WASHINGTON, November 6 (RIA Novosti) – The outcome of the US midterm elections will not have a major effect on the White House handling of foreign policy, deputy director and fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington told RIA Novosti on Wednesday.
“The election will have some impact around the edges, but it’s not going to result in huge differences in the way this administration carries out its foreign policy,” said Jeffrey Mankoff, who served as an adviser on US-Russian relations at the US Department of State.
“Foreign policy at the end of the day is largely the prerogative of the president,” Mankoff stressed.
He added that although there is going to be more pressure on US President Barack Obama from the new Congress, “Obama got a lot of pressure from the old Congress too, as the House of Representatives was already under republican control”.
On Tuesday, Republicans took control of the full Congress by gaining the majority of seats in the US Senate, and retaining the majority in the House of Representatives during the 2014 midterm elections. Congress has become republican-led for the first time in eight years.
Senator John McCain, who is calling on military support for Ukraine and boots on the ground in Syria, is expected to become Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee due to his seniority.
Mankoff claimed that the republican caucus is more divided on military action now than five or ten years ago, and partially because of the influence of the Tea Party that tends to be much more focused on domestic politics and has a less assertive approach to what’s going on internationally.
“Right now there’s not a lot of political support for putting American forces in Syria and Iraq,” he noted, adding that there are already advisers there.
”Whether the number of advisers increase depends on a lot of things, one of them is going to be what happens on the ground in the coming months to years,” Mankoff said.
On the question of arming the Ukrainians, there was substantial support in the Congress for doing that even before the election, and so it’s going to make a huge change in that regard, he noted.
“At the end of the day it’s something the Obama administration would have to decide on, and so far the administration has been very adamant that it doesn’t see a military solution to the conflict, and is not going to support arming the Ukrainian military, regardless of what happens to Congress,” Mankoff emphasized.
Mankoff also underlined that Russia and the United States are still cooperating on a number of issues, including Iran, Syria and space industry.
“I think there are still areas where Washington and Moscow are going to see that they have interests that overlap, to some extent we are seeing more of that in Syria, in Iran,” he explained, adding that the challenge is going to be decoupling or delinking efforts to cooperate on those issues.
“And that’s going to be a challenge for both the American and Russian governments,” Mankoff concluded.
The relations between Russia and the West deteriorated following amid the Ukrainian crisis. The European Union and the United States have been hitting Russia with sanctions over Moscow’s alleged role in the Ukrainian crisis. Western sanctions have targeted Russia’s largest banks, energy and defense companies, as well as some individuals.
