Russia

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Moscow earlier this week, seeking Russian support for tighter sanctions on Iran. And what did she get for his efforts? A few nice photo ops, plus an unambiguous "nyet" from Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov.

I have a couple of questions.

Did she go there believing that she really would get a meaningful commitment for tighter sanctions from the Russians? Or did she know beforehand that she wasn't going to get anywhere, but felt she had to go through the motions anyway?

Frankly, I don't know which answer would worry me more. If it's the former, she's getting very bad advice from her Russia experts, who clearly have no idea how Russia's leaders perceive their own interests. If the latter, she has no business wasting time and effort on a lost cause and giving Lavrov the opportunity to score points by stiffing her in public. The Secretary of State of a great power shouldn't be flying off to foreign capitals with the diplomatic equivalent of a tin cup, pleading with them to comply with our wishes. You're supposed to wait until your assistants have got the deal more-or-less in place, and then you show up to make the final push and iron out the last sticky details. Either way, this just wasn't very smart diplomacy.

And let's not overlook the obvious possibility that Lavrov was right: right now isn't an opportune time to threaten Iran with more sanctions. The initial round of talks were encouraging (though there's still a long way to go), and brandishing threats is probably the best way to derail them before any additional progress is made. There are undoubtedly people in the United States (and Iran) who would like to see that happen, but I didn't think Hillary was one of them.

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Some mildly good news: in a partially smart diplomatic move, the Obama administration has reportedly offered to trade the deployment of missile defenses in eastern Europe for active Russian support to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program. According to the NY Times story, the deal requires not just Russian support (presumably for more extensive economic sanctions), but rather depends on Iran "halting any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles."

This is a clever offer at first glance, because it gives up an expensive program that we don't need (missile defenses) in an attempt to get something we do want (better relations with Russia, and a deal with Iran on its nuclear program). Missile defense has been a costly chimera for decades, for two main reasons. First, any country sophisticated enough to put a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile could probably develop low-cost countermeasures that would thwart our defenses. Second, any country that could develop missiles and a bomb small enough to mount on one wouldn't have much trouble smuggling a few weapons into Europe or the United States. This situation would actually be worse than a missile attack, because we might not even know where the attack had come from and thus would not be able to deter it by threatening retaliation. Spending billions on missile defenses is like locking the front door and leaving the back door wide open, with a sign inviting the burglars to come on in.

But the offer to Moscow has a down-side: it means that the fate of the missile defense program is actually in Iran's hands, not Moscow's, and the precise terms of the deal remain unclear. There's still no evidence that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program (though obvious reasons to be suspicious) and little evidence that it will give up control of the full nuclear fuel cycle simply because the United States ramps up the diplomatic pressure or gets Russia and China to agree to stiffer sanctions. It's even less likely that Iran would give up its ballistic missile program. It might be possible to get a deal that addressed Iran’s regional security concerns (including our various efforts to foment regime change there) in exchange for tighter guarantees against their pursuit of an actual weapons capability, but that requires us to go in without big preconditions and without a lot of harsh rhetoric. Merely tightening the screws on Tehran hasn't worked in the past and is unlikely to work in the future. And if Russia does agree to help us, Iran still balks, and we go ahead and deploy the missile defenses in Eastern Europe anyway, Moscow is bound to feel betrayed.

Now for the bad news: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently thinks diplomacy with Iran isn't going to work anyway. Perhaps she just misspoke (itself not a good sign), or perhaps this illustrates a point I've mentioned before: effective diplomacy requires lots of coordination, so that an initiative in one area isn't undermined by something you do or say somewhere else. Or maybe this incident suggests that the whole idea of talking to Iran is simply laying the diplomatic groundwork for a more direct military campaign later on. Thus far, the Obama administration hasn't strayed very far from the Bush administration's failed approach, which was in essence to tell Tehran "first, you do what we want, and then we'll talk to you about the things you care about." Obama does say we're willing to talk, but there's no sign that we are planning to make them a "yes-able" offer and his secretary of state apparently thinks direct diplomacy isn’t going to work.

This behavior is deeply puzzling, because a military strike on Iran is an unattractive option and we ought to be energetically looking for a diplomatic alternative. Beginning that process with a lot of tough talk and saying that we aren't expecting success doesn't strike me as a very promising way to start the process. Maybe it's just a coincidence that this sounds like the strategy new Iran point man Dennis Ross endorsed last summer, and not that different from the approach that the Israeli government is reportedly urging on Secretary Clinton during her visit to Jerusalem. As I've said before, if you think the debate on a military strike on Iran ended when Bush left office, think again.  

