Russia

By David J. Kramer

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came away from her visit to Moscow this week with mixed results. The two big ticket items involved Iran and the human rights situation inside Russia.

By all appearances, Clinton struck out on moving Russia closer to supporting sanctions against Iran should current negotiation efforts fail. "We did not ask for anything today," she said, in a rather stunning admission. "We reviewed the situation and where it stood, which I think was the appropriate timing for what this process entails."

That she would not try to push Russia toward supporting sanctions is hard to believe -- and, if true, frankly irresponsible. More likely, she tried and failed but was putting the best spin on it. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's comments after his meeting with Clinton clearly indicated continued Russian resistance to any sanctions push. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, never a supporter of getting tougher toward Iran, reinforced this position in comments from Beijing on Wednesday when he argued that discussing sanctions now against Iran would be "premature."

This contrasts with comments Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made in New York last month and that he reportedly reiterated in his private meeting with Clinton on Tuesday. The Kremlin, however, has not publicly challenged either the foreign minister's or prime minister's contradictory comments, even though the president is ultimately in charge of Russian foreign policy (the idea that Medvedev would slap down Putin is rather laughable). Yet these conflicting messages cause confusion about who calls the shots in Moscow. Then again, perhaps the situation is very clear: it is Putin and not Medvedev (more on this in a future blog entry). What a shame, then, that Putin was in Beijing, not Moscow, during Clinton's visit. All this is not a surprise to those of us who have been saying that Russia is unlikely at the end of the day to support tough sanctions against Iran -- even in exchange for the Obama administration's regrettable decision September 17 on missile defense (which, by the way, was handled abysmally).

In contrast to the bad news on Iran, Clinton's comments on the human rights situation inside Russia were a pleasant surprise. In spite of her short shrift of human rights concerns in the past (recall her comments on the way to Beijing in February when she said she didn't want those issues to "interfere" with other pressing matters), Clinton made clear the concerns of the Obama administration about the deteriorating situation inside Russia.  Her meeting with human rights and civil society activists was a very good follow-up to President Obama's similar meeting in July. Her interview with independent radio station Ekho Moskvy and her remarks to students at Moscow State University (MGU) also touched on these issues in a strong way.

"I think all of these issues -- imprisonments, detentions, beatings, killings - it is something that is hurtful to see from the outside," Clinton said at MGU. "Every country has criminal elements, every country has people who try to abuse power, but in the last 18 months ... there have been too many of the incidents," adding that not enough was being done to "ensure no one had impunity from prosecution ... I said that this is a matter of grave concern not just for the United States but for the Russian people, and not just for activists but people who worry that unsolved killings are a very serious challenge to order and the fair functioning of society," Clinton said. In an innovative society, she observed, "people must be free to take unpopular decisions, disagree with conventional wisdom, know they are safe to peacefully challenge accepted practice and authority."

In her interview with Ekho Mskvy, she highlighted the attacks on journalists and human rights defenders, noting they are "of such great concern. ... in the last 18 months ... there have been many of these incidents. ... I think we want the government to stand up and say this is wrong."

Her strong statements on these issues were especially important given an unnecessary and unfortunate situation caused by an article in the Russian newspaper Kommersant earlier in the week based on comments made by NSC Senior Director Michael McFaul suggesting that human rights concerns would receive less attention from the Obama administration. The thrust of the Kommersant article seemed out of synch with Obama's handling of the issue in July, with Clinton's comments this week, and with McFaul's own passion for human rights over his career (and I've known him for some 16 years). Clinton stepped into the fray and allayed the concerns, at least for the time being, of those who were worry that human rights issues will fall down the list of priorities in the interest of the Obama Administration's overall "reset" policy with Moscow. 

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Secretary Clinton's recent visit to Moscow provides another opportunity to do a midcourse assessment of Iran policy. The assessment is bleak. Very bleak. The "mission accomplished" banners that Obamaphiles were unfurling when the Russians hinted at a greater openness to sanctions look a bit more faded and ironic today in light of reports that the Russians are back to their old script of opposing sanctions as an impediment to negotiations.

I argued earlier that the key intermediate objective of the negotiations with Iran was getting Russia (and China and the European in-laws) on side to impose tougher economic pressure on Iran. Without such leverage, negotiations were very unlikely to succeed.

