Posts Tagged ‘reset’
A Russian ‘frenemy’
The White House is trying to revive the “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is likely to be a wasted effort. The reset is dead not because of someone’s ill will or mistakes. It is because Washington and Moscow have reached the limit of accommodation that neither could overstep without compromising the central elements and moral content of their foreign and domestic policies. The Obama administration’s effort would be far better spent on devising a more realistic strategy that at least stabilizes the relationship, albeit on a lower level of interaction.
Two sets of factors are mostly responsible for the growing disjunction between the United States and Russia: the diminution of Russia’s geo-strategic relevance for some key U.S. objectives, and the increasing prominence and role that Kremlin domestic behavior plays in U.S.-Russian relations.
In Afghanistan, the rapid drawdown of U.S. troops obviates much of the need for personnel and materiel transportation through Russia after 2014. With regard to Iran, another key U.S. concern, Russia has unambiguously signaled the end of its support for even watered-down resolutions that it previously voted for at the U.N. Security Council.
Syria has been an even starker demonstration of the diversion in guiding values and objectives. Russia thrice vetoed U.S.-supported Security Council resolutions calling for sanctions against the murderous Assad regime. The last of the vetoes was cast in July, despite President Obama’s appeal to President Putin in an hourlong telephone conversation. Throughout the conflict, Russia has continued to sell weapons and technology to Assad.
On Russia’s domestic front, following Putin’s reelection in March 2012, the Kremlin has undertaken a concerted and consistent effort to repress, intimidate, marginalize and stigmatize not just the political opposition but also citizens participating in peaceful protests and members of nonpolitical, independent civil movements and groups. Since the run-up to the Duma election in the second half of 2011, from Putin on down, the regime has been using alleged subversion by external enemies to justify the crackdown.
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Kadyrov Faces Sanctions Under Magnitsky Act
One month after U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, it is clear that Russo-American relations have entered a difficult period.
But the dispute over Moscow’s adoption ban might mark only the beginning of the difficulties Obama is facing with the Kremlin in his second term, which officially starts with Monday’s inauguration ceremony.
The Magnitsky Law states that no later than 120 days after its Dec. 14 signing, the president must submit to Congress the names of those facing sanctions. That list is likely to contain Ramzan Kadyrov, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The Chechen leader “is on the list of Russian officials to be sanctioned, as [the commission] recommended,” the organization said in a report published on its website earlier this month.
The report argues that Kadyrov “condones or oversees” mass human rights violations and instituted a repressive state based on his religious views. “At least nine women have been killed for ‘immodest behavior’ since 2008, with Kadyrov praising the murders, and the killers did not stand trial,” it said.
Kadyrov has long been accused of involvement in murders, torture and disappearances of political opponents and human rights activists both in the country and abroad. He denies wrongdoing, and his spokesman, Alvi Karimov, reiterated Tuesday that the report’s accusations were baseless.
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Putin’s Russia: back to the bad old days
Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness to undertake democratic reform has led to a cooling of relations with the US and Europe.
We can all sleep more safely. The end of the world will not happen on December 20 2012 , or even for another 4.5bn years, because Vladimir Putin has assured us that it won’t. Collective jitters produced by the end of the Mayan calendar have been good business for the suppliers of candles, matches, salt and torches in some parts of Russia, even though, as one psychiatrist noted, what happens every day can be a lot scarier than Armageddon.
Take, for instance, Mr Putin’s support for a ban on Americans adopting Russian children. This was a measure named after the horrific case of a Russian toddler who died of heatstroke in Virginia after his adoptive American father left him in a car for nine hours. The ban, however, was not born out of any wish to protect orphans. It was written out of anger. It was one of the responses to a law signed by Barack Obama named after Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who died in prison after trying to expose a government tax fraud. The Magnitsky law requires the US administration to compile a list of Russian citizens accused of human rights abuses, including those involved in Magnitsky’s case, and bar them from travelling to the US. The measure is designed to hit officials personally and where it hurts them most – to prevent them travelling to and from their luxury pads in New Jersey and accessing their copious bank accounts there. Many say, with some justice, that the same measure should apply to that greatest money-laundering centre of all – London.
