AS President Obama approaches his second term, few foreign policies are
more in need of reassessment than his stance toward Russia.
Recent events have eroded the promise of the “reset” proclaimed in 2009.
Its achievements — the New START Treaty, cooperation on Afghanistan and
Iran, Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization — have faded,
replaced by stubborn differences over Syria, Iran and other high-profile
issues amid rising, gratuitously antagonistic rhetoric in both
capitals.
Obama will now try to reverse this deterioration, perhaps demonstrating
some of the “flexibility” he promised Russian leaders earlier this year.
Putin, for his part, has talked about giving the relations “a new
quality” by adding a strong economic dimension. We may hear talk of a
second phase of the reset. There may be more deals of the kind ExxonMobil struck with Rosneft.
But glib formulations and major energy projects should not cover up the
fundamental choice the two administrations face: to continue their
transactional approach to relations, with their inevitable ups and
downs, or to put relations in a broader, longer-term strategic
framework, which could foster more enduring constructive relations.
A choice in favor of the former faces two problems.
First, it is hard to see where progress can be made in the next four years.
Deeper nuclear-arms cuts, a U.S. priority, will harden Russian concerns
about U.S. missile defense and nonnuclear strategic systems, while
approaching the threshold at which Chinese, Indian and Pakistani forces
begin to affect the global nuclear balance.
Putin’s recent preference for trade and investment requires a
qualitatively different business climate in Russia, including the de
facto rule of law and competent, honest governance. Fruitful cooperation
on regional conflicts, as Syria has demonstrated, requires dealing with
the age-old principles of world order, sovereignty and noninterference
in internal affairs, and the growing Western preference to use force to
protect foreign populations from brutal leaders.
The United States will not revert to realpolitik, and Russia will not
give up its support for the traditional order. Overall, there will be no
easy trade-offs.
Second, domestic political conditions in neither country are conducive
to pursuing such trade-offs. Incensed by Washington’s insistence on
dealing simultaneously with the Russian government and Russian society,
Putin has taken steps — from branding foreign-funded non-governmental
organizations as “foreign agents”
to ending the U.S. Agency for International Development’s 20 years of
work in Russia — that do not make it politically easier for Obama to
sell closer engagement with Moscow.
The Magnitsky Act,
calling for sanctions against Russian officials who violate human
rights, establishes a precedent which, in theory at least, can be
expanded to include any senior member of the current regime.
By contrast, a strategic approach would start with the geopolitical
transformation now underway across the globe and ask how each country
could become a strategic asset for the other.
Russia, if only by virtue of geography, and the United States, because
of its global reach, could exercise significant influence over the
emergence of a new geopolitical balance in Eurasia. The two countries’
strategic interests do not necessarily collide; indeed, there is
probably a significant overlap, given common concerns about China,
Islamic extremists and competition for Arctic resources by non-Arctic
powers.
Moreover, there is a significant economic component to all these
balances that could encourage the productive relations with the United
States that are critical to Russia’s becoming a modern economy — one of
Russia’s prime national strategic objectives.
The question arises then how the United States and Russia could each harness relations to its own strategic purposes.
So far, both the U.S. administration and the Kremlin have resisted
taking a strategic approach. In her article in Foreign Policy a year ago
on the “pivot” toward Asia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not
once mention Russia, even though Russia was then preparing to act as
host to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in
Vladivostok in September 2012 in part to underscore its determination to
return as an Asian power, and was playing a vital role in supplying
American forces in Afghanistan. Putin canceled his participation in last
May’s Group of 8 summit meeting at Camp David at the last moment,
something no world leader had done before.
On the U.S. side, this oversight grows in part out of the discomfort
America has with the very idea of Russian power, grounded in the long
Cold-War struggle. Having confronted malevolent Soviet power for so
long, America resists the idea that Russia could ever have a positive
role in American strategic interests.
On the Russian side, there is still great resentment over the way the
United States treated Russia after the end of the Cold War, and a fair
amount of suspicion that U.S. policy is aimed at weakening Russia today.
It is time to begin overcoming this mutual discomfort and mistrust. Two
decades after the Cold War, the United States and Russia are no longer
strategic rivals, and in the emerging multipolar world they could be
partners.
This is a proposition that now needs to be tested. The two countries
need to engage in a high-level strategic dialogue to understand the
dynamics of our changing world and the ways in which they impact on each
country’s strategic interests, and to determine whether there is
sufficient overlap in these interests for a long-term cooperative
relationship.
There is no guarantee that we would reach agreement. Indeed, a strategic
dialogue could reveal unbridgeable differences. But the potential
benefits of strategic cooperation justify the effort.Read the full story here.
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