President-elect Barack Obama has so many different and immediate crises on his plate that it's easy to ignore one of the most important foreign policy issues he has to address. It's one that can affect many of the others, including Iran's quest for nuclear weapons: how to deal with Russia.
The fact is that neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration has handled the Russia issue well. Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Study recently wrote a paper that should be required reading for the president-elect and his choice for secretary of state, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
"Where are we now (with Russia)?" asks Mandelbaum. "We are in a bad place. Relations are worse, and more dangerous, than at any time since the beginning of the 1980s. Each side regards the other with suspicion and growing hostility."
While the increasingly brutal and undemocratic government of Vladimir Putin clearly deserves some of the blame, the United States' policy over the past two administrations should take some, too.
The Clinton administration's decision to expand NATO into Eastern Europe and the Bush administration's continuation of that expansion into countries that had been part of the Soviet Union, such as Georgia and Ukraine, were a mistake. So was Bush's abrogation of the ABM Treaty and his plan to put an anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe.
It all had the effect of rubbing Russia's nose in its defeat in the Cold War. That might have been justifiable if these moves enhanced U.S. security interests, but it's extremely hard to make that argument. Mandelbaum, to his credit, has been a harsh critic of NATO expansion since its inception during the 1996 presidential campaign.
What's concerning is that Obama endorsed all these moves during the campaign, and Sen. Clinton has reflected her husband's support of them. In addition, the foreign policy team that Obama and now Clinton are putting together includes many of the people who supported NATO expansion in the first place. That includes Vice President-elect Joe Biden. This is not encouraging.
Certainly, Russia has no security interest in Iran's becoming a nuclear power. And a united and genuine U.S.-Russian policy against the Iranian nuclear program would add significant leverage to the effort to stop it.
"The Russian reluctance is to be understood, I believe, at least in part as the result of reflexive opposition to any initiative sponsored by the United States, and of a general policy of trying to weaken the American position in the world however and whenever possible," said Mandelbaum.
This is a long way from the extraordinary cooperation between Moscow and Washington when Boris Yeltsin was head of Russia and George H.W. Bush was president. It helped make the 1991 Gulf War a truly cooperative effort. Even if that was a unique moment, relations with Russia could be more cooperative. The point now is to find areas of common security interest and try to work together on them. At the least, Washington should stop making the situation worse.
Beyond Iran, there are significant areas in which U.S. and Russia have common interests, including stopping the spread of nuclear materials and weapons to terrorists and developing a security regime that includes Europe and Russia. In fact, the problem that NATO expansion has created - once you start expansion, where do you stop? - might well lead to the eventual expansion to include Russia. Given the current tensions, that seems a long way off. But it's the correct goal for U.S. policy.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both pragmatists, not ideologues. It's always easier to take a hard line against Russia when the bear is behaving poorly - especially during a political campaign. But the campaign is over. Both should demand a review of policy toward Russia and develop a more sophisticated and nuanced policy that reflects U.S. national security interests, not partisan politics.
