Bush is no lame duck for
Moscow By M K Bhadrakumar
The recent US congressional mid-term
elections ended up only adding to the violently
ambivalent Russian-US relationship. While for the
rest of the world the elections demystified the
pipe dream of neo-conservatism and its limited
number of permutations - such as the Iraq war and
the democratization of the Middle East - the mood
in Moscow was of a dark realism over clean slates
and new leases that might never arrive.
The mainstream
opinion of Russian analysts, experts
and influential public personalities is that downstream of the
victory of the
Democrats, negative consequences are in store for
Russian-US relations. What dramatizes the drift of
thoughts is that a triple entendre is in play.
From Moscow's point of view, the nomination of
former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief
Robert Gates as the new defense secretary and the
specter of Tom Lantos, a Democratic congressman
from California, heading the Committee on
International Relations of the House of Representatives (for up
to six-years) are no less worrisome than a
Democrat-dominated US Congress.
Quite
understandably, the dark side of Gates must
perturb Moscow. Gates was a Cold Warrior who
insisted that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev
was a fake. It seems Gorbachev remarked when they
first met in May 1989, "I understand the White
House has a special cell assigned to the task of
discrediting Gorbachev. And I've heard you are in
charge, Mr Gates."
Gates' thesis was that
glasnost and perestroika were a
pernicious ploy aimed at making the Soviet Union a
leaner, more efficient, virile and meaner enemy,
and that the hidden agenda of Gorbachev was to
ensnare and divide the West. Gates argued,
therefore, that the West was naive to believe it
could "do business" (to use British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher's famous words) with Gorbachev.
Indeed, Gates was not alone in having such
profound difficulty in understanding Gorbachev.
Recently declassified US and Russian archival
material relating to the famous Ronald
Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik 20 years ago
in October 1986 have revealed how some spooks
never get things straight.
The
Soviet documents show on the one hand how at a
politburo meeting in Moscow on October 4, 1986,
Gorbachev was insisting that his negotiating brief
for Reykjavik ought to be imbued with a
"breakthrough potential" leading to a total liquidation of
all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. But the US
documents tell an altogether different story of
Soviet intentions.
Curiously, on the same
day 20 years ago, a briefing memo for the benefit
of Reagan titled "Gorbachev's Goals and Tactics at
Reykjavik" was drafted by the National Security
Council in Washington, which not only completely
mis-predicted Gorbachev's conduct at the
forthcoming summit but cautioned Reagan that
Gorbachev would be "coy" and "undecided", and that
the Californian with his wily charm might have to
"smoke" Gorbachev out at the talks.
In the
event, Gorbachev bombarded Reagan with an
extraordinarily ambitious set of proposals
concerning nuclear disarmament, holding out for a
fleeting moment the mind-boggling prospect of a
world without nuclear weapons.
Moscow
today would have good enough reason to worry
whether Gates still holds his past expertise in
Kremlinology and Russian-US relations.
At any rate, as Ira Straus, the US coordinator
of the Washington-based non-governmental
Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), recently
wrote in the Moscow Times, the Russian-US
relationship is still "fragile enough that it
could be destroyed quickly if the United States
were to abandon caution for full-scale
Russia-bashing ... the relationship with Russia is
unconsolidated and troubled ... this will be all
too easy for Gates, as secretary of defense, to
undermine ... Today he would meet little
opposition in bashing Russia - a pastime that has
once again become popular."
As a CIA
wunderkind, Gates inflated the Soviet
threat and the "Evil Empire's" propensity to be
hideous - even on the eve of the USSR's
comprehensive, unconditional collapse in 1991. The
point is whether he today retains his old
prejudices or whether, given his reputation for
political opportunity, he will go by what the
Chinese call the "wind factor".
Lawrence
Walsh, the US special prosecutor who investigated
the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote in his memoir
Firewall that he plainly disbelieved Gates'
testimony to the effect that despite being William
Casey's deputy at the CIA at that time, he wasn't
in the loop on the conspiracy.
Lantos' is
a more straightforward story. Moscow knows
precisely where he stands on Russian-US relations.
There is no ambiguity here. If his background as a
Hungarian-born politician, his connections and his
record are anything to go by, in his capacity as
chairman of the Committee on International
Relations, Lantos will take a hostile stance
against Russia.
The Kremlin knows Lantos
as one of the harshest and most intractable
critics of Russia on Capitol Hill. He perpetually
(and very noisily) worries about the human-rights
situation inside Russia; he regards Mikhail
Khodorkovsky (incarcerated in remote Siberia) as a
"political prisoner" rather than atoning for oil
company Yukos' alleged acts of irregularity; he
thinks Russia (despite its surging economy) must
be expelled from the Group of Eight industrialized
nations for its democracy deficit.
According to Robert VerBruggen of the US
journal National Interest, Lantos has possibly
been a political ally of controversial Russian
oligarchs such as media baron Vladimir Gusinsky in
the latter's public relations campaigns in the US
against the Kremlin. "The financial links between
Gusinsky, Lantos and the [public relations] firms
[hired by Gusinsky in the US] are clear ... An
institution linked to one firm has paid for more
than US$46,000 worth of Lantos' travel since
2000," VerBruggen wrote last week.
The
issue is not whether Lantos' criticisms of Russia
are unwarranted, but whether they will remain his
Russia priorities in his elevated standing in the
US Congress, which confers on him the influence to
set the agenda of US foreign policy. Hardly five
months ago, he joined hands with Senators John
McCain and Joe Lieberman in co-authoring a letter
to President George W Bush accusing President
Vladimir Putin of authoritarian tendencies.
