President Barack Obama’s Russia policy is defined by the Administration’s view that America is overstretched globally, and that without assistance from a major power, such as Russia or China, Washington cannot achieve its goals. Some in the Administration believe that America is in decline and their job is to manage it. The policy of “outstretched hand” toward Russia (as well as other unfriendly powers) follows from this notion. So far, President Obama has failed to achieve any impressive results.
The Administration did not succeed in gaining Russian concessions on issues of U.S. top priority, such as Russian support of Iran sanctions, START negotiations and U.S. missile defense in Europe. In addition, the implementation of a tentative agreement with Moscow to support NATO and the United States on Afghanistan expeditionary force resupply is excruciatingly slow.
The Obama White House and State Department are very shy when it comes to Russian designs against Georgia, relations with Ukraine, pipeline politics in Eurasia, violations of human rights, and the rule of law. While some senior officials recognize the importance of these topics, others view them as irritants.
Russian officials told this blogger that the Obama Administration listens better [than that of George W. Bush], but “did not offer anything substantive.” Others compared Obama with Gorbachev – in terms of presiding over a great power in decline and referring to his naïveté. A senior Russian official half-jokingly said the U.S. concessions were “birthday presents for President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin.”
Sure, the Kremlin will pocket the U.S. concessions and ask for more. It was blatantly clear to this blogger as early as September 2009, (after spending ten days with the leading Russian foreign policy experts), that the Obama Administration did not – and will not — receive any quid-pro-quo for the significant concessions it provided to Russia as a part of its “reset button” policy.
Another systemic problem Obama faced in Russia is the duopoly of power. Obama spent many hours talking to Medvedev, whereas the real decision making lies with Putin. Talking to the wrong guy is a bad negotiating strategy.
Let’s examine the track record of Obama’s Russia policy. The mis-labled “reset button” (mistranslated as “overload” by someone at State) said it all. The decision to abandon a permanent ballistic missile defense (“the third site”) in Poland and Czech Republic was aimed to placate Russia and gain its support for UN sanctions against Iran. Instead, that decision signaled U.S. weakness and encouraged Russian intransigence. It failed to generate Moscow’s good will or support in the UN Security Council on robust sanctions against Teheran.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) negotiations were hailed as the centerpiece of U.S. Russia policy, but they are stuck in the muck. The Obama administration has failed to complete the negotiation of the START follow-on treaty by Dec. 5. The two superpowers are now in unchartered waters. The Russians already kicked-out U.S. inspectors, thus scrapping a key provision of the now-dead treaty.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin upped the ante, linking U.S. missile defenses with the treaty signature. Speaking in Vladivostok later that week, Mr. Putin warned against U.S. “aggressiveness” and disruption of the nuclear balance in case the Obama administration deploys missile defenses. The United States rejected such linkage. But Putin will not relent: he now demands to terminate poultry imports from the United States, despite the fact that it will boost the price of chicken in every pot in Mother Russia.
The Obama Administration misplaced its hopes on Russian assistance with U.S. efforts to stop the Iranian nuclear program. However, a review of Russian policy on Iran since the mid-1990s under Presidents Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev demonstrates that Russia’s interests in Iran fundamentally diverge from the U.S. agenda.
Powerful Russian special interests — security, nuclear, oil and gas, and the military-industrial complex — are vehemently opposed to any significant reversal of Russian policy toward Iran. Therefore, it is naïve, if not dangerous, to hope that Moscow will provide decisive assistance in the U.N. Security Council or bilaterally vis-à-vis Iran. The Obama Administration and Congress should recognize this inconvenient truth.
The Administration ignored Russia’s growing military deployment in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and it indefinitely delayed a push for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. Obama also downgraded relations with Ukraine and Georgia. He sent Vice President Joe Biden to Kyiv and Tbilisi two weeks after Obama’a trip to Moscow. This diluted a key message which Washington consistently beamed at Moscow since the Clinton Administration: that Russia should respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors.
It is too expansive to have a U.S. president learning on the job. Misreading Russia’s great power agenda, overestimation of one’s own negotiating capabilities, misplaced and idealistic faith in the merits of arms control, and dialogue at all costs all this brought Barack Obama’s Russia policy into dangerous shoals. One hopes that the President will learn his lessons and that his second year in office will benefit the United States in the Administration’s dealings with Putin & Co.
Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Policy at the Katherine and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
Last month, The Washington Post reported that President Barack Obama had asked senior officials for a province-by-province analysis of Afghanistan “to help determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help.” He supposedly wanted “the clearest possible understanding of what the challenges are to our forces and what is required to meet the challenge.”
But now two weeks later the Associated Press reports that President Obama has rejected all of the options presented by his national security team and is now asking for “revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government.” The White House continues to assert that Obama just needs more time to properly calibrate how to communicate to the Afghan government that it “must improve in a reasonable period of time.” But Obama has been President for ten months now, and his rhetoric during the campaign would tend to suggest that he has been aware for sometime of our struggles in Afghanistan. The truth is the Pentagon has been scrutinizing the failures of our AfPak strategy for over two years and the new administration has benefited from all the work done before it took the White House. The argument that we need more study, or that half measures will do, is wearing pretty thin. All this news makes it look like the president is shopping for a rationale to justify a commitment that is “politically” acceptable in Washington.
In fact, the ongoing public debate about Afghanistan has already cost the U.S. credibility with its NATO allies and is confusing our regional partners who are starting to hedge their bets and plan for a decreased U.S. commitment to the region. As well-known Pakistan expert Ahmed Rashid commented on October 27th in an article in the National Interest, “Every sign of the United States or NATO dithering over strategy only convinces the Pakistani military about keeping its Taliban option open.”
Yes, the recent flawed Afghan election was a setback to international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, but as Heritage senior research fellow Lisa Curtis notes: “Part of the reason Karzai’s reputation has suffered is the deteriorating security situation — so it stands to reason that providing additional U.S. troops to reverse Taliban momentum, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal has requested, would also increase the credibility of the Afghan regime. While the Obama administration is right to demand cleaner rule from Karzai, it also must be realistic about the security situation and acknowledge that stemming Taliban advances is vital to U.S. national security interests.”
The Obama administration used to believe that defeating the Taliban was a vital national security interest. It was just this past August when President Obama said: “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is a — this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
We need a decision from President Obama, and pretty compelling rationale to support it, soon. Obama’s Afghan strategy should provide U.S. military commanders on the ground with the resources they need to fight a successful counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban. Depriving our commanders of the resources they require is a recipe for failure.
Quick Hits:
- According to Pew, two-thirds of the public is dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country. Fully nine-in-ten say that national economic conditions are only fair or poor, and a plurality continues to oppose the health care reform proposals in Congress.
- After bailing out Chrysler with $12.5 billion in taxpayer money on the promise that Fiat would build electric cars here in America, Fiat has now announced that they are disbanding the project.
- The Roman Catholic bishop of Providence, Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin accused Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) of “false advertising” for describing himself as a Catholic and saying he should not receive Holy Communion because he supports using taxpayer money for abortions.
- According to a complaint filed last Friday, a California union is accusing the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of threatening workers with deportation and tampering with secret ballots to narrowly win a pivotal election last summer in Fresno, California.
- According to Rasmussen Reports, most adults (53%) say being able to buy whatever kind of TV they want is more important than conserving energy.