U.S., Russia: Mother of All Deals?

I arrived in Moscow from Washington highly optimistic, a day after the vigorous, historic handshake between Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in London on April 1. I left -- after visits with officials and colleagues -- more than a bit concerned. My optimism was not based on cheerful gestures such as pushing reset buttons, although such tone-setting steps have their place. I believed that a major deal between the two countries could be made, based not on identical or even complementary interests of Russia and the United States, but on profound differences in saliency.

Allow me to explain. When Party A has some things that Party B deeply desires but Party A does not care much about, and Party B has some things Party A keenly wants but Party B is not much invested in, a mother of all deals is plausible. The fact that this notion has some legs became clear when the Obama administration, which is far from invested in building a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic while Russia is rather troubled by it, offered, in effect, to trade it in. That is, to exchange it for Russia's help in encouraging Iran to give up on its nuclear arms program. As the United States sees it, an Iran with nuclear bombs would gravely endanger the United States and U.S. allies -- not just Israel, but also Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Iran's nuclear program is highly important for the United States, but at the same time Russia also is not interested in having a nuclear-armed Iran on its southern border, to put it mildly.