed Shevardnadze a list of reported human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze’s predecessor, Andrei Gromyko, had always received such lists grudgingly and would lecture us for interfering in Soviet internal affairs.

This time, though, Shevardnadze looked Shultz in the eye and said through his interpreter: “George, I will check this out, and if your information is correct, I will do what I can to correct the problem. But I want you to know one thing: I am not doing this because you ask me to; I am doing it because it is what my country needs to do.”

Shultz replied: “Eduard, that’s the only reason either of us should do something. Let me assure you that I will never ask you to do something that I believe is not in your country’s interest.”

They stood and shook hands. As I watched the scene, with as much emotion as amazement, it dawned on me that the Cold War was over. The job of American ambassador in Moscow was going to be a lot easier for me than it had been for my predecessors.

I thought back to that moment as talks between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s top diplomat this past week failed to resolve the crisis in Ukraine. It’s striking that the language being used publicly now is so much more strident than our language, public or private, was then. “It can get ugly fast if the wrong choices are made,” Kerry declared Wednesday, threatening sanctions.

I don’t believe that we are witnessing a renewal of the Cold War. The tensions between Russia and the West are based more on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and posturing for domestic audiences than on any real clash of ideologies or national interests. And the issues are far fewer and much less dangerous than those we dealt with during the Cold War.

But a failure to appreciate how the Cold War ended has had a profound impact on Russian and Western attitudes — and helps explain what we are seeing now.

The common assumption that the West forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus won the Cold War is wrong . The fact is that the Cold War ended by negotiation to the advantage of both sides.

At the December 1989 Malta summit, Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush confirmed that the ideological basis for the war was gone, stating that the two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies . Over the next two years, we worked more closely with the Soviets than with even some of our allies. Together, we halted the arms race, banned chemical weapons and agreed to drastically reduce nuclear weapons. I also witnessed the raising of the Iron Curtain, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the voluntary abandonment of communist ideology by the Soviet leader. Without an arms race ruining the Soviet economy and perpetuating totalitarianism, Gorbachev was freed to focus on internal reforms. Because the collapse of the Soviet Union happened so soon afterward, people often confuse it with the end of the Cold War. But they were separate events, and the former was not an inevitable outcome of the latter.

Moreover, the breakup of the U.S.S.R. into 15 separate countries was not something the United States caused or wanted. We hoped that Gorbachev would forge a voluntary union of Soviet republics, minus the three Baltic countries. Bush made this clear in August 1991 when he urged the non-Russian Soviet republics to adopt the union treaty Gorbachev had proposed and warned against “suicidal nationalism.” Russians who regret the collapse of the Soviet Union should remember that it was the elected leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who conspired with his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts to replace the U.S.S.R. with a loose and powerless “commonwealth.”

Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, Gorbachev maintained that “the end of the Cold War is our common victory.” Yet the United States insisted on treating Russia as the loser.

“By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,” Bush said during his 1992 State of the Union address. That rhetoric would not have been particularly damaging on its own. But it was reinforced by actions taken under the next three presidents.

President Bill Clinton supported NATO’s bombing of Serbia without U.N. Security Council approval and the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe. The effect on Russians’ trust in the United States was devastating. In 1991, polls indicated that about 80 percent of Russian citizens had a favorable view of the United States; in 1999, nearly the same percentage had an unfavorable view.

Vladi­mir Putin was elected in 2000 and initially followed a pro-Western orientation. When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, he was the first foreign leader to call and offer support. He cooperated with the United States when it invaded Afghanistan, and he voluntarily removed Russian bases from Cuba and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

What did he get in return? Some meaningless praise from President George W. Bush, who then delivered the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin: further expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans, and plans for American bases there; withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; invasion of Iraq without U.N. Security Council approval; overt participation in the “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan; and then, probing some of the firmest red lines any Russian leader would draw, talk of taking Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Americans, heritors of the Monroe Doctrine, should have understood that Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign-dominated military alliances approaching or touching its borders.

President Obama famously attempted a “reset” of relations with Russia, with some success: The New START treaty was an important achievement, and there was increased quiet cooperation on a number of regional issues. But then Congress’s penchant for minding other people’s business when it cannot cope with its own began to take its toll. The Magnitsky Act , which singled out Russia for human rights violations as if there were none of comparable gravity elsewhere, infuriated Russia’s rulers and confirmed with the broader public the image of the United States as an implacable enemy.

The sad fact is that the cycle of dismissive actions by the United States met by overreactions by Russia has so poisoned the relationship that the sort of quiet diplomacy used to end the Cold War was impossible when the crisis in Ukraine burst upon the world’s consciousness. It’s why 43 percent of Russians are ready to believe that Western actions are behind the crisis and that Russia is under siege.

