Russia versus NATO

Days after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced his country's intentions to revamp its armed forces, the top U.S. commander in Europe is warning of a new period of "uncertainty" in U.S.-Russian relations.
In Senate testimony today, Gen. Bantz Craddock, the head of U.S. European Command, was blunt. "The relationship with Russia," he said, "is likely to be more difficult to manage in coming years than any time since the end of the Cold War."
Relations between the Kremlin and Washington hit a rough patch after the August 2008 South Ossetia war, and Craddock's statement comes as European Command reevaluates plans to downsize the U.S. force presence in Europe. Two Army brigades are scheduled to return to the United States from Europe in 2012 and 2013, but Craddock is now recommending they remain stationed in Europe. Without specifically mentioning Russia, the general said in testimony that "these forces contribute directly to our dissuasion and deterrence efforts."
The Obama admistration has tried -- with limited success -- to push the "reset" button with Russia, and it wants the Kremlin's help in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions and preserving supply routes to Afghanistan. President Barack Obama is scheduled to meet next week with his counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev; Russian experts are already telling us to curb our expectations.

Russia threatening Europe

Russia will pull out of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty if ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia are set on the path to NATO membership, Interfax news agency quoted a government official as saying on Friday.
"If Ukraine and Georgia are granted NATO Membership Action Plans (MAP), then the revised CFE treaty will be doomed," Interfax quoted the unnamed official, whom it described as a senior military diplomat.
"If MAP starts being implemented for Ukraine and Georgia, Russia will not only continue the moratorium it imposed on the CFE, but will ultimately pull out of it."
Georgia and Ukraine are seeking action plans, which are seen as road maps to eventual membership of NATO, at an alliance summit in December, though diplomats say it is unlikely either will be granted MAP.
Russia, which is fiercely opposed to NATO's expansion toward its borders, suspended its compliance with the CFE treaty last December but remains a signatory.
Moscow says the treaty, designed to limit battlefield weapons, such as tanks and armoured vehicles, on either side of the old Iron Curtain, is a Cold War relic which gives too much scope for an enlarged NATO to beef up its forces.
Russia's biggest grievance with the CFE pact is the limit on deployments west of the Ural mountains, while armaments are not capped in new NATO members in eastern Europe.
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said at talks in the Estonian capital on Thursday that Ukraine should press ahead with defense and security reforms to gain membership to the alliance.

Split over Russia grows in Europe

BERLIN, Nov. 7 -- Russia sent President-elect Barack Obama a message this week when it threatened to "neutralize" the proposed U.S. missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. But analysts said the tough talk from Moscow had another aim as well: to exploit a festering divide within Europe.
Many Eastern European countries have become increasingly alarmed over what they consider Russia's aggressive attempts to re-create a sphere of influence over satellite states of the former Soviet Union. Such concerns soared after Russia sent troops into Georgia in August, sparking a brief war.
The worries worsened Wednesday when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the Kremlin would move short-range missiles into Kaliningrad, a sliver of Russian territory on the Baltic Sea bordering Poland and Lithuania, if the United States proceeds to base parts of a missile-defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus called the Russian threat "beyond comprehension."
In contrast, Germany, France and other countries in Western Europe play down any security risks posed by Moscow and instead see Russia foremost as a lucrative -- if unpredictable -- trading partner. These countries, which former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld once derided as "Old Europe," generally consider the U.S. missile defense project to be an unnecessary irritant.
Peter Struck, a former German defense minister and now parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats, one of Germany's two ruling political parties, called Medvedev's speech "understandable" and blamed the Bush administration for provoking Moscow. In a radio interview, he said he hoped Washington would soften its "intransigent position" on the missile shield.
As a protest over the war in Georgia, the European Union withdrew in August from negotiations with Russia over a "strategic partnership" agreement. On Wednesday, just hours before Medvedev gave his speech in Moscow, E.U. officials reversed their position and indicated they would soon resume talks. The shift was led by French and German officials who argued that engagement with Russia was more likely to succeed than isolation.

