“Is he the affable front man for the business-as-usual hard-liners, a puppet president who offers soothing remarks, but little else? Or is he a genuine reformer who is edging Russia away from the more heavy-handed practices of Mr. Putin, but needs time to make his mark?”

What Clifford Levy writes in today’s New York Times about Dmitry Medvedev could easily be said about Barack Obama himself.

But unlike the new POTUS, who came to power from the opposition with a sweeping mandate for change, Medvedev has always been a member of the incumbent party; a successor rather than a challenger.

So, for all the tempting parallels with Obama, Medvedev-McCain is a much better fit when trying to set expectations for the Russian president.

Imagine if McCain had become US president. By many measures, he is a much more moderate, progressive and ideologically discrete politician than Bush. He was relatively liberal on social issues such as abortion and religion, denounced torture, and refused to jump on the anti-immigration bandwagon.

In fact, McCain’s reputation for pragmatism and bi-partisanship left many die-hard GOP partisans and their champions in the media, such as Rush Limbaugh, devastated, but gave him enough cross party clout to appeal even to liberal Hillary Clinton voters.

Medvedev – a non-ideological pragmatist with moderate leanings and liberal tastes – is in many ways to Putin what McCain was to Bush.

Levy quotes IrinaYasina, an analyst at the Institute for the Economy in Transition in Moscow:

“We so want to believe that things are getting better that we sometimes confuse our expectations with what is really happening. We so want to believe that there is a big difference between Putin and Medvedev. And sometimes our hopes prevent us from seeing the reality.”

Many on the American left are saying exactly this about Obama, astutely evoked by Naomi Klein in a recent Nation article. Yet such sentiments were also expressed during the early stages of the US presidential campaign with reference to McCain.

It’s worth remembering how susceptible liberal journalists and commentators were to the hardscrabble charms of the underdog aboard his Straight Talk Express. At that time, in late 2007, it was left to the few lonely Yasinas of the US media, such as Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, to shout: snap out of it!

So smitten were many liberal voters by McCain’s offers of a ‘sane’ and ‘commonsense’ republicanism after years of Bush’s cultural revolution that Democratic groups felt it necessary to launch a desperate campaign to brand him “McSame as Bush”.

Indeed, crushed by the forces of his party, McCain has already been forced to moderate his anti-torture stance and other maverick policies.

Is Medvedev McSame as Putin? According to Aleksei K. Simonov, president of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, “Medvedev is just pronouncing nice words. But there has been a complete lack of deeds.”

That’s not entirely true: he has, for example, enacted a wide reaching military reform, demonstrating his seriousness by sacking the intransigent head of military intelligence. He has also freed Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina from prison and made anti-corruption promises.

But as Ilya Milshtein points out in the opposition newpaper Grani.ru, many of these measures might have happened anyway; for instance the intelligence director had had a falling out with the defence minister and may have been removed on Putin’s orders.

Words matter, however, as Obama has himself said. In that sense, in ridding Russian politics of the macho Putinite vocabulary, Medvedev has already accomplished a kind of thaw.

But in the words of Milshtein, it is a ‘weak, cowardly thaw, quickly covered by fresh snow”.

Georgia is nervously calling “for an independent investigation into who started the war between Russia and Georgia…after the New York Times and BBC's Newsnight programme raised serious doubts about Georgia's claim that its attack on the breakaway Georgian enclave of South Ossetia on August 7/8 was in response to Russian aggression”.

But it was the Amnesty International report comdemning both sides that is really significant, due to Amnesty's reputation as an impartial and respected source that rarely sides with Russia.

“The rights group said the use of notoriously inaccurate Grad rockets in the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali resulted in “scores of civilian deaths” and violated international law on the conduct of war.

Amnesty also took Moscow to task for failing to stop killings, torture and abuses against civilians perpetrated by Russia's allies ‚ the South Ossetian militias ‚ in ethnic Georgian enclaves inside the breakaway region”.

Now, in light of this joint culpability (if anything, Georgia's was active - shelling civilians 0 and Russia's passive -failing to rein in allies), the question that I asked in August remains:

Why [did] CNN care more about Russian violence in Gori than Georgian violence in Tskhinvali?

Mark Ames has some excellent hunches over at his zine Exiledonline.

