Recently, U.S. President Obama showed a high degree of candor when he quipped that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin still had one foot in the Cold War.
At this week’s Moscow Summit, he was more diplomatic (i.e. restrained). He focused his attention on areas where the U.S. and Russia seem to have common interests: achieving greater strategic arms reductions, counter-acting Islamic militants in South Asia, and most probably slowing down nuclear proliferation (although possibly not including Iran).
It seems only those subjects upon which there was agreement in advance among the two sides’ staff can be considered resulting from the meeting. Still deadlines produce results. Achieving results on complex issues is far more difficult.
Unfortunately, the U.S. may have seemingly forgot about the Russian invasion of Georgia when it agreed to resume limited military cooperation that were suspended in the aftermath of last August’s events. Perhaps it would have been wiser for President Obama to make a commitment to seek to end trade restrictions that are in place as a result of outdated Jackson-Vanik Amendment.
No agreement was achieved on contentious topics. This demonstrates that Russia wishes that the U.S. would acknowledge its sphere of influence in the “near abroad” (i.e. the Soviet Union’s successor states (minus the Baltic States) — most significantly Georgia and Ukraine). This will not come to pass. It also seems that a large share of the Russian national security community have yet to accept that the Czech Republic and Poland are sovereign countries.
No doubt, upon his return to the U.S., the Obama administration will point to the President’s meeting with opposition figures as evidence that he had not abandoned the promotion of human rights and the rule of lawin Russia since he met with Russian opposition figures.
Still there does not appear to be any major concrete consequences for Russia to penalize it for its domestic policy — but the possible loosening up of requirements for non-governmental organizations to register seems to be a positive development — now to see how it is implemented.
Just as the Soviets were fearful of the implications of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), the Russians’ anxiety over missile defense in Europe is unjustified. The deployment of any defensive system would be limited in scope. The Russian military has far greater confidence in the U.S.’s ability to develop and operate an effective missile defense system, thus Moscow’s concern appears exaggerated.
Apparently, the Russian leadership is no longer threatening to deploy offensive missiles in Kaliningrad. This is inherently logical as ever military threat creates the necessity of countermeasures. Events in both Georgia and Estonia suggest that the Russian military establishment is examining the potential of cyber-attacks, after all anti-missile systems rely on computers.
Now in a war-time environment, how much confidence should we have that our weapons systems will be able to operate as planned? Just think how many times that U.S. launches of rockets have to be postponed due to bad whether or the malfunctioning of some part or system that had already been checked by NASA engineers many times over.
Russian strategic planners may not fully appreciate that nuclear power plants are very attractive targets for cruise missiles and conventional aircraft. Russia (and other countries dependent on nuclear energy such as France), face the very real danger of having their population irradiated; such a calamity would result in an untold number of deaths due to cancer and other disease as well as give rise to a food crisis the world has never seen.
At this stage, no news in U.S.-Russian relations is probably good news. President Obama can show the Russians the respect they crave without making any concessions. If both Zbigniew Brzezinski and Michael McFaul seem pleased with the results, who am I to disagree?
Tags: Missile Defense, Missiles, Strategic Arms, U.S.-Russian Summit