Putin’s military occupation of Crimea has exacerbated the situation. If it leads to the incorporation of Crimea in the Russian Federation , it may well result in a period of mutual recrimination and economic sanctions reminiscent of the Cold War. In that scenario, there would be no winners, only losers: most of all Ukraine itself, which may not survive in its present form, and Russia, which would become more isolated. Russia may also see a rise in terrorist acts from anti-Russian extremists on its periphery and more resistance from neighboring governments to membership in the economic union it is promoting.

Meanwhile, the United States and Europe would lose to the extent that a resentful Russia would make it even more difficult to address global and regional issues such as the Iranian nuclear program, North Korea and the Syrian civil war, to name a few. Russian policy in these areas has not always been all the United States desired, but it has been more helpful than many Americans realize. And encouraging a more obstructive Russia is not in anyone’s interest.

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Why America does not understand Putin

By Angela Stent, Published: March 14

Angela Stent directs the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University and is the author of “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century.”

In 1974, I spent several months in the dusty main reading room of Moscow’s Lenin Library, studying the troubled Soviet-German relationship. It was a thrill to glimpse the closed world of the Soviet Union, yet I soon found myself spending lots of time explaining the United States to incredulous Soviet students at Moscow State University. Yes, I said, Americans were outraged that President Richard Nixon’s White House was listening to people’s phone conversations. And no, The Washington Post was not in the hands of a capitalist-Zionist cabal out to destroy detente by fabricating Watergate. On the day Nixon resigned, I left Moscow, having failed to convince my fellow students about how America really works.

For four decades as a graduate student, professor and policymaker, understanding how the Soviet Union and Russia really work has been my vocation. Unfortunately, America’s focus on Russia comes and goes with news cycles and academic fads. Over the past decade or so, growing interest in China and the Arab world sidelined Russia; at most, it was one-fourth of the BRIC acronym of emerging markets — and the least enticing. But now, the trifecta of Edward Snowden, the Sochi Olympics and the Ukraine crisis has prompted talk of a newCold War and how hard Vladimir Putin will play “great power” politics. My inbox and voicemail run over with producers and reporters seeking quotes and insights. Why did Nikita Khrushchev give Crimea to Ukraine in 1954? And who is Vladimir Putin, really?

Sovietology may be as defunct as the Soviet Union itself. But the need for a dedicated and deep understanding of Russia — especially the motives and machinations emanating from the Kremlin — is as critical as ever. Otherwise the United States is doomed to repeat cycles of “resets,” great expectations of better relations with Russia followed by serial disappointments. President Obama’s reset was only the latest of four since the Cold War ended.

I began my life as a Sovietologist at Harvard in the heyday of the 1970s, when interest in the U.S.S.R. was high, the United States and the Soviet Union were caught in the embrace of mutually assured destruction, and support for graduate students studying Soviet politics was abundant. The discipline had been established in the late 1940s as Washington came to realize how dangerously little it knew about its new Cold War adversary. The government funded area studies for the Soviet Union — and for other regions, from East Asia to Latin America — because it recognized the importance of training people who could bring together an understanding of the region and its languages, history, culture, economy and politics.

My timing was good. I began to teach in the 1980s, a great decade for Soviet experts. Ronald Reagan proclaimed the “evil empire.” One after another, three geriatric Soviet leaders died (giving rise to a popular Moscow joke about who had a season ticket to state funerals). And then, of course, came the dynamic and young Mikhail Gorbachev.

I was a professor in Georgetown University’s Russian area studies program, which trained dozens of students every year in the Russian language and social sciences. Many found employment in various branches of the federal government, some in academia and the odd one or two in business. Debates about whether Gorbachev was “for real” and how far his reforms would go consumed my colleagues and the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

In Moscow in 1989, I attended the first meeting of Soviet and American experts on Eastern Europe. The Soviets shocked us by suggesting that the political situation in the satellite states of Eastern Europe was far worse than we appreciated. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski — long reviled in the Soviet press as the ultimate Cold Warrior — lectured a standing-room-only crowd at Moscow’s Diplomatic Academy. He received a standing ovation. Clearly the times were changing, and rapidly.

And when Gorbachev announced, in an 11-minute speech in December 1991, that the Soviet Union was no more, times changed for us Soviet experts as well.

Most of us transitioned to being Russian and Eurasian experts. In my case, that meant throwing away my lecture notes on Marxism-Leninism and how the Politburo functioned, and talking instead about elections, political parties and public opinion influencing foreign policy. And it meant approaching the former Soviet republics as independent nations. It was a challenge to comprehend how Russia and its neighbors would throw off the legacy of the Soviet system.

