Mark Adomanis
Contributor, "Forbes"
Some people, including a number of friends whose views I greatly respect, dislike the reset because they think that it has been too accommodating towards the Russian regime. These people tend to view Russia as dangerous, aggressive, and revanchist, and they think it was a mistake to take a "softer” line towards Moscow. But while I know many people who dislike the reset, they’re usually pretty understated about their opposition because they can see that, in the grand scheme of things, the reset is actually a pretty modest departure from previous US policies in the region and that America remains very firmly engaged with new NATO allies like Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. So although I still personally think that the reset was a good idea, I recognize that there are reasonable counterarguments to it.
Ariel Cohen, though, apparently thinks that the reset is a policy disaster comparable to both the Cuban missile crisis and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. Writing in The National Interest, here’s what he had to say (emphasis added):
Yet, many times, and in different quarters in Moscow, Russians characterized the current U.S. president as a well-meaning leader who is somewhat weak and naive. While Russians view past Republican presidents as hard-nosed realists, they had their share of troubles with well-meaning Democrats. Kennedy had his Cuban missile crisis; Carter, his Afghanistan invasion; and Obama, his "reset” policy. Every time the Russians perceived a weakness in a Democrat president, they made a move—even though later they may have come to regret it.
One of these things is not like the others. The Cuban missile crisis was one of the most serious security crises of the past century, a situation that, if handled poorly, really could have led to nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union and the end of human civilization. The Cuban missile crisis isstill the crisis against which all others are measured and, thankfully, there haven’t been many repetitions over the pat half century. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, while not quite as serious as the Cuban missile crisis, was nonetheless an incredibly aggressive and destabilizing step that set off a major war that has killed millions of people and that, in a different guise, continues today.
The "reset” meanwhile is neither a potentially civilization ending nuclear confrontation not a wide-ranging guerrilla war that stabilized a large part of Central Asia, but a modest policy that has modestly reduced tensions between the United States and Russia. I suppose it’s possible to argue that American national interests were not served by the reset, but it is very obviously not in the same league as the other crises to which Cohen compares it (no one got killed or was threatened with nuclear annihilation). Cohen also makes the truly bizarre error of presenting the "reset: as a Russian move. The reset might not be advisable but it is pretty clearly a creation of the Obama White House and not the Kremlin. I would also note that the most serious Russian "move” of the past decade was the decision to go to war against Georgia in August 0f 2008. That was an awfully long time ago, and I can’t seem to remember who was president back then, but it certainly wasn’t Barack Obama.
Cohen then continues:
The rub is in Russia’s view of its own national interest and assessment of a U.S. president’s weakness, real or imagined. Under Obama’s "reset” policy, Russia got what it wanted: a START ballistic missile reduction agreement that benefited Moscow; U.S. prolonged involvement in Afghanistan, where Americans are killing those who may threaten Russia’s allies and its own soft underbelly; the de-facto recognition of Russia’s "sphere of exclusive interests” in the former Soviet Union, and a much-coveted membership in the World Trade Organization.
The idea that the START treaty was a craven, one-sided sell out to the Russians is probably never going to go away, but it is, of course, entirely inaccurate. START isn’t the be-all end-all of arms control agreements and it’s hardly earth shattering in its implications. Nonetheless it modestly serves the interests of both parties and is greatly preferable to having no mechanism for supervision and verification. And it’s worth remembering that that was the alternative to the treaty we got: nothing. "A treaty which the Russians hate but the Americans love” was never an option, because the Russians aren’t idiots. The choice that the Obama administration faced was between START or nothing and it’s hardly a radical notion to suggest that START, while imperfect, was the better choice.*
And I’ve tread over a lot of this ground before, but it’s very strange to view Barack Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan as a favor to the Russians or as somehow related to the reset. Virtually the entire US political leadership was united behind the idea of trying to "win” the war there, and Obama has faced almost no meaningful political opposition to his decision to escalate. During the election campaign Obama has come under fire not for being too aggressive in Afghanistan but for not being aggressive enough: many Republicans loudly argue that we should have an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan and that Barack Obama’s 2014 deadline is disastrous and cowardly. According to Cohen’s logic, then, hawkish Republicans like John McCain are actually extremely pro-Russian in their policy prescriptions. I’m not sure how we got to the point where this needs to be repeated, but in American debates about Afghanistan "how the war will impact Russia” is so tangential a consideration that it’s hardly worth mentioning.
On a deeper level, Cohen’s editorial is a failure because even through its narrowly partisan lens it doesn’t deal with the pretty glaring and obvious fact that Putin took all of the actions which strengthened, deepened, and institutionalized his rule during a time when a conservative Republican, George W. Bush, was president. The dismemberment of Yukos, the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky, the crackdown on the press, the cancellation of gubernatorial elections, the castration of the Duma, the creation of United Russia: all of those things happened with a Republican very firmly in control of the White House**. It’s honestly a mystery to me how, in 2012, anyone could write a simplistic ”strong and decisive Republicans versus weak and accommodating Democrats” editorial without breaking into laughter. Reality is just a lot more complicated than that, and if a Republican presidency actually made the Russians behave we should have seem some sort of evidence of that during George W. Bush’s eight years in office. Instead, as will always happen, internal Russian political dynamics far outweighed any influence emanating from Washington DC.
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