This is also a perfect time to remember Barack Obama's original declaration at the start of the crisis, for which he was roundly ridiculed for being a wimp and even, in McCain's words, “bizarrely in synch with Moscow”:

“I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict,” Obama said in a statement. “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint”.

At that time, McCain responded with these now embarassing histrionics:

"That's kind of like saying after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that Kuwait and Iraq need to show restraint, or like saying in 1968 [when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia] … that the Czechoslovaks should show restraint," he said.

We can only hope that Americans hawks, of all political stripes, learn some lessons about the wisdom of reflexive, ill-informed bellicosity, and that Obama feels vindicated enough in his moderation to ward off similar attacks at the future US president.

 

“Americans Chose Perestroika” was the headline splashed across Russia's leading tabloid, the Komsomolskaya Pravda, on November 5th.

Indeed, the scenes of solidarity, jubilation and catharsis that I witnessed in downtown Washington DC  around 11pm on November 4 could have come from a documentary about the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the immediate aftermath of Ceausescu's overthrow.

Drivers honking their horns, people with flags leaning out of car windows, spontaneous hugging, drumming; truck and bus drivers and police officers stopping to fraternise with and high-five the human roadblocks: this was People Power, in all its triumph, sincerity, and naivete.

Such scenes are especially poignant for Russians, who remember, first-hand or otherwise, the Gorbachev years. Our Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent writes:

“It is not my country, not my history, but I was over-run with goosebumps when the results were announced”.

Is it any surprise then that Gorbachev sees a glimmer of himself in the President Elect?

“I am very happy. Two or three years ago I said America needed perestroika, and this was greeted with cheers in the US,” Mr Gorbachev was quoted as saying, using the term for his 1980s liberal reforms that helped end the Cold War.

“It is no accident that the whole world followed these elections, including in Russia, where they were followed like never before. This shows there is hope that the arrival of a new administration will bring changes,” he added.

Comparisons are impossible to avoid:

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, experiencing a deepening economic crisis and increasing international isolation that left it bankrupting itself still further in the arms race.

Just as in the US under Bush II, the Brezhnev years were marked by social conservatism, foreign invasions, increased domestic surveillance, crackdowns on dissidents and debt-financed lifestyles; in another eerie parallel, making fun of the apparently senile, gaffe-prone and increasingly incompetent Premier had become a national past-time.

Sample Brezhnev jokes:

Lenin showed us how to govern. Stalin showed us how not to govern. Khrushchev showed us that any fool can govern. And Brezhnev showed us that not every fool can govern.

Brezhnev called together a group of cosmonauts. ‘Comrades! The Americans have landed on the Moon. We here have consulted and have decided that you will go to the Sun!’
‘But we will burn up, Leonid Iljich!’
‘Be not afraid, comrades, the Party has thought of everything. You
will leave at night.’

At the 1980 Olympics, Brezhnev begins his speech. “O!” — applause. “O!” — more applause. “O!” — yet more applause. “O!” — an ovation. “O!!!” — the whole audience stands up and applauds. An aide comes running to the podium and whispers, “Leonid Ilyich, that's the Olympic rings, you don't need to read it!”

Of course, people did not choose Gorbachev in an open election, but they were crying out for change.

Victor Tsoi, the USSR's most legendary rock star, distilled this sentiment in the song “(We want) Changes”:

The words articulate much of what American youth was also feeling on the eve of this vote:

Instead of fire - there's only smoke.
Instead of warmth - cold.
Another day is crossed out on the calendar grid.
The red shining sun has completely burned out,
And this day goes out with it,
And over a glowing city, the shadow will fall

We want changes!
It's the demand of our hearts.
We want changes!
It's the demand of our eyes.
In our laughter, in our tears, and the pulse in our veins.
We want changes!
And changes will begin…

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR RUSSIAN-AMERICAN RELATIONS?

Unfortunately, history is in danger of repeating itself as farce.

When Gorbachev unveiled his New Thinking on international relations, the Reagan administration was very slow to react. By the time the US had come round in 1989, too much valuable time was lost, and Gorbachev's vision, and job, were in terminal crisis.

The Russian people have still not forgiven what they see as cruel American circumspection and delay in engaging their country's sincere offer of a clean slate.

