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From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Serguei A. Oushakine
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 11:12 PM
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Subject: Anatol Lieven: How Obama Can Reform Russia Policy (The Nation)

...The assumptions of the Clinton and Bush administrations concerning US
power and the ideological certainties on which they founded much of their
foreign policy lie in ruins. Faced with the collapse of past Communist
certainties, the Chinese and Russian elites eventually responded with
radically new strategies. I would be disappointed to find out that US
Democratic Party elites are inferior in this regard.


How Obama Can Reform Russia Policy
By Anatol Lieven
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090112/lieven

Anatol Lieven, a professor at King's College, London, and a senior fellow at
the New America Foundation, is the author of Ethical Realism: A Vision for
America's Role in the World (Pantheon), written with John Hulsman.

This article appeared in the January 12, 2009 edition of The Nation.
December 23, 2008

One of the incoming Obama administration's top foreign policy priorities
should be to stop the drift toward confrontation with Russia. The war in
Georgia last summer demonstrated the dangers of an American policy that
encourages Russia's neighbors to attack what Russia sees as its vital
interests. The United States, by contrast, has no vital interests in this
region--certainly not compared with those elsewhere. The Georgian attack on
South Ossetia and President Mikheil Saakashvili's increasing
authoritarianism should also make clear that the United States has no moral
stake in the Russia-Georgia dispute. In any other context, Washington would
have not the slightest difficulty in denouncing the Saakashvili
administration as chauvinist, bellicose aggressors against the Abkhaz and
Ossetian peoples.

Above all, however, Washington simply cannot afford the geopolitical
distraction of confrontation with Russia when the United States faces such
immense challenges elsewhere. What is more, Russia can be of great help on
what should be two linked priorities of the new administration: achieving
détente with Iran and putting together a regional coalition to help
stabilize Afghanistan and eventually replace the US and NATO presence there.
Russian pressure and Russian contacts in Tehran would be immensely valuable
in this regard. These are urgent issues; defending Europe against possible
Iranian nuclear weapons at some indefinite time in the future is not
necessary today and probably never will be. Plans to deploy missile defenses
in Central Europe should therefore immediately be put on hold, as part of a
wider strategy outlined below.

In its approach to Russia the new administration has one great advantage,
denied to it in other spheres: in order to achieve a significant improvement
in relations, Washington does not actually have to do anything. It only has
to stop doing certain things. This is because, contrary to the impression
assiduously cultivated in the US media and think-tank worlds, Russian policy
vis-à-vis the West is not more aggressive or assertive than it was in the
past. Outside the economic sphere, it is rather overwhelmingly reactive,
made up of responses (which may, of course, be exaggerated or unwise) to the
actions of the West and especially the United States.

The difference between the image of Russian behavior in the United States
and its reality was dramatized by the war over South Ossetia in August. It
is not just that a clear and obvious Georgian attack was misreported as an
act of Russian aggression by the US media and establishment. It is also that
the whole affair was presented in terms of a new Russian expansionism. As a
matter of record, however, Moscow's commitment to defend South Ossetia dates
back to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, and that of defending Abkhazia, to Boris
Yeltsin in 1993. Rightly or wrongly, Soviet and then Russian help was
instrumental in defeating Georgian attempts to crush these regions'
independence moves in the early '90s.

Thereafter, Moscow repeatedly made clear that it would not accept any
Georgian attempt to retake these territories by force. In recent years
Moscow's signals in this regard to the Saakashvili government could not have
been clearer. One can criticize this Russian policy from a number of points
of view; but one cannot seriously claim that it was either new or hidden.

The new element in the region has been the US arming of Georgia and the US
push to bring Georgia into NATO. It can only have been belief in US support
that inspired Saakashvili to launch Georgia's attack. If Washington had not
created the impression that such support would be forthcoming in the event
of war, there would have been no war, and the United States would have
avoided a crisis that the world economy could ill afford, including $4.5
billion in emergency Western aid to Georgia, money that could have been
better spent in helping Pakistan, for example--a country that truly is vital
to US interests.