In Brussels on Friday, during a European summit on the global financial crisis, French President Nicolas Sarkozy defended the diplomatic approach. He said that he had already raised objections to Medvedev's speech but that fueling public tensions with Russia would be counterproductive. To "raise questions, it's better to see one another and talk," Sarkozy said.
In Eastern Europe, however, some leaders have lobbied for a harder line. In a joint statement this week, the presidents of Poland and Lithuania said negotiations should remain frozen because Russia has not lived up to an E.U.-brokered agreement to defuse the military conflict in Georgia.
"There is a general feeling that the Western allies are too tolerant, especially France," said Oldrich Cerny, director of the Prague Security Studies Institute and a former Czech national security adviser.
The U.S. military says the shield is designed to track and shoot down any ballistic missiles fired at Europe or the United States from a "rogue state," such as Iran.
The system would be built on several legs, with components in the United States, Britain and Greenland. More controversial has been the Pentagon's effort to place 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic.
Moscow has objected vehemently to the plan, saying that the system could be converted into an offensive weapon and aimed at Russia someday. U.S. officials say that Russia's fears are groundless and that the shield would be overwhelmed by Russia's enormous stockpile of nuclear and conventional missiles.
The Bush administration has invited Russia to participate in the shield, but talks have fizzled.
Russia has previously threatened military reprisals against Europe for supporting the shield. In August, a Russian general said Poland was "exposing itself to a strike -- 100 percent" if it agreed to host the interceptors. But Medvedev's comments were the first time that the Russian government itself has made a tangible threat to take military action against Europe since the end of the Cold War.
Russia's statements have led to increased support for the shield in Poland. After months of fitful negotiations with Washington, officials in Warsaw signed a preliminary agreement in August to accept the base.
Slawomir Debski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs, said public opinion shifted in favor of the shield after Russian troops moved into the Caucasus.
"Prior to the crisis over Georgia, the public was rather skeptical, and the government hesitated quite a bit," he said in a telephone interview from Warsaw. "The concern is that the rhetoric of Russia may not just be words, but that deeds may follow."
Officials in Prague also signed a preliminary accord this year to join the missile shield. But the Czech and Polish parliaments still need to approve the deal. Passage is particularly uncertain in the Czech Republic, where surveys show that a majority of residents are opposed.
Adding to the uncertainty is the forthcoming change of administrations in Washington. Obama has expressed skepticism about the project. In an interview with Fox News in September, he said the shield was "appropriate," but added, "I want to make sure it works, though."
Polish and Czech officials said they would not seek legislative approval until Obama gave his full support. For the moment, they said they are assuming the project remains on track.
"We haven't so far received any signals that the project may be changing in a negative way for us," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday at a news conference.
Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states belong to NATO, and officials acknowledge that Russia is highly unlikely to invade.
At the same time, each of the countries is dependent on Russian gas and oil, and they fret that Russia might turn off the valves someday as political retribution, just as it did to Ukraine in the winter of 2006.
Germany also relies heavily on Russia for its energy supplies. But rather than pull away, Berlin has tried to strengthen ties with Moscow in recent years and has been reluctant to criticize the Kremlin in public. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, for instance, heads a consortium of energy companies that reports to the Kremlin and is building a giant pipeline that will connect Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
Klaus Segbers, a political science professor at the Free University of Berlin, said Eastern European countries should take a lesson from Germany and tone down their anti-Russian rhetoric. He said that although it may not be easy to deal with the Kremlin, there is no real alternative.
"We cannot get rid of Russia," Segbers said. "You can't put the Russians in a cage. To keep isolating Russia for an unspecified period of time is not something that will bring us any gains."