So far, it looks like Medvedev is following in Reagan's footsteps. He was the last major head of state to congratulate Obama. The day before his election, Medvedev delivered some pointed barbs at the US, and the day after, declared his intention to install rockets in Kaliningrad.

Medvedev's caution is widely shared. Like Reagan's America, while Russians are broadly happy about Obama's victory, few believe that the US can really change its stripes; perhaps this whole Obama thing is some sort of cunning ruse, the repackaging of ‘imperialism’ as ‘leadership’ etc etc etc.

Speculation that Obama is considering bringing in former Clinton officials like Holbrooke (despised in Russia for expanding Nato and bombing Yugoslavia) plays into that very narrative.

This threatens to be a self-fulfilling prophecy; Russian policies must not provide any excuse for a genuine hawk takeover of the Obama administration.

Democratic presidents are automatically on the defensive about perceived ‘foreign policy weakness’ (one reason why the USSR preferred Republicans). Thus, by acting conciliatory and not being seen to take advantage of US overstretch, Medvedev can do much to blunt this criticism and avoid the pitfalls encountered between Russia and previous Democratic administrations.

On the other hand, any attempts to exploit or test the new president will only invite Obama to over-compensate.

Moreover, Medvedev should not forget that Obama was the only presidential candidate to have placed responsibility of both Russia and Georgia for the August war, at a time when seeminly everyone else was single-and simple-mindedly condemning Russia.

It is entirely understandable for Russians to have a certain amount of cynicism regarding US elections: foreign policy has traditionally been largely non-negotiable (’partisanship stops at the water's edge’) and decoupled from domestic policy. This is how a domestic liberal like Clinton could also comfortably be a foreign affairs hawk.

However, it is too easy and irresponsible to not see the trees for the forest.

This year may present a perfect foreign policy storm for the US: Obama's personal anti-war, pro-detente stance+ US ‘imperial overstretch’ in Afghanistan and Iraq+economic crisis that will necessitate roll backs in defence spending+public opinion sea-change all point to the possibility of an at least quantitatively new direction.

Obama may not seem radical enough for some Russians, but Katrina Vanden Heuvel is confident that his election is good for Russia.Most importantly, no matter what Medvedev may think of Obama's intentions, the American public hungers for change.

Russia: take America at her word today, as America should have taken you at yours in 1987.

You may regret not having done so.

Call me Miss Congeniality, but my brittle European sensibilities were flummoxed by the sheer boorishness of the anti-Russia vitriol in last night's McCain-Obama match.

Setting aside the painful hypocrisy inherent, in the words of one BBC commenter, in “the irony of two men castigating Russia for unnacceptable petrodollar muscleflexing and interfering in other nations affairs while debating the best tactic for deploying US troops abroad…” the whole thing was very unbecoming.

I understand that this was a foreign policy debate and US-Russian relations have been rocked by the Georgian war; indeed, I was expecting plenty of oblique references to the event, and a healthy dose of sardonic swipes at the resurgent Eastern European power.

Perhaps something along the lines of Putin's speech in 2006, the last Russian-American low point, in which he compared America to a wolf.

However, that speech, full of “veiled references” and “apparent jibes”, and billed by most Western newspapers as just about the most aggressive, jingoist and nationalistic in human history, now feels SOOOO totally tame!

It seems that comic-book villification has become an essential precondition for American campaigning.

In a sense, ritualistic bluster, the American equivalent of Soviet-speak, is its own political lexicon: vocabulary, rather than content. Using respectful language regarding rival powers is no longer allowed; thus, just as any argument in official Soviet circles had to be advanced in Marxist-Leninist terms, so too now must any US foreign policy argument - no matter how conciliatory and benign - be couched in angry jingoism.

Once upon a time, Kremlinologists had to parse through pages and pages of nearly identical speeches extolling the virtues of Lenin and Marx before they could read between the lines and unearth the sometimes very different meanings that lay beneath.

Who knew that these tactics would have to be applied in America c. 2008?

Depressing, yes; but also necessary, because on the face of it, McCain's and Obama's positions on Russia seemed identical: analysts concluded that “both criticized Russia's invasion of Georgia and said Georgia and Ukraine should be free to join NATO”, and the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis.

After all, it was Obama who was the sole candidate to refer to Russia as a ‘rogue state’.

