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19.10.07
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Old Habits Are Hard To Break
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Comment by Georgy Bovt
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U.S-Russia Relations at a Standstill
Now that the administrations of Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush are drawing to a close, the U.S-Russian relationship has reached a stage of predictable stability. It has taken the form of regular declarations of disagreements on different issues. The procedure of these declarations usually takes place in a calm and sometimes even amicable form; there is no reason to vent emotions if it is clear in advance that no agreement can be reached.
As was expected, last week’s “two plus two” meeting between the Russian ministers of foreign affairs and defense with their American counterparts practically buried Russia’s initiative for the United States to use the Gabala radio locator station in Azerbaijan as an alternative to establishing missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe.
From the very beginning, when Putin surprised Bush by making this proposal public at this year’s G8 summit, it was clear that this end would come about sooner or later. The fact that the station’s technical characteristics make it unfit for intercepting missiles fired from the territory of Iran (in particular, it cannot serve as a radar for aiming anti-ballistic missiles) is not the only reason that this proposal was turned down.
The other reason is that the two countries are guided by very different behavioral norms in the international arena. Russia and the United States have never had any shared values that could serve as a common basis for finding solutions for certain international problems; neither do they have a common point of view on specific international threats and challenges.
For example, they can make general statements about the global danger of terrorism. But behind these words, there is no mutual understanding about what modern international terrorism is and where exactly the main terrorist threat is coming from. This is why some examples of tactical cooperation in the war on terrorism, such as joint maneuvers or other events of demonstrative character, don’t look too impressive against the background of a general atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, and the unwillingness to meet each other’s wishes and to be mutually open.
This is exactly why Moscow and Washington have been taking so long to develop a common policy on Iran. The United States sees this regime as explicitly retrograde, supporting and promoting terrorism in the international arena. For Moscow, Tehran’s behavior is much more understandable, and thus much less scary. Russia behaves the way it does toward Iran not only to spite Washington or to insist on the sovereignty of its foreign policy, but also because the internal logic and behavior of the Iranian regime is more understandable for Moscow. And Tehran really does not seem as dangerous and unpredictable to Moscow as it does to Washington, although this perception might be fallacious.
Over the last eight years there has been no new agenda for U.S.-Russian relations, not even on acknowledging the seemingly common, general world threats and challenges (like international terrorism, global warming, and the problem of poverty or new dangerous diseases in the world). The energy dialogue is still as inert as it was several years ago when Mikhail Khodorkovsky tried to develop it. The interaction of business elites hasn’t yet reached a new quality level. Individual large purchases of some factories in the United States by Russian businessmen are rather exceptions that prove the rule.
Activity on the lower levels is much more noticeable. The most fruitful is probably the U.S program that allows thousands of Russian young people to come to the United States for a few months to work or study. However, any qualitative results of this program, such as lowering the overall degree of anti-Americanism in Russian society as a whole and primarily among the Russian elite, will come only in the medium term.
In all other fields of activity, local contacts between individuals represent a very inert process. There are no notable positive changes on the visa front either. Even the U.S. proposal to switch to five-year visas was met with a hostile rejection from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In practice, Russian officials do not want to simplify the visa regime between Russia and the United States, and the overall high degree of anti-American sentiment among the Russian elite is maintained by some of Washington’s moves in the post-Soviet space, which Moscow can see only as an attempt to constrain Russia.
The spirit of rivalry still prevails in this bilateral relationship. Even during the recent visits of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Pentagon chief Robert Gates to Moscow, the Russian leaders could not keep from annoying their guests. Before the audience in his Novo-Ogaryovo residence, President Putin started by keeping Rice and Gates waiting for 40 minutes, and then, despite a protocol agreement on avoiding any public statements, gave a small lecture on the disagreements between Russia and the United States in front of the cameras. It is said that Rice was infuriated, but from the Russian perspective, it was just a modest payback for the inability and unwillingness of the Americans to consult with Moscow on equal terms about many other international issues.
U.S.-Russian relations, just like during the Soviet times, are still dominated by arms issues. Moreover, if the United States continues to insist on deploying their strategic missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, Moscow’s reaction will probably be aimed at revising the arms regulation agreements that are still the foundation for the international and, primarily, the European security system, in the form that it has taken since the Cold War – first of all, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, which was signed when the Warsaw Pact was not yet dissolved and which Moscow quite justly refuses to see as adequate for the present distribution of power in Europe.
During the recent Moscow consultations, Putin also made it clear that under conditions involving the spread of missile technology and the appearance of strategic missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, Moscow will no longer be able to stay within the limits set by the Russian-American Treaty on Medium/Short-Range Missiles.
It looks like both of the exiting presidential administrations will pass on to their successors a bilateral relationship burdened with problems. And it is clear to both sides that neither of them has any solution to these problems.
Such a solution doesn’t lie in the area of economics, military or science: it is hidden within the value systems of the two societies – Russian and American – that are still too different to allow us to start agreeing on any important issue, apart from how not to destroy each other and the whole world, too.
Georgy Bovt is a Moscow-based political analyst. |
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