The Policy of small improvements

By Dmitry Babich, political analyst, RIA Novosti

The summit of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama, did not resolve all the issues that burden the Russia- U.S. relationship, but it was still a success. The sides reached a preliminary understanding on cuts to their nuclear arsenals, limiting them to 1,500-1,675 warheads on each side and setting a cap for the number of delivery vehicles as low as 500-1,100 units.

Russia was not able to make the future cuts conditional on the United States dismantling its plans to install an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, but President Obama’s statements indicated important shifts in the U.S. position on the issue. Obama reiterated his readiness to make a link between offensive and defensive weapons, something that his predecessor George W. Bush refused to do after Washington pulled out of the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001. Obama also agreed to sign what he called a “legally binding” follow-on treaty to the START 1 treaty of 1991. This is another digression from the stance of George W. Bush, who said repeatedly that since the United States and Russia were no longer Cold War foes, they did not need a detailed agreement on arms reductions.

It is in Russia’s interest to make deep cuts in the number of nuclear warheads and their carriers, since maintaining its current arsenal of several thousand warheads and a corresponding number of carriers is a costly and risky business. However, some Russian experts before the summit warned the Russian leadership against cutting the number of weapons to several hundred warheads, since this move could induce smaller nuclear powers, such as China, to increase their arsenals to match those of the United States and Russia. Right now the United States and Russia possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.

The other, more divisive issues in Russia-U.S. relations, such as differences on Ukraine’s and Georgia’s eventual membership in NATO, Russia’s democratic process and economic issues were obviously raised during the presidents’ one-on-one talks and during the broader-format negotiations, but were wisely omitted during the news conference that the two president gave soon after their meeting. 

Leaving the currently unsolvable questions aside, both presidents agreed on just about all the points they could agree on without changing their countries’ longtime foreign policy priorities. An international summit on nuclear issues will be held next year, nuclear tests and missile launches by North Korea were jointly condemned; President Medvedev said he “valued the efforts of the United States in fending off the terrorist threat that has been stemming and unfortunately continues to stem from Afghan soil.”

The summit can be said to have fulfilled all the experts’ expectations, without producing the so-called breakthrough that would have been viewed with suspicion by public opinion in both the United States and Russia. In the United States, President Obama is often criticized by his opponents for being too “soft,” not only on Russia, but also on Iran, a country with which Obama had promised to negotiate – for the first time in 30 years – during his presidential campaign of 2008. The crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran, as well as North Korea’s recent provocative missile launches, did not help. In this situation, any blank checks to Moscow would be viewed negatively by the vast majority of the political and expert establishment in the United States. On the other hand, in Russia, the trauma of the unfulfilled hopes on “friendship” with the United States and EU countries in the aftermath of Moscow’s dismantling of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s is still fresh in people’s minds. Any kind of a “remake” of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of “new thinking” (which degenerated into unilateral concessions in 1989-1991) would be politically impossible for Medvedev. So, the two sides do what they can – for example, restarting contacts between the two countries’ militaries, frozen after last year’s short conflict between Russia and Georgia in which Washington supported Tbilisi. 

“In the last years of George W. Bush’s administration, Russia-U.S. relations experienced so many traumas that any U.S. administration – even a very good one – will be viewed with suspicion in Moscow for a few years,” said Vladimir Orlov, the president of the PIR Center, a Moscow based think-tank busying itself with the issues of nuclear deterrence. “It is very good that there is a verbal understanding that the United States has not taken a final decision on the deployment of the ABM shield in Europe, but we will not be at peace until we have a legally binding document on that.”

During the news conference, Obama said the U.S. ABM shield in Eastern Europe would not be able to make the huge Russian nuclear arsenal irrelevant and that United States would like to cooperate with Russia in creating an ABM capability against unauthorized launches of individual missiles, which could be a challenge the projected American ABM force of 10 interceptor missiles could deal with. Medvedev obviously politely disagreed, but stressed that the previous U.S. administration had refused to discuss the matter in principle, insisting that the projected ABM force was not directed against Russia and thus was none of Russia’s business.

Without solving all the problems, progress on the disarmament front can allow the United States and Russia to lay foundations of mutual trust that both leaders can build on in the future, resolving new issues as they arise. “The main story of Russia-U.S. relations in the near future will not be disarmament, but rivalry for influence in the post-Soviet space,” said Sergei Karaganov, the head of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, an umbrella organization of Russia’s experts on strategic issues. “Without the U.S. dropping the idea of seeing Ukraine in NATO there will be no long-term improvement in relations. What we can do now is to increase trust between the two governments, so that in case a crisis of the type of last year’s events in Georgia arises, we are better prepared for it.”