However, these lexically similar declarations betray significantly divergent policy aims.

Compare and contrast some of the assertions below:

Obama: “Russia is a threat to the peace and stability of the region. Their actions in Georgia were unacceptable”.

McCain: “Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia. And Russia has now become a nation fueled by petro-dollars that is basically a KGB apparatchik-run government. I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters, a “K,” a “G,” and a “B.” And their aggression in Georgia is not acceptable behavior”.

Sound fairly similar, non?

However, the devil is in the follow-ups. Obama later makes a very clear distinction between US support for Eastern Europe, “the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Poles, the Czechs”, who “are members of NATO”, and Ukraine and Georgia, who are not.

This is something that McCain emphatically does not.

McCain: “I think the Russians ought to understand that we will support — we, the United States — will support the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in the natural process, inclusion into NATO”.

Here's Obama's take:

Obama: “To countries like Georgia and the Ukraine, I think we have to insist that they are free to join NATO if they meet the requirements, and they should have a membership action plan immediately to start bringing them in”.

While both McCain and Obama support Nato membership for Georgia and Ukraine, Obama includes the key proviso of “if they meet the requirements”; those requirements could include having full territorial control, for example,which Georgia would not currently be able to meet.

And how did they fare meting out threats of a new cold war?
McCain:

I don't believe we’re going to go back to the Cold War. I am sure that that will not happen. But I do believe that we need to bolster our friends and allies.

Translation: “We don't want a cold war; just a hardened division of Europe into two sides - us and the Russkie bastards”.

Obama:

Now, we also can't return to a Cold War posture with respect to Russia. It's important that we recognize there are going to be some areas of common interest.

Translation: “Despite all my obligatory bullish rhetoric earlier on, I am not interested in a cold war, but rather in an aggressive engagement based on common ground and national interest, including Iran, energy and nuclear non-proliferation”.

I have written much about how McCain has been comprehensively wrong on Russia from the start; no-where more so than in his hot headed and ignorant knee-jerk reaction to the Georgia conflict that singularly failed to address Georgian complicity in the outbreak of the violence.

Yet, he somehow managed to cast Obama's reasonable and sane call for “restraint from both sides” as “naive”.

The scariest part of it all is that the pundits overwhelmingly applauded McCain's jingoistic Russia-bashing, and it didn't all come from the right, either!

While the neoconservative Heritage Foundation's Nile Gardiner could be expected to wax lyrical about McCain's  “swagger and aggression”, I was very surprised to see the sentiments echoed by the latte-liberal Guardian's Michael Tomasky: “McCain probably won the Russia conversation”.

In the end, the BBC sums it up nicely:

“Mr McCain was able to describe meeting Vladimir Putin, “looking into his eyes and seeing three letters, K, G and B” - a reference to the old Soviet intelligence agency for which Mr Putin once worked.

Does it sound corny to foreign ears, with a slight B-movie flavour to it? It probably does”.

So there you have it: superpower presidential elections as B-Movie casting calls.

Be afraid, be very afraid…

–by Vadim Nikitin

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?

Republican presidential nominee John McCain is well known for his adversarial, even anachronistic, approach to Russia.

Straight talk, right?

Perhaps.

But, asks Mark Benjamin today on Salon.com, could his bluster have had less to do with the Republican base than with the lobbying connections of a close advisor?

The architect behind McCain's hard-line Russia policy, including kicking it out of the G8, is Randy Scheunemann.

And Scheunemann has until early this year been a long-time lobbyist for Georgia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia, receiving over $2 million in pay from them.

Moreover, "much of Scheunemann's work focused on paving the way into the NATO fold. Two of Scheunemann's clients, Latvia and Romania, were admitted to full NATO member status in 2004, after which they ceased paying him".

Of course, that does not mean that any of these countries paid Scheunemann to influence McCain to enact an anti-Russian agenda. However, ""those are countries whose advantage it is to point the finger at a Russian threat, particularly Georgia,' explained Thomas Simons, ambassador to Poland under George H.W. Bush and to Pakistan under Bill Clinton".

Crucially, asks Harvard's Dmitry Gorenburg, if McCain and Scheunemann ""have had an association for a long time, how do you tell if it is because they think alike, or one has told the other how to think because he is getting paid?'”