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Why Obama Should Sign the Magnitsky Act
The U.S. House of Representatives approved the Magnitsky Act last week, legislation that would simultaneously sanction Russian officials implicated in human rights abuses and normalize U.S. trade relations with Russia. The dual nature of the bill may seem at cross purposes, but this is not the case. Increasing trade with Russia and investment in Russia requires the rule of law.
For the past four years, under U.S. President Barack Obama, the “reset” policy has delinked questions of human rights, democracy and rule of law from all other areas of U.S. policy toward Russia. In doing so, it has sent a message that the U.S. may talk about these issues but it will not do anything to discourage abuses.
The Magnitsky Act is a recognition by Congress that the reset policy was a mistake. In 1975, after the U.S. Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which withheld U.S. trade benefits to certain countries that restricted emigration, the effects were profound. Year after year, the Soviet Union “paid” to obtain U.S. trade benefits by allowing some of its citizens to emigrate. About 1 million Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union, while thousands of other minorities also emigrated. Jackson-Vanik was one of the most successful examples of U.S. human rights legislation. It increased trade and promoted universal human rights.
In August, Russia finally joined the World Trade Organization. According to WTO rules, members may not discriminate against each other, and those members who do are penalized. If the U.S. leaves Jackson-Vanik on the books, Russia can choose to give the U.S. less favorable trade terms with Russia, while U.S. firms that have trade disputes with Russia can be denied access to WTO dispute-resolution mechanisms. That is a situation nobody wants. It’s clear that it is time to repeal Jackson-Vanik and for the U.S. to grant Permanent Normal Trade Relations, or PNTR, to Russia.
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What Obama needs to do about Russia
At least as far as foreign policy went, Russia received an unexpected amount of attention in this year’s U.S. presidential election campaign. Whether it was the Romney team’s dismissing the so-called reset, its claim that Russia is America’s “number one geopolitical foe,” or President Obama’s infamous open mic moment, in which he promised his Russian counterpart “flexibility” on missile defense if reelected, ties with Moscow kept cropping up.
It is, of course, true that the Cold War world no longer exists, and that Russia occupies a far less significant space in American foreign policy. And the U.S.-Russia relationship simply is not as overtly antagonistic as it was in the Soviet era. But it is also clear that Russia continues to pose serious challenges for the United States.
With this in mind, here are some suggestions for President Obama for how he should approach Russia in his second term.
Forget the reset. The election is over. It’s time to face reality. And the reality is that Russia has rapidly regressed from soft authoritarianism into a less qualified dictatorship that shields brutal regimes around the world with ever greater brazenness. What’s more, the Russian leadership has all but acknowledged that the reset is over. And if you don’t trust the Kremlin’s words, then consider its actions. Putin blamed opposition protests on “signals” that Hillary Clinton had supposedly sent to incite revolts against his regime. In September, the Foreign Ministry announced the expulsion of USAID from Russia and rejected the State Department’s request for a six-month extension to wind down grants. And, last month, Moscow decided that it will not negotiate a follow-on Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction pact with the U.S. These are trends that even the reset’s most ardent supporters cannot ignore.
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How Will Russia React to Obama, Round Two?
The question posed by my title doesn’t quite hit the mark. Just as one cannot really speak of a single “America”, there is no one “Russia” anymore but rather several Russias. But while each different Russia has its own interests, attitudes and moods, there is something that unites them all with respect to America: The United States is on all of their radars. All of the various Russias hope to use the United States and its policy to serve their own domestic agendas. (In contrast to this, Russia largely fell off America’s radar after the fall of the Soviet Union.)
How, then, will the various Russia’s react to the renewed Obama presidency? Let’s start with the official Russia—that is, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. Along with David Kramer, I have already discussed what the Russian establishment and Putin’s regime could have expected from either possible election result on November 6. I will only add here a couple of brushstrokes to that landscape now that we know the results of the election. Moscow’s official rhetoric and actions over the past year—that is, after Putin officially returned to the Kremlin—allow us to conclude that the Kremlin’s position on the United States would have been based on the following premises no matter who America hired as boss in the White House:
• America is weak. It is teetering on a “fragile foundation” and will continue to decline. The United States today can no longer continue as a world leader, and its ongoing fall from grace will give Russia more room to maneuver on the global scene.
