Bush is no lame duck for Moscow
By M K Bhadrakumar
The recent US congressional mid-term elections ended up only adding to the violently ambivalent Russian-US relationship. While for the rest of the world the elections demystified the pipe dream of neo-conservatism and its limited number of permutations - such as the Iraq war and the democratization of the Middle East - the mood in Moscow was of a dark realism over clean slates and new leases that might never arrive.
The mainstream opinion of Russian analysts, experts and influential public personalities is that downstream of the
victory of the Democrats, negative consequences are in store for Russian-US relations. What dramatizes the drift of thoughts is that a triple entendre is in play.
From Moscow's point of view, the nomination of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief Robert Gates as the new defense secretary and the specter of Tom Lantos, a Democratic congressman from California, heading the Committee on International Relations of the House of Representatives (for up to six-years) are no less worrisome than a Democrat-dominated US Congress.
Quite understandably, the dark side of Gates must perturb Moscow. Gates was a Cold Warrior who insisted that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was a fake. It seems Gorbachev remarked when they first met in May 1989, "I understand the White House has a special cell assigned to the task of discrediting Gorbachev. And I've heard you are in charge, Mr Gates."
Gates' thesis was that glasnost and perestroika were a pernicious ploy aimed at making the Soviet Union a leaner, more efficient, virile and meaner enemy, and that the hidden agenda of Gorbachev was to ensnare and divide the West. Gates argued, therefore, that the West was naive to believe it could "do business" (to use British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's famous words) with Gorbachev.
Indeed, Gates was not alone in having such profound difficulty in understanding Gorbachev. Recently declassified US and Russian archival material relating to the famous Ronald Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik 20 years ago in October 1986 have revealed how some spooks never get things straight.
The Soviet documents show on the one hand how at a politburo meeting in Moscow on October 4, 1986, Gorbachev was insisting that his negotiating brief for Reykjavik ought to be imbued with a "breakthrough potential" leading to a total liquidation of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. But the US documents tell an altogether different story of Soviet intentions.
Curiously, on the same day 20 years ago, a briefing memo for the benefit of Reagan titled "Gorbachev's Goals and Tactics at Reykjavik" was drafted by the National Security Council in Washington, which not only completely mis-predicted Gorbachev's conduct at the forthcoming summit but cautioned Reagan that Gorbachev would be "coy" and "undecided", and that the Californian with his wily charm might have to "smoke" Gorbachev out at the talks.
In the event, Gorbachev bombarded Reagan with an extraordinarily ambitious set of proposals concerning nuclear disarmament, holding out for a fleeting moment the mind-boggling prospect of a world without nuclear weapons.
Moscow today would have good enough reason to worry whether Gates still holds his past expertise in Kremlinology and Russian-US relations.
At any rate, as Ira Straus, the US coordinator of the Washington-based non-governmental Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), recently wrote in the Moscow Times, the Russian-US relationship is still "fragile enough that it could be destroyed quickly if the United States were to abandon caution for full-scale Russia-bashing ... the relationship with Russia is unconsolidated and troubled ... this will be all too easy for Gates, as secretary of defense, to undermine ... Today he would meet little opposition in bashing Russia - a pastime that has once again become popular."
As a CIA wunderkind, Gates inflated the Soviet threat and the "Evil Empire's" propensity to be hideous - even on the eve of the USSR's comprehensive, unconditional collapse in 1991. The point is whether he today retains his old prejudices or whether, given his reputation for political opportunity, he will go by what the Chinese call the "wind factor".
Lawrence Walsh, the US special prosecutor who investigated the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote in his memoir Firewall that he plainly disbelieved Gates' testimony to the effect that despite being William Casey's deputy at the CIA at that time, he wasn't in the loop on the conspiracy.
Lantos' is a more straightforward story. Moscow knows precisely where he stands on Russian-US relations. There is no ambiguity here. If his background as a Hungarian-born politician, his connections and his record are anything to go by, in his capacity as chairman of the Committee on International Relations, Lantos will take a hostile stance against Russia.
The Kremlin knows Lantos as one of the harshest and most intractable critics of Russia on Capitol Hill. He perpetually (and very noisily) worries about the human-rights situation inside Russia; he regards Mikhail Khodorkovsky (incarcerated in remote Siberia) as a "political prisoner" rather than atoning for oil company Yukos' alleged acts of irregularity; he thinks Russia (despite its surging economy) must be expelled from the Group of Eight industrialized nations for its democracy deficit.
According to Robert VerBruggen of the US journal National Interest, Lantos has possibly been a political ally of controversial Russian oligarchs such as media baron Vladimir Gusinsky in the latter's public relations campaigns in the US against the Kremlin. "The financial links between Gusinsky, Lantos and the [public relations] firms [hired by Gusinsky in the US] are clear ... An institution linked to one firm has paid for more than US$46,000 worth of Lantos' travel since 2000," VerBruggen wrote last week.
The issue is not whether Lantos' criticisms of Russia are unwarranted, but whether they will remain his Russia priorities in his elevated standing in the US Congress, which confers on him the influence to set the agenda of US foreign policy. Hardly five months ago, he joined hands with Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman in co-authoring a letter to President George W Bush accusing President Vladimir Putin of authoritarian tendencies.