McCain likes to say that unlike Bush, who claims to have looked into Putin's eyes and seen his soul, he saw the letters K, G and B instead.

But maybe what he really saw were the letters U, S, and D?

There has never been any love lost between John McCain and the Evil Empire.

As far back as 2006, he had promised to be “very harsh” on Russia. By May 2008, he was still vowing to push through an even earlier 2005 determination (in a bill co-sponsored with Joe Lieberman) to kick Russia out of the G8, declaring that the club “should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia” and that “rather than tolerate Russia's nuclear blackmail or cyber attacks, Western nations should make clear that the solidarity of NATO, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, is indivisible and that the organization's doors remain open to all democracies committed to the defense of freedom”. The statement was universally criticised, and even a senior US official called the proposal “just a dumb thing”.

Indeed, McCain, alone among the presidential candidates and isolated even in neoconservative circles (Cf Fareed Zakaria's criticisms above), had practically included the country in a new axis of evil, his bellicosity eliciting much nervousness on both sides of the Atlantic, and even among conservatives.

Yet could talk of a new cold war should McCain be elected president still be premature?

Today, the New York Times reported that John McCain had

“distanced himself from the Bush administration on Tuesday by vowing to work more closely with Russia on nuclear disarmament and to move toward the elimination of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe….

…Mr. McCain told a small crowd at the University of Denver that he would pursue a new arms control agreement with the Russians and that he supported a legally binding accord between the two nations to replace verification requirements in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, which expires in 2009.

The Bush administration has refused to accept such binding limits on nuclear weapons, which its critics say has created paranoia in Moscow. Mr. McCain's proposal to eliminate tactical nuclear weapons in Europe sets him apart from President Bush as well.

‘Russia and the United States are no longer mortal enemies,’ Mr. McCain said.”

Diffusing nuclear tensions with Russia, ratcheted up in recent years by the Bush administration's unilateral disengagement from previous arms control treaties as well as by Putin's revival of Russia's strategic forces, is clearly a step in the right direction for McCain.

However, such a small concession is unlikely to quell fears of an ideologically driven approach to Russia from a potential McCain presidency.

Certainly, he is consistently viewed with fear and suspicion even among the most liberal Russian opinion-makers. The Russian wikipedia entry for McCain has an entire section devoted to the mean things he has said about Russia; pundits on the liberal radio station Ekho Mosvky have also said that McCain's eleciton to the presidency would not bode well for Russia. In media outlets closer to the government, such sentiments are even more widespread. For example, in March, Izvestia (a national broadsheet owned since 2005 by state oil company Gazprom) reported that McCain considers Russia to be an enemy, quoting him as saying that when he looked into Putin's eyes, he saw the letters K, G and B.
Moreover, McCain's desire to distance himself from Bush on Russia would be a mixed blessing: although he opposed tying America's hands in terms of nuclear weapons, Bush was generally cooperative and open to dealing with Russia, having famously peered into Vladimir “Putti-put” Putin's soul. A reversal of that part of Bush's Russia policy would hardly constitute a thaw.

WHAT THE RUSSIAN PRESS IS SAYING ABOUT MCCAIN's OVERTURE: 2 VIEWS

Kommersant Daily (Liberal, independent):

“Hillary Clinton and John McCain Argue Over Russia” (May 29, 2008).

The article notes McCain's “radical” steps towards nuclear negotiations with Russia, and then mentions Hillary Clinton's responce. Clinton poured scepticism on McCain's proposals, saying that any overtures to Russia would be undermined by his recent and continued attempts to throw the country out of the G8. No editorial comment.

Izvestia (Centrist, Gazprom controlled):

“McCain is Ready to Negotiate With Russia”.

Izvestia writes that McCain's recent overture was a great surprise, noting dryly that “up to now, he had given people little cause to suspect him of Russophilia”. It goes on to list a history of McCain's criticisms of Russia, and delivers this stinging reminder: Mr McCain should remember that it was a Soviet rocket that downed his plane over Vietnam. Ouch!!

The article then states that like all candidates, even the “Hawk” McCain becomes more pragmatic as elections near, and delivers a note of rebuke to Obama for saying that his grandfather liberated Auschwitz, when it was the Red Army that did it. (Obama has since clarified that his grandad was in fact in Buchenwald).