Russian-American relations: In search of détente, once again | The Economist: The real breaking-point in Russia’s relationship with America came after 2003. America’s invasion of Iraq, and the Kremlin’s attack on Yukos against the background of a rising oil price, coincided to change Russia’s direction and subsequently its relationship with the West.
With his fondness for conspiracy theories, Mr Putin decided America’s goal was to weaken Russia at any cost. He blamed “outside forces” for a tragic school siege in Beslan, and also saw an American hand behind the Orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004. That looked to him like a dress rehearsal for a revolution in Russia. Meanwhile he saw the war in Iraq, Russia’s long-time client state, as an intolerable encroachment on national interests, if not a declaration of war. Mr Putin compared the West to a “strict uncle in a pith helmet” telling other people how to live. But Mr Bush, preoccupied with Iraq, paid little attention.
“Ten American presidents from Truman to Clinton [made] Russia one of their top strategic issues,” says Strobe Talbott, Mr Clinton’s top Russian adviser. “George W. Bush, if you had asked him what his ten to 15 top issues were—Russia would not be one of them until August 2008 [when Russia invaded Georgia].”
When Mr Putin warned America and its allies against taking Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, the West saw this as posturing. In the end, it achieved the worst of both worlds. It pledged eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine without offering them a way to achieve it, and it infuriated Russia without promising to defend Georgia. “We have combined strong rhetoric with policies of appeasement,” says Joseph Wood, a senior adviser to Dick Cheney, America’s former vice-president.
In August 2008, Mr Bush and Mr Putin talked in Beijing about the worsening situation in the Caucasus. When Mr Putin realised that Mr Bush wouldn’t or couldn’t rein in Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, he decided to whack him himself. In invading Georgia, Mr Putin felt he was merely mirroring NATO’s actions against the Serbs and America’s war in Iraq. But Russia also saw the war in Georgia as a proxy conflict with America and NATO. For a moment, the two countries were close to touching the electrified wire.
Cold-war mentalities
Mr Obama is going to Moscow at a dangerous time. The risk of another war in Georgia is far from over, and the economic crisis has not made Russia any friendlier to the West. By way of a welcome for Mr Obama, Russia has staged the biggest military exercise in the north Caucasus since the end of the cold war. It concludes on the day he arrives in Moscow.
The new American administration, which has mobilised some of the best experts on Russia, has few illusions about the nature of the Kremlin regime: institutionally weak, nationalistic, corrupt and dangerous both to its neighbours and to its own people. But they are also aware that lecturing the Kremlin about its behaviour at home or abroad is useless. “We don’t have the ability or even will to use coercive power to change Russia’s behaviour,” says a senior administration official.
Instead Mr Obama will be talking about America’s national interests, in the hope that some of them may overlap with Russia’s. The irony is that while Mr Obama and Mr Medvedev have pledged “to move beyond cold-war mentalities and chart a fresh start”, the central (and safest) topic of talks is nuclear-arms control, just as it was in the 1980s. The two are aiming to bring their deployed arsenals down below the 1,700-2,000 by 2012 agreed in the 2002 Moscow treaty. An opinion poll this week shows that more than half of all Russians do not support the reductions. “Russia is encircled by American military bases, airports and naval units,” cried Vyacheslav Nikonov, a hawkish commentator.
Yet the fact is that, in many ways, Russia needs a new treaty more than America. It cannot afford to start another arms race. “It is back to the future: in the dark days of the cold war, the only piece of real business that the United States and the Soviet Union could do together was not blowing up the world. It may not be the only game in town, but it is the only one that looks pretty clear win-win,” says Mr Talbott.
By engaging with Russia on nuclear questions and giving it the status it craves, of a quasi-superpower, America hopes to get traction on other issues, such as Iran and non-proliferation. And if Russia has enough at stake in its relationship with America, it may even decide that the cost of fighting another war in Georgia or destabilising the Crimea is simply too high.
Moscow has registered the change of language. Sergei Prikhodko, the Kremlin’s chief foreign-policy adviser, says the style has not become softer, but “we get the feeling that they don’t just listen to us, they hear us as well.” He says Moscow is also receptive to America’s demand to limit any possible leaking of nuclear technologies and material out of Russia. And both Mr Prikhodko and his American counterparts say Russia has been more co-operative on Iran than it appears. “They are certainly not doing certain negative things that they could have been doing there,” a senior administration official says.
Much of Mr Obama’s policy rests on the assumption that Russia still wants to sit at the same table as America and be integrated into world structures. But this may no longer be the case. Russia does not consider the West as a model of governance or the rule of law, but as a provider of services, including financial ones, for the ruling elite. As Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, has argued, Russia has left the West and is trying to build up its influence in the former Soviet space. Mr Putin’s decision to pull out of the World Trade Organisation entry negotiations, saying that Russia is prepared to go in only as part of a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, illustrates that point. It came despite Mr Obama’s and Mr Medvedev’s pledge to jump-start Russia’s entry.
But the most difficult issue will remain the fate of Georgia and Ukraine. Russia may not be trying to recreate an empire—it has neither the energy, human resources or ideology for that—but it is trying to prevent the West from entering its sphere of influence. Mr Trenin says that what Russia wants is a buffer zone, with no American military bases or NATO presence. The first targets in Georgia last August were military installations built to NATO standards.
Russia wants a monopoly on the use of force in the former Soviet Union. It also wants to ensure that no conflict can be resolved without its involvement. In advocating a multipolar world, Russia sees itself as one of the poles, dominating its region.
Looking the same way, unusually
Mr Obama’s team will stress that America has no intention of giving up on Ukraine and Georgia. But it will not fight for Georgia militarily or force the issue of NATO membership, not least because neither country is ready. The danger, says Mr Illarionov, is that Russia may interpret any wavering as a signal that America has abandoned Georgia and Ukraine, which might then lead to another military clash.
As one of his advisers puts it, Mr Obama is not a sentimental guy. He will give the Russia relationship his best shot. But if his investment does not yield returns, there is a good chance that Russia will simply drop to the end of his long list of priorities. “We know this is a very serious window of opportunity and nobody should be in any doubt that we want to use it,” says Mr Prikhodko. “But we also have to get answers to the questions we have accumulated over the years. We can ‘reset’ the computer—but what are we going to do with the memories?”
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