It was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who observed that relations between two actors really involve six "persons": each actor's self-image, each actor's image of the other and, finally, what each actor actually is. Under this rubric, the success of President Obama's "reset" policy with Russia will depend not only on getting U.S. actions toward Moscow right but also on getting insight into the way the Kremlin views the United States and its new president.
Unlike many of its critics, the new Obama administration is not inclined to view Vladimir Putin's Russia as a paperback edition of the Soviet Union. Russia today is not a democratic state, but it is not an ideology-driven tyranny, either. Russians are wealthier and enjoy more freedoms than they have at any other period in their history. Russian elites are no longer in the business of destroying capitalism -- they are in the business of enjoying it. The majority of Russians favor democracy, but most are also deeply suspicious of America's desire to bring democracy to their country. So any hopes that American pressure can bring democratic change in Russia are illusory.
Obama is also right to believe that Russia is more of a declining power than an insurgent power and that its recent revisionism -- manifested last August during its war with Georgia -- is better understood as evidence of the Kremlin's insecurity rather than its imperial designs. In the aftermath of the global economic crisis, the Kremlin is terrified by Russia's weakness and its irrelevance in the post-Cold War era. Russian officials are desperate to preserve the country's "great power" status at a time of major geopolitical shifts. As Putin said in 2008, "Russia will either be a great power, or it will not be at all."
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