Moscow is not aiming at domination of Georgia proper. After all, in recent
years Russia has withdrawn its bases, allowed the peaceful displacement of
President Eduard Shevardnadze by Saakashvili and acquiesced in Saakashvili's
forcible overthrow of the rival regime of Aslan Abashidze in the Georgian
autonomous republic of Ajaria and in the virtual abolition of that region's
autonomy--despite the fact that at the time, Russian troops were still based
in Ajaria and could have intervened to prevent it.

Moscow has long since recognized that Georgian nationalism makes a
subservient Georgia impossible. On the other hand, the Russian establishment
is absolutely determined to defend the protectorates of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia, and to prevent NATO from helping Georgia to reconquer them. It sees
in this an exact parallel with the West's policy of defending Kosovo against
Serbia.

In other words, the US depiction of the situation in the Caucasus is an
inversion of the truth. Far from protecting Georgia from Russia, US policy
has encouraged Georgia to attack Russia and thereby endanger and destabilize
itself. And whether Georgia is inside or outside NATO, there is no chance
that the United States will send forces to fight for Georgia, if only
because it does not have any available.

American reporting about Ukraine has been just as misleading. The push for
NATO membership has been presented as a move to boost Ukrainian democracy
and enhance Ukrainian security. But NATO membership would almost certainly
have exactly the opposite effect, for the simple reason that according to
every opinion poll, it is opposed by a large majority of Ukrainians in
general and by an overwhelming majority in the Russian-speaking east and
south of the country. Even leaving aside the issue of Russia's reaction, the
NATO issue bitterly divides Ukraine and raises the possibility of internal
differences worsening to the point of civil war. Russia would doubtless
encourage this process, but it is the United States, not Russia, that would
initiate it.

The first step in relations with Russia on the part of the new
administration should therefore be quietly to move the offer of NATO
membership for Georgia and Ukraine onto the back burner. Condoleezza Rice
has already opened the way for this by stating that the United States will
not press for an early offer of a "membership action plan" at the next NATO
summit. As one of its first actions in the area of foreign policy, the Obama
administration should give private assurances to Russia that the issue will
not be raised again as long as Obama remains in power--unless, of course,
Russia takes aggressive and unprovoked actions against Ukraine, Georgia or
the Baltic states. Russian officials have repeatedly made clear in private
that the abandonment of US offers of membership to Ukraine and Georgia would
automatically unlock much greater Russian cooperation on a range of other
issues. Given the congruence of wider US and Russian interests--and the
Russian government's need for Western investment and goodwill in the face of
its own growing economic crisis--a considerable warming in relations should
be possible.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, the Obama administration should aim at a
clear, if doubtless private, agreement that would exclude radical action by
either the United States or Russia in favor of a joint commitment to share
influence. Thus the United States would abandon further moves to pull
Ukraine into NATO in return for a Russian disavowal of crude forms of
political intervention and economic pressure. Such an agreement should be
eased by the fall in the international price of energy, greatly
reducing--for a time at least--Moscow's ability to use its energy supplies
as a weapon of geopolitical influence.

It should also be made clear to Moscow that if it ever uses energy blackmail
against existing members of NATO and the EU, then all other agreements will
automatically be under question. To be fair, despite hysterical Western
fears, Moscow has never done this or threatened it as far as its Western
customers are concerned--though it has cut supplies to Ukraine and Georgia
because of massive unpaid bills. However, fears that Russia will put energy
pressure on the West in the future should be used by the Obama
administration to accelerate radically increased US cooperation with Europe
to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

The Obama administration needs to embed its relations with Russia in a wider
new strategy toward Eurasia. The frame should include Russia, Iran,
Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and the approach should be based on a
recognition that the United States is simply not strong enough anymore--if
indeed it ever was--to impose its will on the region, or even to prevent
Afghanistan from sinking into deeper civil war.

First, the Obama administration needs to make a determined effort at
reconciliation with Iran, starting with private signals to the Iranian
establishment that the defeat of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran's presidential
elections in June 2009 would be a major step in making this possible,
coupled with assurances that the United States has no intention of backing
regime change. The new approach should include a return to the terms of the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty under strict supervision, thereby verifiably
freezing the Iranian nuclear program short of weaponization. Russia and
China should be enlisted to bring this about, and to agree to impose very
tough international sanctions if Iran breaks the treaty. On the other hand,
Iran should immediately be promised the restoration of full diplomatic
relations and the unlocking of frozen assets in return for a treaty
promising strict adherence to the NPT and help to the United States in
Afghanistan.