Gates and Lantos aside, the most positive
spin that has been given by Russian experts to the
US congressional elections is their philosophical
stance that no new element is entering the
Russian-US equation, despite the Democrats'
well-known penchant for harping on human-rights
issues.
To quote Sergei Rogov, director of
the USA and Canada Institute of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, "Both of them [Democrats and
Republicans] alike evaluate extremely negatively
Russia's domestic and foreign policies." At any
rate, Rogov added, the Russian-US partnership has
been only "declarative", whereas in actuality,
"this partnership has no content today, and mutual
claims against one another keep growing".
There is some merit in the argument. For
instance, neither of the two highly contentious
issues in Russian-US relations currently - NATO
enlargement or the "color" revolutions in the
former Soviet republics - can be quite regarded as
the legacy of the Bush administration.
In
fact, the germane seeds of both - jettisoning of
the US commitment not to expand NATO in the
post-Cold War era or the studied cultivation of
"civil society" groups on the political soil of
the post-Soviet space as a way of bringing about
"regime change" - were sown by Bill Clinton's
administration. Similarly, the concept of
"selective cooperation" with Moscow (as compared
with full partnership) is a bipartisan one, too,
that harks back to the Clinton White House.
But the fact remains that the Democrats'
relatively more robust emphasis on human rights
and democratic institutions in Russia will pose
problems for Moscow. A touchstone will be the
readiness of the incoming US Congress to concur
with Russia's World Trade Organization (WTO)
accession.
Russian Economics Minister
German Gref said in Moscow this week that a
bilateral agreement with the US could be signed on
the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation summit in Hanoi on Saturday.
Negotiations with the US were hitherto taking a
tortuous course due to what Washington cited as
differences over the issue of agriculture, access
of US companies to the Russian financial-services
market, and the absence of adequate protection for
intellectual-property rights in Russia.
Russian spokesmen often enough hinted that
Washington was deliberately stalling the
negotiations and that there could be unspoken
linkages to Moscow's energy policy. To be sure,
Moscow repeatedly deferred a decision on awarding
the contract for the massive Shtokman gas fields,
pending the outcome of the WTO negotiations with
Washington. (A Shtokman deal is still within the
realms of possibility.)
If so, it is
curious that the Bush administration has pressed
ahead at this late hour, when it is supposedly a
lame duck already, to strike a deal with Moscow on
WTO accession. For, unlike the Bush
administration, Democrats do not have any close
links with the US energy industry.
From
this point onward, the subject narrows down to the
Democrat-dominated Congress' willingness to lift
the 1974 Jackson-Vanick trade law that barred the
Soviet Union from achieving most-favored-nation
status with the US - which it should do if Russia
joins the WTO, as otherwise Washington would be in
violation of WTO rules.
Since 1991,
Washington has been granting Russia and the former
Soviet republics yearly waivers from
Jackson-Vanick, but a new threshold will be
reached this weekend. Once the agreement regarding
Russia's WTO accession is signed, Bush is expected
to make a formal request to Congress to grant
Russia normal trade relations. When that happens,
will the Democrats put on the brakes? On the other
hand, does the US administration intend to press
ahead on the Hill before a Democrat-dominated
Congress becomes a full-fledged protagonist in the
Bush-Putin WTO deal?
Clearly, interesting
possibilities now open up in Russia's energy
cooperation with the US. Moscow is no doubt aware
that the traditional conservative wing of the
Republican Party that has lately gained ascendancy
within the Bush administration on the debris of
neo-conservatism includes "realists" such as James
Baker, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft.
Indeed, the Kremlin's ace spokesman, Dmitry
Peskov, has been cautiously optimistic. He said
Russia respected the choice of the US electorate
and would be "open for dialogue" with the new
leadership in Congress, but "we are not
speculating on the WTO until the negotiations are
over. They are developing quite positively."
But Moscow would see advantages in areas
other than beyond WTO and energy. Russian experts
have almost uniformly singled out the Iraq war as
the Bush administration's albatross in domestic
politics. And most experts are of the view that it
is a matter of time before a pullout of US troops
from Iraq commences. The influential head of
the Politika Foundation, Vyacheslav Nikonov, was
voicing a common opinion in Moscow when he said,
"The US failure in Iraq is just as painful as the
one the US suffered in Vietnam - if not more
serious." The corollary of such a thought is of
course that the US dogma of a "unipolar" world has
become simply not sustainable any longer.
Russia sees advantages here - having
consciously decided to step out of the Western
orbit as a matter of destiny, and even to aspire
to create a Moscow-centered system. Nikonov
explained that in the "multipolar" world order
that is shaping up, which may involve 10-15 power
centers, given the absence of a "system of
collective security with the participation of the
US but also China, Russia, Europe, Japan, India
and other leading players", what may ensue in the
coming period is a "game without rules" that could
well deteriorate into a "multipolar chaos".
In such a scenario, US policy toward
Russia has to become simply more responsible, no
matter the domestic party politics in the United
States. The Kremlin would therefore estimate that
for the next two years at least, the traditional
conservative Republicans who have emerged in the
corridors of power in the White House in the
recent past are of far greater consequence than
the new crop of Democrats grandstanding on the
Hill during a presidential election year.
For it was they who were usually
responsive to the compulsions of ensuring
strategic stability with Moscow on a mutual basis,
and ensuring that relations with Russia should be
based on cooperation rather than crisis.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for
more than 29 years, with postings including
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
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