Of course, the overall objective of those negotiations is to get the Iranian regime to abandon its nuclear weapons program. The Obama team, like the Bush team before it, believes that the only way the Islamic Republic will do so peacefully is if the United States can exert serious economic leverage over the regime so a compromise deal looks attractive -- hence the urgency of the intermediate objective of establishing such leverage.

From the beginning, the diplomatic track has been stymied by two stubborn facts. Fact 1: The U.S. cannot unilaterally generate the sanctions leverage it needs to give diplomacy a chance. Fact 2: The Russians, the Chinese, and sometimes the European in-laws all believe that diplomacy is an alternative to sanctions (and vice-versa) rather than understanding that sanctions are a necessary component of the diplomatic track. In other words, sanctions are what you resort to when diplomacy has failed rather than something you resort to in order to help diplomacy succeed.

The "shocking" news that the Iranian regime had been misleading the international community with a hidden second enrichment program provided a one-time opportunity to bring the international community on side, impose sanctions, and then pursue negotiations. Instead, the Obama team contented itself with the rhetorical support for sanctions the Russians offered -- the vague suggestion that if the Iranians kept up their bad behavior stiffer penalties might follow -- basked in the glow of praise for its deft diplomacy, and launched negotiations.

With Secretary Clinton in Moscow, the Russians sprung the trap. We can't do sanctions, the Russians explained, because that would undermine negotiations. As long as the negotiations are ongoing, the Russians will block sanctions. All the Iranian regime has to do to keep sanctions at bay is to string the negotiations along. As was foreseeable, Team Obama is trapped negotiating with the Iranian regime without significant leverage and without much prospect of additional leverage. This does not guarantee failure, but it does guarantee that the Iranian regime has the strongest possible hand and that the U.S. hole card, the evidence of Iranian duplicity revealed at the U.N. General Assembly in late September, has been played to minimal effect.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images

By Christian Brose

The news that two Russian nuclear submarines are patrolling off the eastern coast of the United States brings to mind a similar event from last year, when the Kremlin sent two of its aging Blackjack bombers on a "training mission" into the western hemisphere. The best line at the time was attributed to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. As the decrepit, Cold War-era Blackjacks clunked and sputtered their way to Venezuela, the Pentagon diligently scrambled a few fighter jets to shadow them -- a mission whose real purpose, Gates reportedly remarked, was "search and rescue." That basically sums up my reaction to this recent submarine incident: Worth keeping an eye on, but not worth much else.

What makes this attempt at muscle-flexing more comical still is the official reaction from the deputy chief of staff of Russia's armed forces: Stating that the rationale for the submarine mission is "the fleet shouldn't sit on its hands and be idle" (an interesting image, but OK) and that the reason for the earlier long-range bomber missions was because "we got tired of flying in circles" is much more revealing of Russia's shortcomings as a great power than I'm sure the gentleman had intended. Calling it a "routine" mission is probably not the best approach either. The whole point of these exercises is to goad the United States into behaving as Russia does, which is presumably to lodge loud protests that Moscow is meddling in our "sphere of influence", thereby enabling Russia to hoot and holler about American hypocrisy.

This is the geopolitical equivalent of nanny-nanny-boo-boo. And while it's good to know that our folks at NORAD are monitoring it closely, the best response is to treat it with the nonchalant dismissal it deserves. That, and making sure we're prepared to assist in the event that the submarine sinks.

By Christian Brose

Patrick Barry and my colleague Josh Keating think I’m understating the importance of what President Obama accomplished in Moscow. So let me be clear: The arms reduction agreement and the Russian air corridor into Afghanistan aren’t small peanuts. Indeed, the latter is quite important because it will help to advance a key national interest -- success in Afghanistan. Still, we’d better not put too many of our eggs in that basket, because what Moscow giveth, Moscow can easily taketh away. And considering how many conflicts of interest we still have with Russia, even after our reset buttoning, U.S. military planners are probably not taking that air corridor as a given indefinitely.

As for negotiating an update to START, which expires this year -- of course we should do it, and it’s not unimportant. But would anyone drawing up a list of U.S. national interests put the negotiation of a bridge agreement for the START treaty at the top, or anywhere near the top? That’s all I’m saying. It’s a worthwhile step, but let’s put it in perspective.