• America needs Russia more than Russia needs America. The United States needs Russian help on Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Central Asia, nuclear issues and counterbalancing China. All of these issues put the Kremlin in a stronger bargaining position with respect to Washington.
• America’s decline and European stagnation demonstrate that liberal democracy is in crisis. This fact justifies the Kremlin’s decision to return to the idea that Russia represents a “unique civilizational model.”
• America is bogged down by domestic problems. It is turning its focus inward, thus making it less prepared to react to the Kremlin’s turn toward repression. Moscow can dismiss Washington’s criticism; its bark is worse than its bite.
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BERMAN: U.S.-Russia ‘reset’ hasn’t changed stance
You might not be familiar with Sergei Magnitsky, the 37-year-old Russian lawyer who died of medical complications while languishing in a Moscow prison back in 2009. You should be — Magnitsky’s case is worth knowing, both because of what it says about the nature of the Russian state and because it could soon prompt a substantial shake-up in U.S.-Russian relations.
A lawyer for the Moscow-based Hermitage Capital investment fund, Magnitsky ran afoul of Russian authorities when he stumbled across, and dutifully reported, evidence of massive official corruption. For his trouble, he was imprisoned and held without trial for nearly a year in squalid conditions on trumped-up charges of tax evasion and tax fraud. Toward the end of his incarceration, Magnitsky developed gall stones and pancreatitis, but he was denied proper medical attention by prison authorities. He died in November 2009 as a result.
To add insult to injury, Russia’s Interior Ministry has since posthumously moved ahead with prosecuting Magnitsky. Like the rest of the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky’s demise, the current case is fraught with absurdity. Hermitage lawyers believe that documents relating to the affair have been falsified, but so far — in time-honored Soviet tradition — they have been denied permission to see the case file for their client.
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Putin Does His Own ‘Reset’
Democrats and the media who love them have ridiculed Mitt Romney for saying Russia is America’s “number one geopolitical foe,” and Vladimir Putin recently all but endorsed President Obama for re-election. But the Russian President keeps behaving in ways that prove the Republican had a point.
In the latest slap to America, the Kremlin announced this week it is expelling the U.S. Agency for International Development. The aid arm of the State Department has spent almost $3 billion in the last two decades to feed and modernize Russia and, in recent years, promote human rights and free elections. The relatively small $50 million annual program will close October 1. Justifying the move, the Russian foreign ministry on Wednesday accused the U.S. of trying “to influence political processes, including elections of various types.”
Among the groups that get American assistance is Golos, which has exposed the Kremlin’s electoral fraud. Golos and other NGOs will be hard-pressed to find new funding. Russians are reluctant to support democratic groups, lest they end up like oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky in a Siberian prison.
Stunned by large pro-democracy protests in Moscow and other cities last winter and spring, the Kremlin has cracked down. Anyone who takes a penny from an outside source is now branded a “foreign agent.” Penalties for public protests are stiffer. Prosecutors are dredging up criminal cases against activists, and more show trials are coming.
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Clinton Tells Russia That Sanctions Will Soon End
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged Saturday that the United States would soon lift cold-war-era trade sanctions on Russia, but she did not address human rights legislation in Congress that has so far stalled passage, infuriated the Kremlin and become an unexpected issue in the American presidential race.
Attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting here in place of the campaigning President Obama, Mrs. Clinton welcomed Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization last month. And she said that the United States must now normalize trade relations so that American businesses can reap the benefits of Russia’s membership, including lower tariffs for American products.
Although the sanctions included in the 1974 law known as Jackson-Vanik are waived each year and have no practical effect, they violate W.T.O. rules, which could allow Russia to retaliate against American businesses.
The effort to grant Russia normal trade status, however, has become entangled in legislation that would punish Russian officials accused of abusing human rights, denying them visas and freezing their assets. That has raised doubts that any agreement on lifting the Jackson-Vanik provisions can be reached before the November election.
The human rights bill, which has bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after being prosecuted on charges that his supporters argue were manufactured to cover up official corruption.
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential challenger, injected the issue into the campaign last week by issuing a statement saying that, as president, he would normalize trade with Russia only if the Magnitsky bill were enacted. The Obama administration, by contrast, has opposed the bill as too expansive and lobbied against mixing it with the trade issue, while expressing support for addressing rights abuses in Russia in some way.
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