Romney Russia prospects
Subject: Romney Russia prospects
From: Ira Straus <irastraus@aol.com>
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2012
Despite a lot of speculation on Romney’s policies toward Russia, basic points have been missed.
1. Every new President has made a reset with Russia since 1989. Every one of them positive. But every one of them falling short of results sufficient to make the relationship self-sustaining. Romney can be expected to do the same.
2. Obama’s reset is going the way of all the others – downhill.
Every second term of a U.S. Presidency in this period has been bad for U.S.-Russia relations, because the U.S. President has tried to glide on the basis of a reset that was already wearing thin by the end of his first term. None of them have wanted to implicitly discredit their previous policy by a new restart. Various entrenched domestic bureaucracies, elites and media, with their diligent (and in many respects legitimate and necessary) pursuit of residual agendas from the cold war, have taken revenge, in face of the decay of impetus at the top, in Term II, for new departures in US-Russia cooperation. Every one of them has faced harder pressures at home in the second term to regress in relations.
3. While Romney can be expected to make a new reset, Obama can’t. He would just try to keep his old one droning on. Which means, slowly petering out.
Like Bush the younger, Romney would be coming in after a campaign based on anti-Russian criticism of the sitting President. Nevertheless, Bush the younger made the LARGEST reset since Reagan-Gorbachev, bigger than Clinton’s, or his father’s (or Obama’s). No reason to assume Romney will do the same. No reason to assume he won’t. He certainly will make some reset. The likelihood is that, after a period of consolidating his national-patriotic credentials, he’ll make a positive reset. Much as Bush the younger did. And for that matter, the same way Putin did in 1999-2001.
4. Romney, like Bush II and Reagan (and Nixon on China), would have the political credentials to do it. Obama and Clinton didn’t have those credentials — they were too vulnerable to attack from anti-Russian lobbies, obviously including those on the Right but also center and Left (e.g., the Washington Post and other media, which hated first Yeltsin and then Putin).
Clinton’s reset could have been as far-reaching as that of Reagan-Gorbachev, and could have carried it to fruition or a kind of completion, unlike Bush the elder who mostly punted on it — except for the fact that he lacked the domestic political credentials, and didn’t want to invest much political capital on foreign policy in his first term, having run against Bush’s focus on foreign policy; in his campaign he pretended that we had to turn inward to save ourselves economically from a supposed decline back then. Obama continues the theme of emphasizing less investment in foreign policy in order to do our “nation-building” here at home instead. (Quite a silly gratuitous insult to his own country, by the way. Even the most ignorant declininst must know deep down that the US is about as stably-built a country as we’re ever going to find. Nation-building is about gluing together countries that are on the verge of coming apart, or that lack an effective government. There are too many countries that are really in that condition; and as we learned on 9-11, there can be high costs at home for ignoring them abroad.) In his second term, Clinton’s reset turned sour; Albright provided the symbol of it. People have largely forgotten the fact, but, by the end of Clinton’s presidency, relations were as bad as — probably worse than — they were at the end of Bush the younger’s subsequent presidency.
5. Obama’s reset never reached the level of Clinton’s or the Bushes’s, or Reagan’s. It had its virtues, gaining some stability because it took no risks on higher goals that could occasion disillusion, and showed a willingness to keep paying the price of grinding on with it. But in reaching low, it wasted a lot of potential, and built nothing to provide sustainability for itself. Thus the signs of fragility, as the willingness to make the effort for it runs down. An argument can be made that it was the best that was possible at the time, given Putin; and Michael McFaul personally deserves a lot of the credit for its virtues. But it can be equally well argued that more would have been possible by other tacks; and that the reset was meanwhile excessively dependent on misplaced hopes regarding Medvedev, leaving it a widow in face of Putin’s return to the full helm.
6. About that huge supply of wasted potential for Russia-West collaboration. It is a kind of surplus stock of interests that could be better realized on both sides through more collaboration. It that has existed ever since the end of the Communist regime. Due to an underlying sharing of most interests and of far more values than most people realize — a sharing, after the end of the ideologically hostile regime in Moscow, of the most vital interests on both sides, other than the price of oil. Similar to the way most interests are shared nowadays with all societies of European origin, and with the non-European modernized industrialized societies as well. It leaves ample space for a positive Romney reset. Which would almost tautologically do better than Obama could do in a second term.