Now, nonproliferation more broadly IS a national interest that I'd put at or very near the top of my list, and U.S.-Russian arms reductions are a piece of that. Furthermore, Josh is right that if your goal is "a nuclear-free world", then you have to start somewhere. Well, yes, as far as that goes. Still, no matter how clearly we meet our obligations under the NPT, and no matter how much legitimacy that adds to our argument that others should follow suit, I just don’t think that will markedly advance those goals in the real world. So by all means, let’s restart START, let's wrap our policies in whatever added legitimacy that gives us, but let’s not overstate the importance of doing so.

This is generally how I feel about Obama’s speech yesterday: It was important. It had some very nice touches (championing democracy in terms of anti-corruption and national success, flipping Russian concerns for sovereignty into an argument against Russian meddling in Georgia and Ukraine). It helped to clear the air by reaching out to ordinary Russians in a respectful and thoughtful way. And it will help to improve the tone of U.S.-Russia relations around the margins. Beyond that, no one should expect much more.

One more thing: Amid all the talk of Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world, and his college musings on this subject, it’s worth acknowledging that the earlier visionary was Ronald Reagan. (Paul Lettow literally wrote the book on this, and it’s excellent.) Obama should make more of this. The nuclear arms reductions that he has negotiated with Medvedev will require a lot more of the United States than of Russia, and it could be a hard sell back on the home-front. Having the humility to give a conservative icon his due would go a decent way, I think, toward disarming Obama’s critics and building greater domestic consensus behind what are pretty sensible arms reductions.

By Christian Brose

Dan Drezner agrees with this from Matt Yglesias about President Obama’s goals in his visit to Moscow:

It makes a lot more sense to focus a visit on something like the nuclear issue, where U.S. and Russian interests are roughly in alignment and some high-level discussions stand a decent chance of bearing fruit.

I’m all for “de-linkage” in U.S.-Russia relations -- working together where our interests converge, agreeing to disagree where our interests conflict, and preventing those disagreements from impeding constructive cooperation. In short, what Bush and Putin spelled out last April in Sochi.

That said, let’s be honest about what that means for our interests: It means that Obama has just invested a lot of time and effort to secure an agreement to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles to a level that could still annihilate the world several times over. This may be an achievable goal, but it is hardly a pressing one -- not when Iran is speeding toward a weapon of its own, and the United States and Russia cannot seem to find much agreement on how to proceed on that.

Indeed, the question of Iran is illustrative, because Russia has solid national interests in never, ever wanting to see Iran open to the world -- the critical carrot that the West holds out in every diplomatic gambit it has conceived on the Iranian nuclear question. The reason? Gas. Nick Gvosdev explains:

One potential concern for Russia is that if it joins in putting real pressure on Tehran, Iran could eventually negotiate a Libya-style settlement with the West, clearing the way for major new Western investments in Iran’s energy sector.

Right now, Moscow benefits from Iran’s isolation from the West. Not only are Iran’s formidable gas reserves not accessible to European users, preserving Russia as the Continent’s major supplier, but alternate routes for Central Asian energy that could traverse Iran are also not possible.

Yet resolution of the nuclear issue could open up the vast reserves of Iranian natural gas for use through the Nabucco line, the major pipeline on the drawing boards for getting energy to Europe without going through Russia. The project is currently nearly moribund because there isn’t enough supply to justify the huge investments. Iran would be a game-changer. 

So color me skeptical that Russian interests will ever lead it to be an effective partner in pressuring Iran on its nuclear weapons ambitions. And what's more, anyone who thinks the U.S.-Russian nuclear reductions that Obama just won will help to halt the Iranian nuclear program needs to refrain from operating heavy machinery. Something tells me that Iran’s rulers will be none too persuaded to give up their nuclear aspirations simply because the United States and Russia have now agreed to retain a couple thousand fewer nukes apiece between them.

As for the other accomplishment of Obama’s trip -- Russia’s offer to open its airspace for U.S. military re-supply of the war in Afghanistan -- I’m of two minds: Given the uncertainty still surrounding Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan and the insecurity of supply routes through Pakistan, it’s nice to have another option; but we are now directly at the mercy of Russia for a service that they can use against us as a political weapon if they see fit. Just ask Ukrainians with gas-heated homes how that’s working out for them.

All of this should raise a fundamental question for those who harbor high hopes for hitting that reset button with Russia: How good should we feel about a U.S.-Russia relationship where we can make progress on many issues of questionable importance while we disagree over most of the important stuff?