And while we're on the subject of Iran, here's a thoughtful column by Roger Cohen, warning against the simplistic stereotyping that has come to dominate most American discourse about the Islamic Republic. Cohen is neither naïve about Iran nor an advocate of appeasing the likes of Ahmadinejad, yet his nuanced discussion immediately drew the usual hail of criticism from neoconservative pundits, with one of them suggesting that he be fired.

I have a different question: why are Cohen's commentaries confined to the Herald Tribune and the Times blog? Why doesn't Cohen have a regular column on the Times op-ed page, especially now that William Kristol is gone? Cohen's views are balanced, he writes well, and he is often willing to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, which is what a good columnist should do.  If op-ed page editor Andrew Rosenthal wants to raise the level of discourse on his page he’d offer the guy a regular spot.

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Events elsewhere have kept me from paying much attention to the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute, but the realist in me has a couple of thoughts. It's obvious that Moscow is using Ukraine's dependence on Russian natural gas as a diplomatic weapon -- no surprise there -- but it's equally clear that Moscow's leverage is reduced by the EU's reliance on gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines. Whenever Moscow tries to squeeze Kiev, Europe hollers and jumps in, and then the Russians have to lighten up in order to avoid a major fight with the Europeans (an important trading partner). But this problem will ease as soon as EU-Russian pipelines bypassing Ukraine are completed and Russia's ability to pressure Ukraine will perforce increase. As long as the rest of the EU is toasty warm in winter, they aren't going to care much about conditions in Kiev. So if I were Ukrainian, I'd think long and hard about where this one was headed.

Several readers have asked me what I think of Peter Feaver's "realist" defense of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Feaver's logic is admirably straightforward: 1) realism emphasizes evaluating great powers by how they manage relations with other great powers, 2) Bush did relatively well on that front, therefore: 3) Bush had a good foreign policy by "realist" standards. QED.

Not so fast.

First of all, relations with the other great powers weren't a top priority for Bush and his team, especially after 9/11. So even if one accepts Feaver's argument, it amounts to saying that Bush and Co. did better on issues they paid less attention to, while screwing up royally in the areas that they focused on most. I'd agree, but it's not exactly a ringing defense.   

Second, as Feaver admits, relations with Russia got worse throughout Bush's two terms, culminating in that nasty little war in Georgia last summer. Part of the problem may have been Bush's decidedly non-realist method of gauging Russian intentions (i.e., looking into Vladimir Putin's soul), but the larger problem was that the administration kept assuming it could trample all over Russian interests and ignore various Russian "red lines" and not pay any diplomatic price for it. (To be fair, this was merely the continuation of the Clinton administration's own approach, but Bush failed to realize that Russia was no longer as hapless as it had been in the Yeltsin era). So they continued to expand NATO (including open support for Ukrainian and Georgian membership), insisted on independence for Kosovo, and started deploying missile defenses in Eastern Europe, a step which Moscow could only see as an attempt to gain some sort of first-strike advantage.  Whatever the merits of these various initiatives, it was entirely predictable that Russia would be very, very, annoyed by them and that it would be eager for payback.

Even if Bush did manage to avoid a violent blow-up with Moscow, his approach made it impossible to get Russia's cooperation on several issues that did matter a lot to Washington. Russia didn't support the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003, and along with France and Germany, this opposition made it impossible to get a second U.N. Security Council supporting military action. Russia also repeatedly balked on tougher sanctions toward Iran, which made it harder to deal effectively with Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Nor does Bush deserve an "A grade" on relations with India. The new security partnership with India is a positive step that can certainly be justified on realist grounds, but the price Bush paid -- in effect turning a blind eye toward India's nuclear programs and thereby sending a torpedo into the existing non-proliferation regime -- was too high, especially in an era when we were rightly worried about discouraging the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states or terrorists. But at least he got a lot of help from India in Iraq, and strong backing from New Delhi on Iran? Oops, my mistake: they stiffed us on Iraq and provided only mild diplomatic support on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. Seems that new strategic partnership still has some growing to do. As for China, it has taken advantage of our confrontation with Tehran to quietly enhance its own position in this vital strategic area, and forged a series of new connections in Asia while our attention was focused elsewhere.

Finally, realists would judge a great power's foreign policy not just on how one manages bilateral relations with other great powers, but on whether one’s overall foreign policy has left it in a better position vis-à-vis the other major states, and especially those that might become serious competitors.  Here the record is much more worrisome: by mismanaging relations in other places -- most notably the Middle East -- Bush weakened U.S. material power and brought America's global image to new lows. One suspects that Chinese foreign policy elites have found it difficult to contain their glee; their influence has risen not so much because they have played their hand skillfully, but because we've been shooting ourselves in the foot.

Bottom line: even on this narrow "realist" criteria, it's hard to give Bush high marks.

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