The 1990s were a tough decade for the field. With the Soviet enemy gone and a free-market and democratic Russia supposedly about to emerge, why bother devoting government and foundation funds to Russia and Eurasian studies and graduate student exchanges? Ironically, just as it became possible to travel freely around Russia and discuss previously taboo subjects, the demand for our knowledge plummeted. Experts in democracy and economics — not necessarily Russia scholars — flocked to Moscow, believing that it would become a major emerging market, with competitive political parties and enormous business opportunities after decades of Soviet deprivation.

Too soon, the expectations faded, and questions about how the new Russia was evolving and why anti-Americanism was growing started to dominate discussions. I began my first government job, in the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, just after the 1999 Kosovo war had taken U.S.-Russian relations to a breaking point. Moscow said Washington was ignoring Russian interests and trying to ruin its relationship with a traditional ally (in that case, Serbia). The rhetoric was eerily similar to what we hear today. The Clinton administration’s attempts to reset relations with Russia were over.

When the George W. Bush administration came into office, it also sought to revamp ties with Russia. At State, we worked on a plan to offer Russia NATO membership, hoping to give Moscow a stake in Europe’s post-Cold War security system — the same system it seeks to upend today with its occupation of Crimea. After some promising months when Russia was a partner in the war in Afghanistan, that reset also foundered over the Iraq war and the revolutions in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, popular movements that toppled governments and seemed to augur a new era of democracy.

The Kremlin had assumed that, in return for supporting the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Washington would recognize what Moscow claimed as its “sphere of privileged interests” in the post-Soviet space. Then, as today, the Kremlin felt betrayed when the United States supported groups in Ukraine that wanted closer ties with the West. The complexities of the post-Soviet region, as made clear by the 2004 and 2014 Ukrainian crises, are vast, but the ranks of people working on Russia, in government and academia, have thinned.

One culprit is academia, where area studies have become devalued and their budgets slashed. Instead of embracing a deep understanding of the culture and history of Russia and its neighbors, political science has been taken over by number-crunching and abstract models that bear little relationship to real-world politics and foreign policy. Only a very brave or dedicated doctoral student would today become a Russia expert if she or he wants to find academic employment. Foundations, which rarely support area studies these days, also share some blame.

Even though the Cold War is long gone, the new Russia can at times look a bit like the old Russia; we still need the Kremlinology skills that we gained decades ago to figure out Putin’s endgame in Ukraine, for instance. Sustained expertise is essential if we are not to be whipsawed by one crisis after another. We have the opportunity to train a new generation of scholars who can develop in-depth knowledge of contemporary Russia, in ways that were not possible when we were first studying it.

My doctoral adviser at Harvard, Adam Ulam, was a brilliant student of Soviet foreign policy, but he did most of his research sitting in his Cambridge office, trying to get inside the heads of Kremlin decision-makers. When I was in Moscow during the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, a Western broadcast reporter called me to ask, “What does the man on the street in Moscow think?” The answer was that the “man on the street” did not exist, at least in Western terms. He had not been told about the accident and would not have dared talk to a random American asking questions on that street, anyway.

But today, it is possible to meet for hours with Putin, as I have done every year over the past decade, and challenge him with questions. And it is possible to learn what a wide variety of Russian men and women think — both on the street and in the square.

There is much work to be done. In my latest book, I explain how the deteriorating relationship between the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War can be traced to the fundamentally mismatched worldviews and expectations of the two sides, going back to 1991. Indeed, the Crimea crisis is rooted in the Soviet breakup, when the Soviet republics became independent states, based on borders drawn by Stalin. It has proved very difficult for a good part of the Russian population to accept that Ukraine is an independent country and that Crimea — a part of Russia since 1783 — was “given” to Ukraine by Khrushchev on a whim. Indeed, Putin went so far as to tell Bush in 2008 that Ukraine was not really a country.

So for the moment, let’s forget about resets. Unless we effectively manage the current crisis and prevent it from becoming even more dangerous, it will become more difficult to concentrate on the concrete areas where Russia and the United States have overlapping interests: Iran, Syria, transit to and from Afghanistan, and the Arctic. For after the Ukraine crisis is over and all the Russia experts like me have faded from the TV screens and airwaves, there may still be room for a working relationship with Russia, based not on resets but rather on realism.

When that time arrives, who in American universities and government will have the expertise, interest and passion for all things Russian? Unless we commit to educating a new generation about this onetime rival and possible partner, we won’t be prepared to deal effectively with Russia’s post-Putin generation, with all the risks and challenges — but also the opportunities — it will present.