Russia in Mideast: more of same
Jul 10th, 2009 by MESH
From Mark N. Katz
At the recent Moscow summit, the U.S. and Russian governments made progress on strategic arms control and on Afghanistan. Instead of heralding broader Russian-American cooperation, however, the results of the Moscow summit—and subsequent G-8 summit in Italy—suggest that Russian-American cooperation is likely to remain limited, especially regarding the Middle East.
Presidents Obama and Medvedev reportedly discussed Iran at length, but no agreement on how the United States and Russia would work together in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons was announced. The G-8 summit leaders (which include the president of Russia) have given Iran until September to make progress on the nuclear issue, but this call is largely symbolic. Unlike the UN Security Council, the G-8 has no authority to impose sanctions on Iran. The New York Times reported on July 9 that Russian officials are already boasting that they watered down the G-8 statement.
As I have argued before, what the Kremlin really fears is the prospect of an Iranian-American rapprochement since this would result at minimum in Tehran being even less dependent on and cooperative with Moscow than it is now. Improved Iranian-American relations could also lead to America helping Iran displace Russia as a gas supplier to Europe and as a transit route for Caspian Basin oil and gas.
The Obama administration’s efforts to improve relations with Iran, then, was something Moscow feared, not welcomed. For the Kremlin, the Iranian hardliners’ crackdown on the extraordinary protest against the regime’s declaring Ahmadinejad the winner of the recent presidential elections there has been a godsend, since it has resulted in the pause (if not the stop) button being pressed on the Iranian-American rapprochement process. Unlike the United States, which has criticized (admittedly sparingly) Iranian government behavior, Russia has enthusiastically recognized Iran’s officially announced election results. In short, the Iranian hardliners’ mistaken belief that the United States is somehow behind their opponents is simply too good an opportunity for Moscow not to take advantage of.
The Moscow summit did not result in any meaningful Russian-American cooperation on the Arab-Israeli issue either. While the Kremlin will undoubtedly continue to call for a “comprehensive” solution (as well as meetings to take place in Moscow—as if that location would improve chances for a settlement), it is neither willing nor able to broker one. As with the diplomacy over the North Korean nuclear issue, Moscow seems more interested in being seen to be involved in the Arab-Israeli peace process than in actually contributing to it. Instead, Russia appears likely to continue its efforts to have good relations and balance its ties among Israel, Syria, Fatah, and Hamas. And it will probably succeed because, as Moscow well knows, while each party disapproves of Moscow’s ties to its opponents, each would prefer to have some support from Moscow rather than none.
Yet while America and Russia may not have made progress on Iran or the Arab-Israeli conflict at either the Moscow or G-8 summits, some might hope that the progress they made on strategic arms and Afghanistan could lead to cooperation in these other areas. This, however, seems doubtful, not only because Moscow and Washington simply have different interests regarding Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also because there was less cooperation than was announced on the Russian side regarding Afghanistan and strategic arms control.
The Russian decision to allow the United States to transport military equipment through Russian airspace to Afghanistan reflects a calculation that if things go badly for the U.S. military effort in that country, Russian security interests are going to suffer. Objectively (as Russians were fond of saying during the Communist era), the American military presence in Afghanistan serves to protect Russia and its Central Asian allies from the Taliban. Facilitating the transport of American military equipment to Afghanistan, far from representing a concession to the United States, is very much in Russia’s own interests. Similarly, for the United States and Russia to agree on reducing their strategic nuclear arsenals at a time when it has become far more difficult for Russia to keep up with the United States in weapons technology seems far more beneficial to Russian interests than American ones.
If they herald anything, then, the Moscow and G-8 summits do not presage improved prospects for Russian-American cooperation in the Middle East, but for a continuation of the pattern of Russia cooperating with the United States when this serves Moscow’s interests and not doing so when it doesn’t. And, as before, Moscow is more likely to see not cooperating with the United States in the Middle East as being in its interest more often than cooperating with it. Nor would it be reasonable to expect otherwise.
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Mark Katz is, I think, essentially right in his assessment that Obama’s trip to Moscow has not and will not yield any substantial beneficial changes to U.S. policy in the Mideast.
As numerous observers have noted, President Obama failed to generate in Russia the sort of awe and excitement that he has in America and much of the world at large. One reason for this anomaly is that Russians maintain no illusion that the problems in Russian-American relations began and ended with the presidency of George W. Bush. To the contrary, Russian attitudes, popular as well as elite, toward America underwent a profound shift during the presidency of Bill Clinton. At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, much of the Russian public exuberantly admired Аmericans and America. By the end of the decade, however, that admiration had morphed into distate and resentment.
