U.S to Face Choice: Partnership or Confrontation
The U.S.-Russia relations have reached a turning point. The eight-year-long period (started in 2001) is coming to its end, while presidents Bush and Putin proclaimed strategic partnership. Despite good personal relations between the two leaders, the partnership fell through. Partnership requires permanent cooperation mechanisms, international law and economic basis. All that is nowadays absent from the U.S.-Russia relations.
At the same time, there appeared a wide range of disagreements on the international security’s key issues. Among them are NATO’s expansion, the CFE treaty, the missile defense system, and Kosovo. The control over armaments is at the brink of complete collapse. Propagandistic rhetorics reminds Cold War times.
There is now the re-birth of the platform for “restricting the authoritarian neo-imperialist Russia”. This approach is strongly lobbied by influential circles, including Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is not unanimous on that issue. On the one hand, George Bush wants to end his rule by turning NATO into a dominating military-political force in Europe, while NATO’s expansion to the post-Soviet territory will become its symbol. On the other hand, the current U.S. administration would like to avoid a breach with Russia and a new cold war.
Only a large-scale breakthrough, a strategic compromise can prevent the backwash to confrontation. Apparently, the U.S. has started realizing it. Two+two talks in Moscow gave grounds for careful optimism. The Bush administration suggested signing a document on the two countries’ relations’ strategic framework. It also expressed readiness to partially limit the missile defense system’s capabilities in Eastern Europe. At last, it agreed to legally fixate the prolongation of the SNF-1 Treaty, which expires in 2009.
Yet, the devil is in the details, which are to be coordinated yet, while the time is running out. Next week is the summit in Bucharest, and then Putin-Bush meeting in Sochi. Apparently, Medvedev will take part in it as well.
The ‘moment of truth’ is coming. Meeting in Sochi might either lead to a new long-term confrontation, or open the way to forming new partnership relations. If the U.S. achieves the decision to begin talks on Ukraine’s and Georgia’s accession to NATO, the hopes for compromise will be dispelled. Moscow believes that its neighboring states’ accession to NATO will negatively affect Russia’s geopolitical situation and national security. However, if instead of it the Russia-NATO Council manages to agree on expanding the cooperation, including that in issues like Afghanistan, and in creating the regional missile defense system for protecting Europe from medium-range missiles, there will be much more grounds for optimism.
Bucharest and Sochi make the U.S. and the West at large face the choice: either to agree to qualitatively new relations with Russia, or to take responsibility for confrontation.
Sergei Rogov, Director, Institute of the USA and Canada, Russian Academy of Sciences
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 28, 2008
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