Jackson-Vanik amendment - safeguard it!

The Jackson-Vanik amendment must be upheld!

"From the business community perspective, everybody wants this over and done with," said Michael Considine, director for Eurasian issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But Moscow must first fulfill anti-piracy and other commitments it made to the United States in 2006, as well as finish talks with all WTO members, Considine said.

Obama and Medvedev, meeting in London on the eve of a Group of 20 developed and developing countries summit, said in a joint statement they would instruct their "governments to make efforts to finalize as soon as possible Russia's accession into the World Trade Organization."

The administration of former President George W. Bush hoped in early 2008 to finally usher Russia into the WTO after years of negotiations. But the political fallout from Russia's short war with Georgia in August set those talks back for months.

Now, as Obama and Medvedev are trying to rebuild relations, congressional Democrats are complaining that Russia still has not fulfilled all of the commitments it has made to the United States to crack down on copyright piracy.

CURRENT BENEFITS AT RISK

They urged Obama in a March 26 letter to insist Moscow honor all of those commitments before he signs off on a final WTO accession package. They also recommended Obama suspend U.S. trade benefits for Russia until it significantly improves its enforcement of intellectual property rights.

The U.S. Trade Representative's office did not respond to a request for more information on Obama and Medvedev's pledge.

But in an annual report on Tuesday on foreign trade barriers, the trade office said "Russia has much work to do" to bring its laws into compliance with WTO rules and to honor bilateral deals it has made to join the world trade body.

Russia also must resolve multilateral concerns over its intellectual property rights regime, support for agriculture, import licensing of products with encryption technology, operation of state-owned enterprises and barriers to agricultural imports, the trade office said.

Many U.S. lawmakers still oppose lifting a Cold War-era restriction on trade with Russia known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, despite the recent recommendation of a bipartisan experts group that Congress do that to help repair relations between the two countries.
The measure tied normal trade relations with the Soviet Union and other centrally planned economies to the rights of Jews and other religious minorities to emigrate freely.

Russia has been in compliance since 1994, but most U.S. lawmakers have insisted Moscow finish negotiations to join the WTO before they vote to lift the measure and establish permanent normal trade relations, referred to as PNTR.

So far, there has been no detectable change in that sentiment, a Senate aide who works on trade said.

Once Russia reaches a final deal to join the WTO, the United States will be obligated to grant PNTR in order to share in the market-opening concessions that Moscow has made, said Doug Goudie, director for international trade policy at the National Association of Manufacturers.
That could be a tough political fight, but hopefully not as difficult as it was to persuade Congress to approve PNTR for China in 2000, Goudie said.

A WTO deal that opens the Russian market to more U.S. exports would be a boon to U.S. manufacturers at a time when they desperately are looking for new sales, Goudie said.

Russians do not like Polish meat

Poland is to block Russia’s WTO accession until Russia takes off embargo on Polish meat and vegetables, introduced in November 2005.
Still Poland doesn’t mind Russia’s joining the organization; the Polish side has claimed that such a powerful country like Russia should be the WTO member.
But Poland first of all tries to solve its meat market problems. It has already blocked a new cooperation agreement between Russia and EU, now it can block Russia’s WTO accession.

Russia used to buy 5% of Poland meat export. In 2005 Russia has banned Polish meat and vegetables as Poland re-exported these products from the third countries, mostly from African countries. Russia claimed such products didn’t match Russian veterinary requirements.

Will Russia ever join the WTO?

President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday that delays in Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organisation "irritate" Moscow but added that his country was still ready to join the global trade body.
"Russia is ready for accession on normal, non-discriminatory terms. We will do everything that is necessary. This process has dragged out and this irritates us," Medvedev said in televised remarks.
"We are not making a tragedy out of the fact that the process has been drawn out. The main thing is that it does not become a never-ending story," Medvedev said at a joint press conference with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.
Russia's WTO hopes suffered a setback last year after its war with Georgia badly strained relations with the West, and the United States cast doubt on Russia's bid to join the international body.
Moscow responded that its WTO bid was an economic matter that should not be politicised, but trade negotiations made little progress.
Russia is the largest world economy still outside the WTO. Initial membership negotiations started in 1993 but were delayed by disputes over a variety of issues, including enforcement of copyright laws and meat exports.

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.