One indication of the change in attitudes came in the realm of vocabulary. Instead of using the standard amerikantsy to refer to Americans, by 2000 Russian youth increasingly were preferring two slang terms, the slightly disparaging amerikosy and the openly contemptuous pindosy. (It was Russian peacekeeping troops in the Balkans who allegedly repackaged pindosy, formerly an archaic word for Greeks and other travelers from the south, as a denigrative synonym for Americans.) Amerika, a word that for a moment had conjured images of a prosperous land of polite people, freedom, and boundless opportunity (i.e. the mirror image of the economically and ideologically bankrupt Soviet Union), became Pindostan, the country of the doltish and rather pathetic pindosy.
To be sure, popular Russian images and expectations of America at the beginning of the 1990s were irrationally inflated and unsustainable. Disillusionment was bound to set in as Russians came to the realization that crawling out from under the rubble of Communism would be a long process, and that if they were to achieve a prosperous and orderly society they would have to do the work themselves.
The Clinton administration’s policies in the Balkans, and especially the undeclared war it fought with Serbia over the fate of Kosovo, angered Russians in all sectors of society. But it was hardly the only source of friction. Other issues such as NATO expansion, missile defense, energy pipelines, and, not least, America’s high profile involvement in the redistribution of wealth and property under Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” economic policies all served to antagonize Russians, who concluded that Washington was determined to exploit their country’s weakness to the hilt. The simultaneously self-congratulatory and hectoring tone of the Clinton administration did not help. It is worth remembering that in 2000, Condoleezza Rice felt compelled to emphasize that the incoming Bush administration would, unlike its predecessor, conduct a foreign policy grounded in humility.
Despite Rice’s promise and Bush’s later famous claim to have peered into Putin’s soul and found it good, Russian-American relations remained strained for the next eight years. Toward the end of the Bush years, Russia’s reluctance to cooperate in pressuring Iran to cease its nuclear program became a greater source of discontent on the American side. But as Mark points out, Russia has few incentives to back the United States against Iran. To the contrary, Moscow senses that today the United States is overextended and more exposed vis-à-vis Russia than it has been in a long time. The global economic downturn, of course, has revealed the fragility of Russia’s own economy. But whereas just a year ago some American policymakers were still championing the idea of bringing Georgia into NATO—an act that would have put NATO right on the border of Chechnya—Russia went to war with Georgia and demonstrated that it could thrash an effusively pro-American ally with few consequences. Among those gleefully looking on was Tehran.
The Obama administration—not unlike the Bush administration eight years ago—hopes for better relations with Russia. As Obama’s Moscow trip revealed, however, the president’s charisma will not suffice to make that possible. To the contrary, the return of many former Clinton administration officials to power under Obama reminds Russians of their experience in the 1990s. When prior to the Moscow summit Obama gibed that Putin was standing with one foot in the past and one in the present, the Russian prime minister retorted, “We don’t know how to stand vraskoriachku.” To “stand vraskoriachku” here means to adopt a sexually submissive position. As Putin himself acknowledged, his choice of phrase was a less than cultured one. But it does express pithily the attitude of many Russians.
Back in March, Hillary Clinton’s State Department had attempted to signal Obama’s wish to start anew by presenting her Russian counterpart with an office toy, a mock big red button marked “Reset.” Alas, not only did the State Department write the word “reset” in the wrong alphabet—in itself an embarrassing display of cultural solipsism—but it also botched the translation. Whereas the correct translation of “reset” is perezagruzka, the Clinton team rendered it as peregruzka, a wholly different word meaning “overload.” One could hardly imagine a more apt illustration of self-satisfied yet incompetent pindosy in action.
A number of structural factors prevent America and Russia from being easy allies, but they need not condemn the two states to chronic stalemated animosity. Overcoming those structural impediments calls for skillful diplomacy. Effective American diplomacy requires talent, of course, but it must first start with a clear and definite, even ruthless, prioritization of goals and objectives, with the least important sacrificed for the more important. This is particularly true today when U.S. foreign policy has comparatively fewer resources to face multiple challenges that overlap regions.
Washington for years has been attempting to obtain cooperation from Russia against Iran while simultaneously pressing Russian on a raft of other issues, despite the fact that Russian interests on Iran do not easily align with American desires. It is no mystery that this approach has consistently failed to elicit the cooperation it seeks. In Moscow, Obama attempted to substitute his charm for a substantively reworked agenda. For the reasons noted above, that charm counts for little in Russia, and the results of Obama’s trip were predictably modest. It showed that gimmicks and glamor are thin bases on which to build a new foreign policy.
The fact is, resetting American foreign policy requires a certain concrete boldness that Obama, for all his rhetoric of change, has been loathe to display in either domestic or foreign policy.
Michael Reynolds is a member of MESH.