A declared pursuit of détente with Iran would, in turn, enable the Obama
administration to suspend another major cause of Russian hostility, namely
the move to establish US missile defenses in Central Europe. Washington can
announce that as long as there is a good chance of preventing an Iranian
nuclear force by diplomatic means, there is obviously no need for those
missile defenses. The whole issue can therefore be deferred--let us hope
indefinitely.

Improved relations with Iran and Russia should be used to help with what
will be a central challenge for the Obama administration: stabilizing
Afghanistan without committing US troops to fight there for decades or
launching an invasion of Pakistan to destroy Taliban support, thereby
creating a much greater disaster for US and world security. The answer to
this dilemma--a most imperfect answer, but the best on offer--is to try to
stitch together a regional consensus to manage Afghanistan after the United
States and NATO withdraw.

Russia and Iran are both critical to such a strategy. Before 9/11 these
countries were instrumental in preserving whatever remained of anti-Taliban
opposition within Afghanistan. Without them, the United States would have
had no local allies on the ground when it attacked the Taliban regime in the
fall of 2001. In addition, Iran, as Afghanistan's most important neighbor,
will always be critical to any serious attempt to develop Afghanistan's
economy--something that has been barely mentioned in the Western debate over
that war-torn nation.

Russia could also play a valuable role in Afghanistan's future because it
can act as a bridge between two other countries that will be vital in this
regard: China and India. China, in turn, is of great importance because of
its close links to Pakistan, which is the only external power to possess any
significant degree of influence over the Taliban. If the United States can
work with Russia and Iran to help bring together Afghanistan's other
neighbors, that will increase the chances that the United States will be
able to leave Afghanistan with some measure of dignity intact and without
simply allowing Afghanistan to sink back into the horrible anarchy of the
pre-Taliban 1990s.

If the Obama administration pursues the set of policies described above, it
will have to imagine the United States not as "the country which stands
taller than other nations, and therefore sees further," in Madeleine
Albright's words but as a state among other states: not with a unique
mission of national superiority and leadership but with a common
responsibility to seek common solutions to common problems. Unfortunately,
such a truly multilateral foreign policy is alien to the Clinton/Albright
school of diplomacy--from which Obama has drafted many of his top advisers.
Hillary Clinton, Obama's nominee as secretary of state, as well as her and
Obama's key associates in the area of Russia policy, have an especially bad
record when it comes to Russian relations. Some, like Stephen Sestanovich,
Strobe Talbott and Michael McFaul, have contributed directly to a worsening
of relations, for example by their guidance in drafting the misguided 2006
bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations report Russia's Wrong Direction.

On the other hand, two factors contribute to greater optimism regarding
future US-Russian relations. The first is that in many ways, for the United
States to adopt a more sensible policy toward Russia and other major powers,
it really only has to follow the fairly rational model already pursued by
both the Clinton and second Bush administrations in their relations with
China. Both administrations did this in the end because they recognized that
the United States was not powerful enough to do anything else, at least
without bringing the world economies down in ruins. Echoing this, the
growing constraints on US power analyzed in the latest report of the
National Intelligence Council should lead to greater sobriety across the
entire spectrum of foreign policy. Therefore, even if the new administration
proves incapable of greater wisdom in its dealings with Russia, it may at
least be forced to exercise greater caution.

The assumptions of the Clinton and Bush administrations concerning US power
and the ideological certainties on which they founded much of their foreign
policy lie in ruins. Faced with the collapse of past Communist certainties,
the Chinese and Russian elites eventually responded with radically new
strategies. I would be disappointed to find out that US Democratic Party
elites are inferior in this regard.

About Anatol Lieven
Anatol Lieven, a professor at King's College, London, and a senior fellow at
the New America Foundation, is the author of Ethical Realism: A Vision for
America's Role in the World (Pantheon), written with John Hulsman. more...