By Will Inboden

This week brings President Obama’s visit to Moscow, and with it a cauldron of questions over the state of US-Russia relations and the curious trajectory of Russia itself. Continuing uncertainties over who is really in charge in Russia and what Russia wants were further complicated by Prime Minister Putin’s abrupt announcement a few weeks ago that -- sixteen years after applying and just as admission seemed to approach -- Russia was suspending its bid for membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and instead forming a trade bloc with Belarus and Kazakhstan (which, at 66th and 53rd respectively in global GDP rankings, are hardly economic powerhouses).

This odd gambit, seemingly against Russia’s own economic interests as well as President Medvedev’s previous statements, recalls an earlier episode in history. In February 1946, the Soviet Union decided against participating in the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, both of which were just being formed as institutional pillars of the post-war global economic order. As George Kennan relates in his memoirs, this news caused no small amount of distress within the US Government, as it seemed to go against the USSR’s own economic interests and indicate an adversarial posture towards the West. And it was also this Russian decision against international economic cooperation which prompted Kennan, then a diplomat at the US Embassy in Moscow, to compose the “Long Telegram” inquiring into the puzzle of Russian behavior.

Expanded the next year into an article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", Kennan’s argument is remembered today as the paradigmatic exposition of the containment doctrine that defined American grand strategy during the Cold War. But one of Kennan’s central themes is easily overlooked yet unfortunately still relevant. This is his analysis of Russian political character, or what might be called the Sources of Russian Conduct.  Before studying Marxist-Leninist ideology, Kennan was first and foremost a student of Russia -- its language, history, culture.

Even hinting at parallels between the Soviet Union of the past and the Russia of today is fraught with peril, because they are not the same, and the United States is not in a “new Cold War” with Russia, and should not seek a new Cold War with Russia. On this President Obama got it exactly right when he warned Putin against such a posture. But just because history should not be repeated does not mean it should be ignored. 

So Kennan’s article still has much to teach us, as it described a nation with an intrinsic distrust of others and a zero-sum view of international relations.  Kennan observed how Soviet ideology interacted with Russian history in the minds of the nation’s leaders.  It “taught them that the outside world was hostile...[and] the powerful hands of Russian history and tradition reached up to sustain them in this feeling.”  Moreover, members of the Russian government “are unamenable to argument or reason which comes to them from outside sources. Their whole training has taught them to mistrust and discount the glib persuasiveness of the outside world.” Presumably, such “glib persuasiveness” would include things like “reset buttons."

Kennan also described a lamentably familiar posture towards dissent: “all internal opposition forces in Russia have consistently been portrayed as the agents of foreign forces of reaction.” Such slurs are well-known to the brave few remaining Russian political dissidents and independent journalists who are regularly disparaged as tools of the West, or America, or Britain, or Georgia, or whomever the Putin regime’s villain du jour may be. 

This kind of paranoia and xenophobia may seem oddly misplaced, even irrational, today. After all, it is hard to conceive of a threat that the United States and the rest of the outside world really pose to Russia, especially to a Russia whose most profound problems may be its own demographic death spiral. But here Kennan’s analysis may still help explain Russian actions that might otherwise seem to go against Russia’s own interests -- whether it be WTO application suspension, continued belligerence toward Georgia, arms sales and a political heat shield to Iran, and fulminations against the third site ballistic missile defense.

President Obama, for his part, has thus far admirably resisted including Russia in his series of international apologies. And the Russians seem willing to show some good will, at least in their own way, by dialling back on the state-sponsored media slander of America during Obama’s visit. His meetings this week seem to be producing some modestly encouraging cooperative steps, such as the nuclear arms reduction agreement (though still a sideshow from the more substantive issues in US-Russia relations). Yet on the most contentious issues a firm and realistic posture is needed, and promising in this regard is NSC Senior Director Mike McFaul’s assertion that,

We're not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense...We're going to define our national interests, and by that I also mean the interests of our allies in Europe with reference to these two particular questions.

Whatever the outcome of this week’s summitry, going forward relations with Russia will probably continue to be a significant challenge for the Obama administration.  Perhaps most prescient is this line from Kennan, as true in 1947 as it is today: “we are going to continue for a long time to find the Russians difficult to deal with.”