7. I see no reason to believe that Romney, any more than his predecessors, would proceed far enough to realize more than a small fraction of that potential for upgrading collaboration. The most probable prospect is a substantial but insufficient upgrading, as was done by each of his predecessor. Better than a continued wearing down of the Obama reset; benefiting the national interests considerably by comparison; still falling far short of what is possible and therefore mandated for the benefit of those national interests.
8. All these forecasts assume the world as it is. They change drastically if there’s a new 9-11 or other global emergency. As often happens. In such circumstances, dramatic upgrades become a serious prospect again. Particularly when there is a new presidency.
9. Mideast — the most likely arena for new global crises.
a. Syria. Romney would be more direct in bypassing on Russia on Syria. This will bring termporary frictions. However, some Russian analysts have written that Russia would actually prefer this, rather than getting dragged along sharing in the authorization for an intervention that the Russian political elite is never really going to be reconciled to anyway. As happened in Libya, with negative results for Russia-West relations that seem surprisingly heavy and enduring.
b. Iran. Quite unpredictable at this point. Maybe direct negotiations really will begin. Maybe more consistent backbone signals will win results, building on not scrapping Obama’s international coalition-building. Maybe, given the cataclysmic consequences of an Iranian bomb, currently being rationalized as acceptable among the usual suspects in the American elite such as Kenneth Waltz, there is as much reason to worry about Romney’s pragmatism and opportunism — in other circumstances a cause for optimism about him — as about his harsh campaign rhetoric.
c. EGYPT. The main thing in the region is not Syria or Iran. It is Egypt. Here Romney can be expected to do better than Obama with Russia.
Romney’s view — his view of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, his view of the Arab spring and the Islamists — is close to the view of nearly all Russians, including Putin. Obama’s view, like that of the Western media and think tanks, is in a different universe than Russia’s — and, sadly, a different universe than reality. Romney will have a decent chance of communicating seriously with Russia on this, as partners in managing a shared problem. This is something the Obama Administration is unable to do; it has become too heavily invested in the Egyptian Revolution and even in the Muslim Brotherhood government there.
Egypt in turn is the cornerstone for the perspective on the region. Building on a similar perspective with Russia on Egypt, Romney has some chance of reached a shared overall perspective with Russia on the Mideast, providing a context that may reduce the friction in specific countries of disagreement (Syria, Iran); Obama does not.
The commentary from Russia’s mainstream analysts — its most serious ones, including plenty of moderate and pro-Western ones — has been incredibly sharply negative on America’s Mideast policy under Obama, regularly describing it as a policy that has been mindlessly ideological, destabilizing the entire region and world, and negligent even of America’s own interests. This condemnation will continue in its harshness as long as the Obama presidency endures. And in its negativism — the polemic is so thick that Russian analysts, even the more serious ones, paint the entire region with a single brushstroke, the U.S. all wrong in all parts of the region, Russia right everywhere in it. This too is not reality. It makes impossible a serious Russia-West dialogue on the venues where the U.S. is closer than Russia to being right, including the two current crisis-countries, Syria and Iran.
10. Russian foreign policy elites have for decades taken the view that Russia can do better with Republican presidents, despite greater surface sympathy from Democrats, and that the Nixon detente was no accident. More often than not they have proved right about this, They thought in the early ’80s that they had proved wrong thanks to Reagan’s hardline policy; but by the late ’80s this assessment was reversed back to normal. Putin and his party shared the pro-Republican view enough in 1999-2000 to scrap relationship-building with Clinton and wait for Bush II; a party leader in Russia tried to give this a deeper basis, saying that United Russia was a conservative party, like the Republicans. Russia made good progress in relations through Bush II in 2001-2, but in the long run proved more mistaken in hoping for him than in their hopes for any other Republican. Now they seem to be scrapping all their previous experience and acting on a perpetuation of their dislike of the last years of Bush II. This too is probably a mistake. Their long-term view is probably once again closer to the truth.
This note is meant for analysis, not to decide on voting choices. It is perhaps useful as a corrective to what has been written elsewhere; and as preparation for a couple days down the road when we’ll be evaluating the prospects for relations after the election. Personally, it seems to me that, in current global conditions, international problems and crises other than Russia should take precedence as the main foreign policy criterion for voting in this election, and I have written about those issues elsewhere. I say those other issues should come first, despite being one who continues to see great importance in Russia and in the potential for a more collaborative relation with it. Other issues simply have a higher level of urgency at this time; and despite the rhetorically huge contrast between Romney and Obama on Russia, the differences between the two candidates on the other issues seem in reality greater.
The writer is a former Fulbright professsor at MGU and MGIMO, and is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO. The views expressed here are individual, not those of the Committee.