The US and Russia in a tree, K-i-s-s-i-n-g-e-r
In today’s International Herald Tribune, Henry Kissinger delivers a very optimistic assessment of US-Russian relations in the post-Putin era. The king of realpolitik describes the Medvedev period as “a transition from a phase of consolidation to a period of modernization”, one which “may, in retrospect, appear as the beginning of an evolution toward a form of checks and balances lacking heretofore”. Indeed, “we are witnessing one of the most promising periods in Russian history”.
Whoa!! So what should this mean for US Russian relations?
Kissinger says that “Russian policy [is] driven in a quest for a reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice”, and thus, the US should realise the benefits of cooperating with Russia on strategic issues including Iran and disarmament; issues on which, rhetoric aside, they have many common interests.
Kissinger also warns that “the movement of the Western security system from the Elbe River to the approaches to Moscow brings home Russia’s decline in a way bound to generate a Russian emotion that will inhibit the solution of all other issues”.
All this is very sensible advice indeed, and particularly welcome from the man who brought peace between the US and China, and who has also endorsed McCain for president. McCain would do well to adopt Kissinger’s pragmatic, open-minded and non-ideological approach.
A similar argument is presented, in the same newspaper, but from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Eminent Russia scholar Stephen F Cohen paints a vivid back story of where things went wrong between the two countries and echoes Kissinger’s call to cool-headed cooperation.
Cohen forcefully lays the blame for the recent Russian international bullishness on the US’s own post-Cold War policy of “bipartisan triumphalism”:
It meant that the United States had the right to oversee Russia’s post-Communist political and economic development, as it tried to do directly in the 1990s, while demanding that Moscow yield to U.S. international interests. It meant Washington could break strategic promises to Moscow, as when the Clinton administration began NATO’s eastward expansion, and disregard extraordinary Kremlin overtures, as when the Bush Administration unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty and granted NATO membership to countries even closer to Russia - despite Putin’s crucial assistance to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan after 9/11. It even meant America was entitled to Russia’s traditional sphere of security and energy supplies, from the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia and the Caspian.
Such U.S. behavior was bound to produce a Russian backlash. It came under Putin, but it would have been the reaction of any strong Kremlin leader. Those U.S. policies - widely viewed in Moscow as an “encirclement” designed to keep Russia weak and to control its resources - have helped revive an assertive Russian nationalism, destroy the once strong pro-American lobby, and inspire widespread charges that concessions to Washington are “appeasement,” even “capitulationism.” The Kremlin may have overreacted, but the cause and effect threatening a new cold war are clear.
He then concludes that “because the first steps in this direction were taken in Washington, so must be initiatives to reverse it”, and suggests policies very similar to the ones advocated by Kissinger: nuclear non-proliferation, end to Nato expansion.
If a Republican foreign policy guru and a left wing historian can be locked in a passionate embrace of a sensible US-Russia policy, is full on East-West BFF-dom imminent?