Post cold war - not so post

To the extent that he focused on Russia at all, Barack Obama’s attention was concentrated primarily on the need to keep Soviet nuclear weapons stockpiles out of the hands of terrorists.
But now, President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia has thrown down a gauntlet intended to demonstrate to the American president-elect that the post-cold war era may not be so post after all.
On Wednesday, while leaders around the world were falling over themselves to hail Mr. Obama’s election, Mr. Medvedev delivered a harsh welcome-to-the-new-cold-war speech in Moscow.
He never mentioned Mr. Obama by name, but Mr. Medvedev said he would deploy short-range missiles near Poland capable of striking NATO territory if the United States pressed ahead with plans to build a missile defense shield in Europe, something that Mr. Obama has said he supports.
Mr. Medvedev put Mr. Obama on notice on the Georgia crisis as well, vowing that “we shall not retreat in the Caucasus.”
Even his one-paragraph congratulatory telegram to Mr. Obama was brusque. “I hope for a constructive dialogue with you, based on trust and consideration of each other’s interests,” Mr. Medvedev wrote.
“It was a giant, ‘Hey, welcome to the game,’ ” said George Friedman, chief executive at Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company. “While Obama would like to deal sequentially with Iraq, Afghanistan and, when he gets to it, the Russians, the Russians themselves want to be a burning issue at the top of his list.”
Mr. Obama, for his part, has yet to respond to the Russian chest-thumping, and he probably will not do so until after his inauguration, his advisers said.
“We only have one president at a time,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference on Friday, responding to a question about whether he would soon meet with foes of the United States. “I want to make sure that we are sending the world one message.”
Since winning the election, the Obama team has taken pains not to say anything publicly that could signal Mr. Obama’s thinking on the many major foreign policy issues lined up before him.

The reasons are twofold.

Many of those advisers are privately hoping for positions in his administration, and they do not want to jeopardize their chances by talking freely with reporters.
More significantly, Mr. Obama himself is still making the transition from campaign oratory — and in the case of Russia, very strong campaign oratory — to the more nuanced approach that many advisers say will be necessary for him to navigate what are bound to be contentious relationships.
But some of his comments during the campaign may already have boxed him in.
When Russia invaded Georgia in August, Mr. Obama’s initial response, drafted just before he left for vacation in Hawaii, was nuanced, urging both nations to exercise restraint. His statement was similar to the State Department’s initial, equally nuanced response, which also did not immediately blame Russia.
The Republicans’ presumptive nominee, Senator John McCain, responded with a hard-line approach, saying that Russia had crossed “an internationally recognized border into the sovereign territory of Georgia” and should “unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces.”
When the McCain camp criticized Mr. Obama’s response as too measured, Mr. Obama hardened his position. His next statement accused Russia of encroaching on Georgia’s sovereignty. The next day, he said that Russia bore responsibility for the escalation.
By the time of the presidential debates in the fall, Mr. Obama had moved even closer to Mr. McCain on Russia and Georgia, voicing support for Georgia’s entry into NATO, a line in the sand that Russia had dared the West to cross.
Stephen Sestanovich, who was President Clinton’s ambassador at large for the former Soviet Union from 1997 to 2001, said that Mr. Obama’s election may have caused some disquiet in Russia.
“This is a leadership that is not super-comfortable with grass-roots politics,” Mr. Sestanovich, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations who advised the Obama campaign, said of the Russians. “I had a Russian friend e-mail me right afterwards, a short e-mail, and one of the one-word sentences used was ‘envy.’ So that’s how a real democracy works.”
Mr. Obama has options to distance himself from his hawkish remarks on Russia during the campaign, foreign policy experts said. For one thing, while he can continue to support the idea of Georgia becoming part of NATO, the reality is that for now the Europeans will not go along.
Beyond that, Mr. Obama could try to strike more benign agreements that Russians might find soothing, like pushing again for Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization and working with Moscow toward a way out of the missile defense morass. One possibility would be to offer to delay deployment of a missile shield in Poland until an Iranian nuclear threat — which Washington says is its reason for existing — has actually materialized, instead of doing so immediately.
The Bush administration might even lend a hand; it offered several new proposals to the Russians on Friday, including an offer for Russian military officials to inspect the new installations planned in Poland and the Czech Republic for the new missile defense system.
What Mr. Obama will not be able to do, foreign policy experts said, is cede the former Soviet republics and satellites in Eastern Europe back into the orbit of what the Russians like to call their near abroad.
It is a full plate, and all a long way from Mr. Obama’s first dip into Russia policy, when he joined the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee and traveled to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan on a 2005 summer tour with Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the Republican foreign policy statesman.
At the Council of Foreign Relations later, the men described their trip, during which they hiked through nuclear weapons storage sites, picked through piles of mortar rounds and land mines, and toured missile elimination facilities.
Mr. Obama deferred to Mr. Lugar often, according to people who attended the session; it was clear, they said, who was the old foreign policy hand, and who was the junior senator. Shortly after, Mr. Obama joined Mr. Lugar in introducing legislation designed to keep stockpiles of weapons in the former Soviet Union from getting into the hands of terrorists.
Mr. Obama’s focus on “loose nukes,” foreign policy experts say, seems almost quaint today.

