Power's world: Obama's Russian error

Precise quid pro quos are not good in marital or romantic relationships. Neither are they good in big time politics. If made too precisely, they suggest that the other side is not to be trusted unless there is a “deal.” When there is conflict, with friends or indeed with enemies, the great need is to change the atmosphere: to restore a sense of trust so that opinions and arrangements can be freely traded. One good step by one side encourages, but does not demand, a good step by the other side.

At the end of the cold war, we saw such magnanimity. And we, the peoples of American, Russian, Europe and the rest of the world, benefited immensely from it. Two great presidents were responsible for this: George Bush senior in the US and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. In 1991, Bush decided unilaterally to de-alert all bombers, 450 of the deadly accurate city-destroying Minuteman missiles and the missiles in 10 Poseidon submarines (enough with one launch to destroy Moscow, Leningrad and every city in between). Gorbachev, taking this as his cue, deactivated 500 land-based nuclear-tipped missiles and six submarines (enough in total to reduce the most populated parts of the US to ashes and dust). This wasn't, moreover, the cosmetic de-alerting talked about today. Silo and submarine crews actually had their launch keys taken away from them.

This is why President Barack Obama (if the New York Times has got the story right) has made a big mistake in his opening move following the pressing of the famous “reset button.” Although apparently warmly received, his letter to President Dimitri Medvedev—suggesting that the US was open to discussion on the dismantling of the anti-missile site now being constructed on Polish soil, if Russia would lean harder on Iran to halt any programs that would lead to nuclear weapons—was misconceived.

What it should have said is simply this: “President George W Bush made a policy that the US no longer stands by. We want to reopen discussions with you that will lead to our abandonment of the project”. Full stop. Period. The rest would then follow.



Moscow already knows that the US wants to toughen up Russian policy towards Iran. It has already taken important steps towards that end with the responsible way it has handled the building and fuelling of the new Bushehr reactor. It has voted in the UN Security Council for sanctions. Toughening the Russian attitude would become no big deal for Moscow, especially if it sees Washington extending its hand rather than its clenched fist towards Tehran, a long overdue necessity if negotiations are to prove positive.

It is important too for the west to put itself in Russian shoes. The regime of George Bush senior did nothing to threaten the Soviet Union. Indeed, Bush preferred it to remain whole rather than split up into Russia and unstable independent former republics. It wasn't until Bill Clinton was president that the US became more aggressive, deciding to expand Nato across the former Warsaw Pact nations right up to the Russian border. This broke the agreement Gorbachev made in a private meeting with then-Secretary of State James Baker that if he agreed to the reuniting of East and West Germany, “there would no extension of NATO's current jurisdiction eastward.”

George Kennan, the author of the original containment policy towards Stalin's Soviet Union, said that Clinton's policy “was the most fateful error of the entire post cold war era.” And Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Washington's crucial error lay in its propensity to treat post Soviet Russia as a defeated enemy.”

The US already has a model for how to conduct relations with Russia. It is Bush senior's. The years between 1990 and 1993 were the longest period without use of the veto in the history of the UN. In quick succession, the Security Council in July 1987 demanded a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war: the first time ever that the five permanent members of the Security Council had jointly drafted a mandatory resolution. A cease-fire was secured the following year. In November 1990 the Security Council authorized the use of force to reverse Iraq's invasion of Iraq. The following year it unanimously set the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire. It continued like this up to the time of Bill Clinton's presidency.

So, America already knows the way to go. Obama, do it!