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Towards a new cooperative era in U.S.-Russia relations

Even before U.S. President Barack Obama sets foot on Moscow soil today his first visit to Russia has been judged a groundbreaking success that could open a new cooperative era in relations between the two nations.

It is the first full-fledged Russian-American summit in eight years during which relations between the two countries have sunk to a post-Cold War low. Russia and the U.S. came within an inch of military confrontation last year when Washington backed Georgia in its war with Russia and NATO warships sailed into the Black Sea to demonstrate support for the regime of President Mikheil Saakashvili who unleashed the conflict.

Mr. Obama’s pledge to “reset” relations with Russia is part of a sweeping foreign policy overhaul as the new Administration seeks to discard the George W. Bush legacy of failures and blunders. Mr. Obama’s decision to visit Moscow before he travels to Tokyo or Beijing signalled the importance he attached to relations with Russia.

During his three-day visit Mr. Obama is scheduled to have a total of five hours of talks with President Dmitry Medvedev and a separate hour-long meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The Russian and American leaders are expected to announce impressive progress in talks on a new nuclear arms reduction treaty and a dramatic expansion in Russia’s support for the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan. These were the thrust areas for re-launching bilateral cooperation the leaders of the two countries identified during their first face-to-face meeting in March on the sidelines of a G20 summit in London.

Nuclear arms reductions will dominate the agenda of the Moscow summit. The Bush Administration, confident of U.S. military supremacy, rejected repeated Russian proposals to negotiate a replacement for the1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1), which expires on December 5. The Moscow Treaty on Strategic Nuclear Arsenals Mr. Bush and then Russian President Putin signed in 2002 failed to lead to any effective nuclear cuts as it allowed the two sides to stock dismantled warheads, imposed no limits on weapon carriers and envisaged no mechanism to verify compliance. Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Obama will sign a memorandum that would set a framework for a new treaty. It would reduce the nuclear arsenals of the two countries below the level of1700 warheads envisioned by the 2002 pact, impose limits on the means of their delivery – missiles and aircraft, and provide detailed verification procedures.

Mr. Medvedev said Russia would be willing to slash nuclear stockpiles much more radically if the U.S. accepted the Russian demand for a linkage between further arms reductions and global missile defences the U.S. is building.

For all the importance of arms reductions, Mr. Obama’s priority in Moscow will be Afghanistan. And his Kremlin hosts have come forward all the way. During the visit the two sides will sign an agreement to allow massive air and land transit of military supplies and troops for the U.S.-led NATO operations against the Taliban. Shipment of U.S. non-lethal cargoes to Afghanistan across Russian territory began in March. A week before his arrival to Moscow Mr. Obama received another gift, when Kyrgyzstan miraculously relaxed on its decision to shutdown the U.S. airbase at the Manas international airport and agreed to transform it into a “transit centre.”

Breakthroughs on the nuclear arms and Afghanistan are what Mr. Obama needs to claim his Moscow visit a success and convince sceptics at home that his reengagement of Russia is worth the effort. Meanwhile, Moscow views the agreements as only a first step that should help repair frayed relations in other spheres. From Moscow’s perspective, the main problem of Russian-American relations is that even though the Cold War ended 20 years ago the U.S. has continued to treat Russia as an enemy, pushing NATO to Russia’s borders, surrounding it with a ring of military bases and supporting patently anti-Russian leaders informer Soviet states.

Writing in Newsweek ahead of the Moscow summit Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it “will take time” to overcome the “crisis of trust” that had developed between the two countries.

To make their first summit a success the Russian and American leaders agreed to concentrate on areas that offered the best chance of quick progress and address differences later. But as Mr. Obama begins his visit to Russia some disagreements between the two countries remain as formidable as they were under the Bush Administration. Russia is strongly opposed to U.S. plans to deploy strategic missile defences in Europe and offer NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine, while Washington insists there will be no compromise on these issues.

