For the past several weeks, the Washington
Post has featured numerous editorials and articles
denigrating Russia as more expansionist and
assertive toward the West and arguing against
improving bilateral relations between Russia
and the United States.
Fred Hiatt, the editor of the editorial page,
used Vice President Joseph Biden’s commitment
“to press the reset button” in relations
with Russia to make a case against improved
relations. Jim Hoagland, the paper’s senior
op-ed writer on foreign policy, warned that
any effort to improve relations would merely
“spark misgivings and apprehensions among
European and Arab allies.” And Jackson
Diehl, a member of the paper’s editorial
board, recently argued that the deepening domestic
repression in Russia points to greater external
belligerence, which happened to be former secretary
of state Condoleezza Rice’s rationalization
for making no effort to improve Russian-American
relations. All of these charges represent a
distortion of recent events in Russia as well
as the key events in Russian-American relations.
These views are typical, nevertheless, of the
mindset that dominates many elements of the
U.S. mainstream media as well as the views in
Britain’s newsmagazine, The Economist.
The Economist’s senior writer on Central
and Eastern Europe, Edward Lucas, recently published
“The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia
and the Threat to the West,” which predicts
a geopolitical confrontation between Russia
and the United States and describes Putin’s
Russia as a “markedly authoritarian system”
that represents an “ideological mishmash
of tsarist imperialism, Soviet nostalgia, and
xenophobia inspired by nationalist visions of
a Greater Russia.”
Even some of President Obama’s advisors
on Russia during the presidential campaign,
including senior Russian experts such as Stephen
Sestanovich, Strobe Talbott, and Michael McFaul,
drafted a misguided report of the Council on
Foreign Relations titled “Russia’s
Wrong Direction.”
These charges exaggerate the nature and scope
of Russian policies, ignore the anti-Russian
policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations
over the past 16 years, and omit the geopolitical
reasons for improving Russian-American relations.
The weakening of democratic institutions in
Russia over the past several years and last
summer’s five-day war between Russia and
Georgia are worrisome developments, but the
United States certainly would have more leverage
in Moscow in an atmosphere of strengthened bilateral
relations than in the current atmosphere of
strained relations. The U.S. role in training
and equipping the Georgian army and encouraging
the deployment of a large Georgian contingent
in Iraq certainly played a role in the worsening
of Russian-Georgian ties.
A missed opportunity took place in 1991 when
the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet
Union afforded an unusual opportunity to anchor
Russia to the Western security system and to
remove one of the major obstacles to increased
international stability and predictability.
President Bill Clinton was responsible for the
unnecessary expansion of the NATO alliance in
the mid-1990s that introduced former member
states of the Warsaw Pact into a military and
political alliance that was designed to contain
the former Soviet Union.
President George W. Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty of 1972, which was the cornerstone
of strategic deterrence, and championed the
deployment of a costly and ineffective national
missile defense (NMD). The interests of the
military-industrial complex and the unilateralist
views of the Bush administration were driving
NMD, not a desire to promote national security.
The neocons of the Bush administration also
supported the deployment of NMD in Poland and
the Czech Republic, an expanded NATO membership
to include Georgia and Ukraine, and a military
presence in Central Asia. These steps contributed
little to American national security and all
of them helped to worsen Russian-American relations.
In view of the growing political and economic
constraints on US power and the shared strategic
interests of the United States and Russia, there
is an obvious case for a return to détente
between the two nations. The United States and
Russia have more than 90% of the world’s
nuclear weapons, and their two treaties on strategic
arms reductions will expire in President Obama’s
first term. Progress between the United States
and Russia on resolving their differences would
open up the disarmament agenda to include lowering
the caps on major weapon systems around the
world and perhaps bringing India and Pakistan
into the Non-proliferation Treaty.
The recent collision between British and French
nuclear submarines, which carried hundreds of
nuclear warheads, testifies to the need for
bringing their forces into the arms control
arena. Instead of deploying a missile defense
in Poland and the Czech Republic, which the
U.S. justifies as a defense against Iranian
programs, Washington and Moscow should work
together to limit the nuclear threat from Tehran.
Neither Moscow nor Washington would welcome
nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran or North
Korea.
Russia could also play a useful role in the
two most urgent problems that confront the Obama
administration—Iraq and Afghanistan. The
withdrawal from Iraq over the next 19 months
and any eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan
will require regional dialogue and cooperation,
and having Russia on board will make it easier
to communicate with such key regional actors
as Iran, Syria, Pakistan, India, and China.
All of these nations could play a part in helping
to stabilize weak governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Moscow and Washington also have common concerns
on nonproliferation, counter-terrorism, drug
trafficking, and energy security.
The successful arms control policies of Presidents
Nixon and Reagan placed a measure of predictability
and stability at the center of Russian-American
relations. The policies of President Obama could
do the same for this important strategic relationship.
In any event, it is long past time to return
the common interests and strategic concerns
of Russia and the United States to the center
of their bilateral relations.
Melvin A. Goodman, a regular contributor to
The Public Record, is senior fellow at the Center
for International Policy and adjunct professor
of government at Johns Hopkins University. He
was a senior analyst at the CIA for 24 years
and his most recent book is “Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.”
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
