Presidential Candidates on Russia

With Iraq sucking much of the air out of the room, the former Soviet Union and Russia in particular have gotten little attention from the U.S. presidential candidates. The notable exception has been GOP nominee John McCain, who threatened with Bush-like chest-thumping to expel Russia from the G-8, and sophomorically described Vladimir Putin's eyes as containing a "K a G and a B."

Matt Siegel at The Moscow Times weighs in today with a piece in which he interviews McCain's Russia expert, Stephen Biegun, a vice president at Ford Motor and a veteran of the current President Bush's foreign policy team; and Michael McFaul, who is Barack Obama's Russia specialist and acting director of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. It's worth reading, in addition to this discussion by a panel of specialists gathered together by Johnson's List a couple of weeks ago.

Both of the Democratic candidates make the point that it's unnecessary to rile Russia at the moment by insisting on a missile-defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, when there is no evidence that the technology works. McCain supports installation of the shield regardless.

Much also is made of Putin's crackdown on rival voices.

None of the candidates has said a word as far as I can tell about a serious, omnibus approach to Eurasian energy security stretching from Central Asia into western Europe. As readers of this blog know, Putin -- and by extension Dmitri Medvedev -- have treated this as a paramount issue, while Washington has been looking the other way to Iraq.

One amusing aspect of the foreign policy debate that has taken place is hoopla among some in the expert community over Obama's reliance on Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter-era national security adviser, as a chief foreign policy expert. These experts see Brzezinski as a relic of the Cold War. Perhaps such younger specialists see themselves as more authoritative. But a reading of his writing over the last decade and a half shows Brzezinski proving himself again and again as one of the most realistic and wise hands on the former Soviet Union. He does so again here in the current issue of The Washington Quarterly.

At core is a subjective issue that will not be settled to anyone's satisfaction -- is Russia a normal country, meaning should it be treated the way one would approach, say, France? Brzezinski would be on the reasonable side of those who reply 'no,' at least at the moment. Those for whom the answer seems to be yes seem to include Stephen Kotkin of Princeton and Anatol Lieven of King's College in London.

Hillary, McCain and Jingoism

I was in Baku on an oil story when Hillary Clinton visited Central Asia during the 1990s, but when I got back to Almaty I asked around for local impressions of her. The visit went over well, I was told by her Kazakh and Uzbek hosts -- she stopped by a pre-natal care clinic in Almaty, and met with Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev and, in Tashkent, with Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov. But I also heard a singular personal observation from the amused locals -- Clinton, it turns out, doesn't have an athlete's slim legs.

How to respond to an immature remark? Probably with silence, which is what I did. And in fact, I didn't hear Nazarbayev, Karimov or any other official or reporter say publicly: F-A-T T-H-I-G-H-S.

Nor for that matter did I hear then or since any public official abroad say of John McCain: "I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: O-L-D."

Which brings me to recent remarks by Clinton and McCain, both of whom maintain that above all else what sets them apart from their respective rivals in both main parties is gravitas on the foreign policy stage.

So how is it that we find Clinton saying of Vladimir Putin, as she did yesterday: "he's a KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul." And McCain in a newspaper interview: "I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B."

Both of these knee-slappers were intended as swipes at President Bush for his oft-quoted 2001 remark about Putin, as kindly provided by the L.A. Times' Andrew Malcolm: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue."

Did Bush's remark reflect wisdom or good judgment? No. But neither does it require any to remark on someone's well-known former employment.

Putin's KGB background does affect Kremlin policy. The thrust of it is -- anything goes. In other words, set the goal, and use whatever means necessary to achieve it, which is a worrying approach to domestic and foreign policy.

But Putin is going to be around a long time, and the U.S. is going to have to find a common language with him. Rather than offering a serious approach, Clinton and McCain dived quite happily into the muck in a craven effort to capture the base.

Photo: DBKing
Rights: Creative Commons

Note to Presidential Candidates II: Plateau Oil

Dick Cheney famously called conservation a lifestyle issue, but the pragmatist’s case for sharply reduced demand for gasoline keeps getting stronger.

Quite apart from security and environmental issues, the folks who have the oil have made it plain that they’re not able or willing to produce more simply because China and India are growing gangbusters, and Americans wish to drive SUVs.

That is, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kazakhstan and so on – the nations whose state-owned companies control more than 80% of the world’s known reserves – are placing a deliberate restraint on supply, as Ed Crooks blogged yesterday at the FT.

It's partly why some oil company chairman are predicting an "oil plateau" -- a production level of 100 million barrels of oil or so a day that simply won't be regularly exceeded. That's just 20% above the 87 million barrels a day produced now.

I raise this in part because of an article posted yesterday by The Economist, titled “Peak Nationalism.” The piece identifies the above-noted countries as part of the supply problem. For some reason, they don’t want to suck their fields dry. But, the magazine says, “politicians might console themselves with the thought that even the most recalcitrant petro-regime is more malleable than the brute realities of geology.”

The ordinarily sensible Economist has somehow missed the last 35 years of history, in which what it calls “politics” have played an integral role in the world’s oil supply. The policies of nations – in the West and the Middle East – influence both demand and supply. And petro-states see it in their own best interests to stretch out the income stream into the next generations.

That’s not recalcitrant. That’s rational.

It's a central issue for the U.S. presidential candidates. A previously election-oriented post urged more attention to Russia and its oil pipeline policy in Europe. This is a corollary issue. Even higher mileage requirements for vehicles, accelerated retooling of Detroit, more encouragement of non-carbon energy technology all are needed.

At some point, someone will inform Washington that ethanol, while it does satisfy the lobbies of the corn-growing states and their companies, isn't the future. But there could be an answer in the laboratories of Big Oil and the Silicon Valley.

Here's a brief rundown from CNN on the main candidates' positions on energy.

Photo: Nick Stenning
Rights: Creative Commons

Presidential Candidates Clueless on Russia; Report: Putin to be NYT columnist

The presidential candidates as a whole don't look very sure-footed on former Soviet policy. That is except for John McCain, who says Russia should be shoved out of the G-8, and that the U.S. should proceed with the non-working missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Council on Foreign Relations collected the candidates' various positions, and The Washington Post ran them out on Friday.

How about returning to part of the Soviet-era approach -- averting McCain's petulant muscle-flexing, but accepting that there's little overlap in belief systems, that the U.S. and Russia are each out for their own self-interest around the world, and that it's each country for itself in terms of competition?

One challenge of 2008 -- winning the battle to control the new flow of energy into Europe. Russia has the edge in winning over the key country in this battle -- Turkmenistan and its huge natural gas supplies. But Turkmenistan President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is still leaving the door open for Europe and Washington's idea to direct his country's natural gas West.

Putin in the New York Times? The Media Bloodhound reports that NYT editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who just announced a deal to publish his sworn enemy Bill Kristol once a week, has struck a second masterstroke: a weekly column by Vladimir Putin. Satire at its best.

Photo: OxDE
Rights: Creative Commons