Gates and Lantos aside, the most positive spin that has been given by Russian experts to the US congressional elections is their philosophical stance that no new element is entering the Russian-US equation, despite the Democrats' well-known penchant for harping on human-rights issues.
To quote Sergei Rogov, director of the USA and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, "Both of them [Democrats and Republicans] alike evaluate extremely negatively Russia's domestic and foreign policies." At any rate, Rogov added, the Russian-US partnership has been only "declarative", whereas in actuality, "this partnership has no content today, and mutual claims against one another keep growing".
There is some merit in the argument. For instance, neither of the two highly contentious issues in Russian-US relations currently - NATO enlargement or the "color" revolutions in the former Soviet republics - can be quite regarded as the legacy of the Bush administration.
In fact, the germane seeds of both - jettisoning of the US commitment not to expand NATO in the post-Cold War era or the studied cultivation of "civil society" groups on the political soil of the post-Soviet space as a way of bringing about "regime change" - were sown by Bill Clinton's administration. Similarly, the concept of "selective cooperation" with Moscow (as compared with full partnership) is a bipartisan one, too, that harks back to the Clinton White House.
But the fact remains that the Democrats' relatively more robust emphasis on human rights and democratic institutions in Russia will pose problems for Moscow. A touchstone will be the readiness of the incoming US Congress to concur with Russia's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession.
Russian Economics Minister German Gref said in Moscow this week that a bilateral agreement with the US could be signed on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Hanoi on Saturday. Negotiations with the US were hitherto taking a tortuous course due to what Washington cited as differences over the issue of agriculture, access of US companies to the Russian financial-services market, and the absence of adequate protection for intellectual-property rights in Russia.
Russian spokesmen often enough hinted that Washington was deliberately stalling the negotiations and that there could be unspoken linkages to Moscow's energy policy. To be sure, Moscow repeatedly deferred a decision on awarding the contract for the massive Shtokman gas fields, pending the outcome of the WTO negotiations with Washington. (A Shtokman deal is still within the realms of possibility.)
If so, it is curious that the Bush administration has pressed ahead at this late hour, when it is supposedly a lame duck already, to strike a deal with Moscow on WTO accession. For, unlike the Bush administration, Democrats do not have any close links with the US energy industry.
From this point onward, the subject narrows down to the Democrat-dominated Congress' willingness to lift the 1974 Jackson-Vanick trade law that barred the Soviet Union from achieving most-favored-nation status with the US - which it should do if Russia joins the WTO, as otherwise Washington would be in violation of WTO rules.
Since 1991, Washington has been granting Russia and the former Soviet republics yearly waivers from Jackson-Vanick, but a new threshold will be reached this weekend. Once the agreement regarding Russia's WTO accession is signed, Bush is expected to make a formal request to Congress to grant Russia normal trade relations. When that happens, will the Democrats put on the brakes? On the other hand, does the US administration intend to press ahead on the Hill before a Democrat-dominated Congress becomes a full-fledged protagonist in the Bush-Putin WTO deal?
Clearly, interesting possibilities now open up in Russia's energy cooperation with the US. Moscow is no doubt aware that the traditional conservative wing of the Republican Party that has lately gained ascendancy within the Bush administration on the debris of neo-conservatism includes "realists" such as James Baker, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. Indeed, the Kremlin's ace spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has been cautiously optimistic. He said Russia respected the choice of the US electorate and would be "open for dialogue" with the new leadership in Congress, but "we are not speculating on the WTO until the negotiations are over. They are developing quite positively."
But Moscow would see advantages in areas other than beyond WTO and energy. Russian experts have almost uniformly singled out the Iraq war as the Bush administration's albatross in domestic politics. And most experts are of the view that it is a matter of time before a pullout of US troops from Iraq commences.
The influential head of the Politika Foundation, Vyacheslav Nikonov, was voicing a common opinion in Moscow when he said, "The US failure in Iraq is just as painful as the one the US suffered in Vietnam - if not more serious." The corollary of such a thought is of course that the US dogma of a "unipolar" world has become simply not sustainable any longer.
Russia sees advantages here - having consciously decided to step out of the Western orbit as a matter of destiny, and even to aspire to create a Moscow-centered system. Nikonov explained that in the "multipolar" world order that is shaping up, which may involve 10-15 power centers, given the absence of a "system of collective security with the participation of the US but also China, Russia, Europe, Japan, India and other leading players", what may ensue in the coming period is a "game without rules" that could well deteriorate into a "multipolar chaos".
In such a scenario, US policy toward Russia has to become simply more responsible, no matter the domestic party politics in the United States. The Kremlin would therefore estimate that for the next two years at least, the traditional conservative Republicans who have emerged in the corridors of power in the White House in the recent past are of far greater consequence than the new crop of Democrats grandstanding on the Hill during a presidential election year.
For it was they who were usually responsive to the compulsions of ensuring strategic stability with Moscow on a mutual basis, and ensuring that relations with Russia should be based on cooperation rather than crisis.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
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