From: "James Schumaker" <shoeone@comcast.net>
Subject: Realism, Not Bluster (Comment on Washington Post Editorial "Mr. Putin's Bluff")
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 09:11:47 -0800
The Washington Post editorial makes a good point, but tells only one side of the story. It is true that Putin and Medvedev could misinterpret as a sign of weakness any change in the U.S. position on NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, or the deployment of missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. That is clearly a risk, given the toxic relationship we currently “enjoy” with the Russians.
The problem is that what may look like concessions to the Russians may simply reflect a more realistic view of the world by the incoming Administration, a fact implicitly acknowledged by the Post towards the end of its editorial when it notes that there are “legitimate questions about … the missile system and about the reliability of the current governments of Georgia and Ukraine.” I would describe these “legitimate questions” in much stronger terms. For example, the objective fact is that the majority of Ukrainians strongly oppose NATO membership, and a rush to NATO for that country is clearly not in the cards. While there is more enthusiasm for NATO in Georgia, recent ill-advised and irresponsible Georgian adventures in South Ossetia have demonstrated that that country has a long way to go before it can be considered a reliable military ally. With regard to missile defense, deployment of such systems to Poland and the Czech Republic is more a political statement and a red flag to Russia than a practical step aimed at defending Europe from Iranian missiles. There is no system currently in existence that could reliably perform such a function. President-Elect Obama has stated that he would want to make sure that any missile defense system actually worked before it was deployed. That seems sensible to me.
The fact is that while the incoming Obama Administration is going to hit the ground running, it is not going to run aimlessly in the same direction taken by the outgoing Bush Administration, particularly when to do so would be sending the wrong political signals to the rest of the world. I agree with the Washington Post editorial that we must not allow the Russian leadership to misinterpret changes in U.S. policies as weakness, and that our message to the Russians must be firm when defending the independence of Russia’s democratic neighbors. But that does not mean that when the Russians bluster, we need to bluster back, or that we should cling to policies of the previous Administration that have clearly failed. Instead, the Obama Administration should inject a new note of realism into the relationship. As a first step, we should accord a much higher priority to U.S.-Russian relations than has existed in the recent past, and set up early meetings with Putin and Medvedev to clear the air.