Obama and McCain on Russia

Neither of the two major American presidential candidates has seriously addressed, or even seems fully aware of, what should be our greatest foreign policy concern--Russia's singular capacity to endanger or enhance our national security. Overshadowed by the US disaster in Iraq, Moscow's importance will continue long after that war ends.

Despite its diminished status following the Soviet breakup in 1991, Russia alone possesses weapons that can destroy the United States, a military-industrial complex nearly America's equal in exporting arms, vast quantities of questionably secured nuclear materials sought by terrorists and the planet's largest oil and natural gas reserves. It also remains the world's largest territorial country, pivotally situated in the West and the East, at the crossroads of colliding civilizations, with strategic capabilities from Europe, Iran and other Middle East nations to North Korea, China, India, Afghanistan and even Latin America. All things considered, our national security may depend more on Russia than Russia's does on us.

And yet US-Russian relations are worse today than they have been in twenty years. The relationship includes almost as many serious conflicts as it did during the cold war--among them, Kosovo, Iran, the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, Venezuela, NATO expansion, missile defense, access to oil and the Kremlin's internal politics--and less actual cooperation, particularly in essential matters involving nuclear weapons. Indeed, a growing number of observers on both sides think the relationship is verging on a new cold war, including another arms race.

Even the current cold peace could be more dangerous than its predecessor, for three reasons: First, its front line is not in Berlin or the Third World but on Russia's own borders, where US and NATO military power is increasingly ensconced. Second, lethal dangers inherent in Moscow's impaired controls over its vast stockpiles of materials of mass destruction and thousands of missiles on hair-trigger alert, a legacy of the state's disintegration in the 1990s, exceed any such threats in the past. And third, also unlike before, there is no effective domestic opposition to hawkish policies in Washington or Moscow, only influential proponents and cheerleaders.
How did it come to this?

Less than twenty years ago, in 1989-90, the Soviet Russian and American leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, completing a process begun by Gorbachev and President Reagan, agreed to end the cold war, with "no winners and no losers," as even Condoleezza Rice once wrote, and begin a new era of "genuine cooperation." In the US policy elite and media, the nearly unanimous answer is that Russian President Vladimir Putin's antidemocratic domestic policies and "neo-imperialism" destroyed that historic opportunity.

You don't have to be a Putin apologist to understand that this is not an adequate explanation. During the last eight years, Putin's foreign policies have been largely a reaction to Washington's winner-take-all approach to Moscow since the early 1990s, which resulted from a revised US view of how the cold war ended [see Cohen, "The New American Cold War," July 10, 2006]. In that new triumphalist narrative, America "won" the forty-year conflict and post-Soviet Russia was a defeated nation analogous to post-World War II Germany and Japan--a nation without full sovereignty at home or autonomous national interests abroad.

The policy implication of that bipartisan triumphalism, which persists today, has been clear, certainly to Moscow. 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 US 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 US war effort in Afghanistan after September 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 US behavior was bound to produce a Russian backlash. It came under Putin, but it would have been the reaction of any strong Kremlin leader, regardless of soaring world oil prices. And it can no longer be otherwise. Those US 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.

Because the first steps in this direction were taken in Washington, so must be initiatives to reverse it. Three are essential and urgent: a US diplomacy that treats Russia as a sovereign great power with commensurate national interests; an end to NATO expansion before it reaches Ukraine, which would risk something worse than cold war; and a full resumption of negotiations to sharply reduce and fully secure all nuclear stockpiles and to prevent the impending arms race, which requires ending or agreeing on US plans for a missile defense system in Europe. My recent discussions with members of Moscow's policy elite suggest, whether Russia's real leader is its new President Dmitri Medvedev or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, that there may still be time for such initiatives to elicit Kremlin responses that would enhance rather than further endanger our national security.