“We’re not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defence,” U.S. President’s special assistant Michael McFaul said last week.

Mr. Obama struck a different tone ahead of the Moscow visit. In an interview to Russian media he said that “we want to deal as equals” with Russia. This was an encouraging statement as it implied readiness to take into account Russia’s interests and concerns.

However, Mr. Obama also said something else that shows he is yet to grasp Russian political realities. While describing Mr. Medvedev as a forward-looking leader, he said that Mr. Putin “has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.”

“I think that it’s important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev, that Putin understands that the old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations are outdated, that it’s time to move forward ina different direction,” Mr. Obama said in an interview to Associated Press.

Mr. Obama is wide off the mark if he thinks that Mr. Medvedev’s view of Russia’s national interests is any different from Mr. Putin’s or that he is less committed to defending them. Mr. Obama will gain nothing by offering compliments to Mr. Medvedev and trying to play him off against Mr. Putin. Compliments and bear hugging worked with former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, but when Mr. Bush tried the same tactics with Mr. Putin, praising his soul and his “straightforward and trustworthy” manners, he failed. Mr. Obama will be ill advised to use such tricks on his visit.

“We [Russians] don’t know how to stand bowlegged, we stand solidly on our two feet and always look to the future,” Mr. Putin said in his reply to Mr. Obama. He also suggested that it is the U.S. that is stuck in Cold War mentality. Mr. Putin recalled that the U.S. Congress is still refusing to repeal the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment that denied normal trade benefits to the Soviet Union till it allowed its Jews to freely immigrate to Israel.

Mr. Obama should be ready to hear in Moscow that there can be no credible “resetting” of relations unless Washington rethinks its policy of seeking strategic superiority over Russia and recognises Russia’s legitimate interests in its neighbourhood. If Mr. Obama truly seeks a fresh start for the U.S. relations with Russia he should take up Moscow’s proposal to build a joint missile shield to protect the world against possible threats. If he accepts the principle of equal security he should embrace Mr. Medvedev’s call to negotiate a new trans-Atlantic security pact.

For Moscow the main outcome of the summit will be the expected establishment of institutional mechanisms for bilateral dialogue, trade and investment. Such mechanisms have been lacking since 2001, when the Bush administration disbanded an inter-government commission headed by the U.S. Vice-President and the Russian Prime Minister. Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Obama plan to recreate the commission at the presidential level and to sign an Action Plan roadmap to promote across-the-board improvement of ties. A fundamental weakness of Russian-American relations, as compared with U.S.-Chinese relations, is their narrow basis, with the bilateral agenda largely confined to political issues, such as nuclear security, terrorism and non-proliferation. The two countries badly need to expand business-to-business interaction to increase the number of stakeholders in both countries who would benefit from solid partnership.

Moscow is prepared for a long-haul journey to patiently rebuild ties with Washington bearing in mind the famous witticism of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “The United States invariably doesthe right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.”

What inspires greatest hopes about the coming summit is that it will bring together the first truly post-Cold War leaders of Russia and America. Mr. Medvedev, 43, and Mr. Obama, 47, both represent a generational change in their respective countries as the first leaders who began political careers when the world was no longer divided into two hostile camps. They are more likely to have a similar frame of mind and share a similar view of the world than their predecessors.

Corrections and Clarifications

The second paragraph of an article "Towards a new cooperative era in U.S.-Russia relations" (Op-Ed, July 6, 2009) said that Russia and the U.S. came within an inch of military confrontation last year when Washington backed Georgia in its war with Russia. In response to a request for a clarification, the Special Correspondent says: Georgia attacked its breakaway territory of South Ossetia, and not Russia. Russia extended military support to South Ossetia. However, South Ossetia did not have any regular armed forces at the time, and it was Russia that beat back the Georgian attack and launched a counter-offensive. So it effectively became a military conflict between Russia and Georgia.

Russian President Dmitry A. Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama met for the first time on April 1, and not in March as published in the fourth paragraph.

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