The Obama administration is pursuing a dual track approach to dealing with Russia – engaging both government and civil society, a democracy forum heard this week. On his recent trip, President Barack Obama had spent considerable time meeting civil society and opposition groups, the National Security Council’s Michael McFaul said.
While there will be problems transcending the Kremlin’s Manichean, zero-sum mind-set, the administration will pursue US interests with Russia when it can, without it when necessary. The strategy could prove to be “naive and ill-suited”, McFaul conceded, but with the US facing serious challenges elsewhere, “we don’t have the bandwidth to have another enemy,” he said.
“The United States is considered an adversary,” he told RFE/RL recently. “I’m sure many would use harsher words among themselves when they talk about us. And they think that our No. 1 objective in the world is to make Russia weaker, to surround Russia, to do things that make us stronger and Russia weaker.”
But McFaul insisted that resetting US-Russian relations will not be at the expense of neighboring democracies that Russia is determined to undermine. “We are not in any way, in the name of the reset, abandoning our very close relationship with these two democracies, Ukraine and Georgia,” he said.
Washington could best serve the country’s liberals by ensuring the success of Georgia, Ukraine and other transitional states, said the Moscow Carnegie Center’s Lilia Shevtsova, and by helping to integrate Russia into international institutions like the WTO and OECD. It should also try to contain the elite’s authoritarian traditionalists, but it could only effectively do so in collaboration with the European Union.
The problem, said Ivan Krastev, is that the US perceives Russia as a conservative status quo power while Europe increasingly sees it as a revisionist power eager to reassert itself and rollback democratic gains in its neighborhood. The “bad news” is that to the Russians “Obama looks like Gorbachev,” signifying the relative decline of its power, and for that reason US policy will be consistently tested.
Opinion polls confirm that Russians want democratic institutions and remain favorably disposed to the West, despite a barrage of anti-US and anti-EU propaganda, Shevtsova said. But serious Western democracy promotion efforts ended with the endorsement of the less-than-democratic Yeltsin government.
The ruling elite’s “schizophrenic behavior” reflects a contradictory duality in its regression to a traditional political paradigm based on restoring superpower status and fabricating external enemies while aspiring to be integrated into Western business and culture.
Engagement with Russia should be multidimensional, integrating the values-based and pragmatic approach advocated in the 2006 Council on Foreign Relations report prepared by Steve Sestanovich and Francis Fukuyama’s realistic Wilsonianism, while also cautiously reflecting Robert Kagan’s imperative to resist the new authoritarian offensive and David Kramer’s understandable skepticism about the Kremlin’s willingness to engage.
Russia is struggling to retain its great power status and, lacking any meaningful political model or ideology to export, corruption is the means by which the Kremlin projects soft power, said Krastev, head of the Sofia-based Center for Liberal Strategies.
While Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remains in charge, there are clearly tensions within the “tandemocracy”. Shortly before meeting Putin recently, a youth delegation was warned not to use the words decline, money, Medvedev or President. While it is evident that there are competing Medvedev and Putin camps, he said, “we still don’t know if Medvedev is part of the Medvedev camp!”
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