Barack Obama has an opportunity to establish a new relationship with Russia that will make the world a safer place. With ties between the two countries being the most strained they've been in decades, the U.S. president seems to recognize there must be changes in his country's approach to Russia.
The Russians themselves seem uncertain about the direction of U.S. policy. Since Obama was elected, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev vowed to place missiles on the border of the European Union in response to any United States missile defense radar in Poland and Czechoslovakia, then decided to pull them back. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has blamed the United States for the global financial crisis and also expressed optimism about the new U.S. president. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov welcomed a conciliatory foreign policy speech from Vice President Joe Biden at the same time that his country, by pressuring Kyrgyzstan to kick out a U.S. military base, made it clear that Moscow wants to be included in any dialogue about Central Asia.
The current tension between the United States and Russia is not necessary, nor was it inevitable. As a former senator, and as someone who has invested a lot of time and hope in the opportunities opened up by the fall of the Berlin Wall, I regret that the last 16 years have produced a series of strategic blunders leading to a gigantic missed opportunity. The truth is that we have badly mismanaged our relations with Russia since 1992, and our actions may have created a self-fulfilling prophecy of a more contentious relationship between our two countries.
That would be a terrible outcome. We need Russia to work with us to reduce each of our stockpiles of nuclear weapons, to control nuclear proliferation, to safeguard nuclear materials, to fight the war against Islamic terrorism, and to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Instead, U.S. policies toward Russia under the last two presidential administrations have ignored Russia's stated national interests even as they have aggravated age-old ethnic hatreds and continued to promote Cold War-era military projects.
The roots of today's heightened tensions started in the Clinton administration with its failure to properly assist a fallen communist state in moving to democratic capitalism or to seek a genuinely strategic partnership with our former Cold War adversary. Instead of doing those two things -- difficult as they may have been to accomplish -- we did the wrong thing: expand NATO eastward ever closer toward Russia.
In the 1990s, most policymakers in Washington either basked in what they called the Cold War victory over Russia or became preoccupied with remaking that nation in the image of a narrow brand of American capitalism. The Washington consensus was that with its military hollowed out and its economy no bigger than Denmark's, Russia's influence in a world of market states had disappeared. This attitude was captured in Strobe Talbott's memoir in which he quoted then President Bill Clinton, who was preparing for a meeting with his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin, saying to his chief Russian advisor, "We keep telling Ol' Boris, ‘Now here's what you gotta do next -- here's some more shit for your face.'"
Politics 101 says that when somebody with whom you've had extensive dealings goes bankrupt you call them up on the phone and say, "You know, it's been tough. But you're going to be back. I'm with you. And, here's a little help if you want it." That's what you do if you're a good politician because if the bankrupt individual does "get back," you want him to remember your help and your caring. But when Russia was bankrupt in the 1990s, we were neither understanding nor effective in the kind of help we gave.
During the Cold War the U.S. government appealed to the Russian people with a vision of a better way. But when the Soviet Union came to an abrupt end in 1991 we seemed to have forgotten the compassionate lesson of Lend-Lease during World War II -- that it is possible to give tangible help to the Russian people and gain their appreciation for the assistance.
We increasingly filtered the American vision through one man: Boris Yeltsin. The Russian people assumed that since we were backing Yeltsin 100 percent, whatever he did, we were for it. When economic reform created 1,500 percent inflation, we failed to tell the Russian people that we understood how destructive an impact it had on their lives, with, among other things, their pensions and life savings being destroyed overnight. During this time, the U.S. government did very little of significance to help Russians directly or even symbolically.
Consider this comparison: at Clinton and Yeltsin's first meeting in 1993 in Vancouver, Clinton offered $1.6 billion to help a Russia whose territory extends through 11 time zones. Compare that to the proposed $1 billion we're offering tiny Georgia today. Clinton's offer fell tragically short of the mark.
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