American presidential campaigns are supposed to discuss such vital issues, but neither Senator McCain nor Senator Obama has done so. Instead, in varying degrees, both have promised to be "tougher" on the Kremlin than George W. Bush has allegedly been and to continue the encirclement of Russia and the hectoring "democracy promotion" there, which have only undermined US security and Russian democracy since the 1990s.

To be fair, no influential actors in American politics, including the media, have asked the candidates about any of these crucial issues. They should do so now before another chance is lost, in Washington and in Moscow.

Russia and Europe too soon to kiss and make up

Russia and Europe too soon to kiss and make up

Summary: The European Union should not give Russia a new partnership deal until it genuinely withdraws from Georgia.

RUSSIA announced this week that, just as it promised, it had pulled all its troops in Georgia back to the two disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Many European Union leaders were swift to praise the Kremlin for meeting the conditions it agreed with France’s Nicolas Sarkozy some six weeks ago—and almost as quick to suggest a return to business as usual.

A majority now want to start talks in November on a new “partnership and co-operation agreement”. Their none-so-subtle message is: forget about the pesky Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was anyway responsible for starting the war on August 7th, and attend instead to the more urgent task of repairing relations with our biggest energy supplier.

The West needs to keep talking to Russia about many things, notably efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and further reductions in Russia’s and America’s own nuclear arsenals.

Yet it would be wrong to heed calls from the likes of Germany, Italy and their allies to start talks now on a new partnership agreement, as if the Georgian war had never happened. The main reason for this is that the troop withdrawal is largely bogus.

The Russians have stationed almost 8,000 troops in the two enclaves.

Villages in South Ossetia and beyond have been brutally cleansed of their Georgian inhabitants. And Abkhaz forces have retaken the Kodori Gorge, previously controlled by the Georgians. This does not come close to a pull-back to pre-August 7th positions, which is what the EU originally stipulated before embarking on a new partnership agreement. Moreover, the Russians still refuse to allow any of the 200-odd ceasefire monitors deployed by the EU into the two disputed territories.


Some regard Georgia and the Caucasus as small, faraway and so unimportant. They are, on the contrary, a strategically vital region that could play a critical role in the EU’s future energy security. And, as Mr Saakashvili has often said, if the Russians think they can escape unpunished for the invasion and occupation of parts of his country, that could embolden further adventurism. The war was popular with ordinary Russians: the popularity of President Dmitry Medvedev and the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has risen even as financial markets have tanked. There are plenty of Russian citizens and passport-holders in such neighbours as Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics whom the Kremlin might easily find a sudden need to “protect”, just as it did in South Ossetia.

Besides, this is not just about the Caucasus. Both Mr Medvedev and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, have muttered belligerent things about Russia’s neighbours and the West in general. Its short war with Georgia seems to have confirmed Russia’s prejudice that it can cow its neighbours—including some members of the EU—by threatening or even using force. The Russians continue to treat the supply of energy as another weapon in their armoury. There can be no genuine partnership with the EU while Russia thinks this way.
Neighbourhood watch

The EU should be urgently seeking to put more substance into the neighbourhood policy that defines its dealings with Russia’s near-abroad. For all his annoying arrogance, Mr Saakashvili is a democratically elected president who has liberalised Georgia’s economy and cracked down on corruption. Ukraine’s democracy may sometimes resemble a tragicomedy (it is currently preparing for its third parliamentary election in the space of three years), but it is vigorous for all that. Even the autocratic Armenia and Azerbaijan may now look more to the West than they did before the war in Georgia. Belarus, widely known as Europe’s last dictatorship, is shifting its ground a little—as the EU recognised this week when it decided to relax its visa ban on the country’s leaders.

The EU could help these countries by offering financial aid, more open trade deals and easier visa conditions. It should also hold out to them prospect of eventual membership. This is less provocative than the notion of letting any of them into NATO, which has surely receded into the future after the Georgian war. But as experience in the Balkans has shown, the lure of eventual EU membership is a good way to foster liberal, market-based democracy and to defuse territorial and ethnic disputes. As for Russia, its help is still needed on some vital global issues. But for the EU to go ahead with new “partnership” talks now would send a message of astounding pusillanimity. At the very least, Russia needs first to live up to its promises to withdraw properly from Georgia and to let the EU’s monitors into the disputed enclaves.