By Christian Brose

I finally got around to reading this Fareed Zakaria piece that some have recommended, and I can't say I'm much impressed. He's usually a smart writer, but he makes assumptions in this piece that are far more reflective of the so-called "Washington establishment" he aims to criticize, and it's worth picking at it for those reasons. Here's his main point:

The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own -- Russian demands are by definition unacceptable. The only way to deal with countries is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it's imperial policy. And it isn't likely to work in today's world.

I'm all for a serious discussion of diplomacy, but unfortunately this isn't it. Is negotiating akin to appeasement? No, not inherently, but as with everything, the devil's in the details. Diplomacy is not just a synonym for talking. It is the balancing of incentives and disincentives to elicit changes in another party's behavior. So the question should never be, are we negotiating? -- but rather, are we aligning our tools of engagement and coercion to get our desired result?

I'd be the first to say that the Bush administration did not always pass that test. Indeed, one of the many tragedies of the Iraq war was that, at the moment (in April 2003) when U.S. leverage over Iran was highest, the Bush administration did not attempt to use it to change Iran's behavior. Would it have worked? Who knows. But it should have been tried, because the administration then spent its final years trying (unsuccessfully) to recreate the leverage it once had for a policy that was too-little-too-late.

We've been hearing a lot about the Obama administration's plans to talk to adversaries -- Iran, Russia, Syria, the Taliban, etc. But we've heard preciously little about how the administration intends to create conditions of strength that are the requirement for diplomatic success. Everyone knows Obama is willing to talk. The question is what new leverage he will bring to bear to make that talk effective. Will we use the military forces we are withdrawing from Iraq to exert greater pressure on Iran? Are we asking our European allies to take any bold new steps on financial coercion? What exactly is Russia willing and able to do to change Iran's decision-making? So far, answers to questions like these have not exactly been forthcoming, and in their absence, it's not at all off-base to think that talking without leverage could harm U.S. interests. (And all of this is assuming that Iran hasn't just said, screw it, we're getting the bomb, and damn the torpedoes, which opens up a whole new world of problems.)

Similarly, there's Zakaria's assertion, which is echoed so often by people in Washington, that "other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own." Well, there's interests, and then there's interests. It is perfectly legitimate for Russia to use its national power to advance its commercial and security interests. And Obama's team, like Bush's, will have plenty of conversations with Russia about whether our interests and theirs are reconcilable. Some will be; others won't. And we should never mistake, as Zakaria and others seem to do, a lack of agreement for a lack of diplomacy.

But in some sense, this is the less important issue. The real sticking point is how a Syria or a Russia defines some of its "interests." Damascus's desire to dominate Lebanon is not an interest. Nor is Russia's attempt to create a sphere of influence in its old imperial stomping grounds and prevent sovereign nations from making free choices about their own foreign policies. Such "interests" should be, in Zakaria's words, "by definition unacceptable." And to capitulate on this point, in the case of Russia specifically, is not only craven; it plays into what increasingly seems to be Moscow's real goal: to force the United States into a position where every decision we make about our own interests in Europe and Central Asia has to go through the Kremlin first -- be it resupply to Afghanistan or cooperation on missile defense with NATO allies. We can call this many things, but a partnership isn't one of them.

These are hard problems, and rather than tired cliches or pleasant rhetoric about outstretched hands, it's getting to be time for serious answers. Zakaria I suspect knows better. I hope the administration does too.

By Christian Brose

For everyone wondering where the U.S. government keeps the "reset button" that Vice President Biden tells us we will be hitting on our relationship with Russia, it has now been located. In fact, Secretary Clinton, in Geneva today, presented a "reset button" as a gift to Foreign Minister Lavrov. This presents a few interpretive problems. Had Clinton already hit the reset button prior to giving it to Lavrov? Is it Russia that is now supposed to hit the reset button on its relationship with the United States (a more fitting though far-fetched metaphor)? When hitting said reset button, will Russia use an open hand or a clenched fist? These are serious questions, and Americans want answers.

Well, the plot thickens. Turns out, the Russian word inscribed on the button didn't translate to "reset." As Lavrov pointed out, Clinton had given him an "overcharge" button. Something tells me that's a button Moscow won't be hitting anytime soon, even if the Obama administration tries to pay for better Russian behavior by selling off NATO missile defense or bargaining away the peace of mind of our eastern European allies. In fact, Clinton may want to take back that overcharge button. She may need it soon.