U.S.-Russia Summit: Warmer Temperatures in Moscow

The chief takeaway of the U.S.-Russia summit is that it's been all upside, and no downside, for the leaders of both countries: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev got to tally up respect points from hanging out and negotiating nuclear arms reductions with President Barack Obama; and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin got to stare fiercely at the American president (video). From Obama's side, he got to take down the temperature with Moscow, Washington's loudest European critic.

Yet nothing that happened in Moscow shifts the shape of world events as they were when Obama arrived there. For instance, the two sides could do nothing to change the direction of events just south of Russia, in Iran.

The State Department has denied that Vice President Joe Biden has given Israel the go-ahead to fly over Iraq and attack Iran. That's not what Biden meant when he said in an interview Sunday that the U.S. won't stand in Israel's way were it to attack Iran, the State Department asserts. In the closing weeks of his presidency, George W. Bush refused to grant such permission. An Iranian official replies that Tehran will mount a "real and decisive" response to any such attack.

This could be mere brinksmanship. Israel itself is pushing the U.S. to put together a fresh set of "crippling sanctions," according to Michael Crowley at The Plank.

Ria Misra at Inside Politics suggests that an ideological split that's just become public in the religious center of Qom "may be the critical leverage that finally forces not only the overturning of the [June 12 presidential] election results, but maybe of the ayatollah as well." She is talking about a critical statement issued Sunday by a reformist clerical group called the Association of Scholars and Researchers of Qom Seminary. Kathy Kattenburg at The Moderate Voice is also impressed with the development.

This could be another bout of getting carried away, as pundits and the media did leading up to the Iranian election. In fact, as Najmeh Bozorgmehr reports in the Financial Times, the most powerful clerical group in Qom, the Society of Scholars of Qom Seminary, issued a simultaneous statement congratulating Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his official re-election.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Mir Hosein Mousavi's outspoken appearance yesterday in public -- the first time he has been publicly cited in three weeks -- is bound to stir up more turbulence. That will offer up a chance for Obama and Medvedev to exercise their new-found camaraderie.

For the West, One Loss, One Gain

Short of a bolt of lightning from Qom, there will be no game-changing opening between the West and Iran. The politics in neither Tehran nor Washington will allow one, not after all the bloodletting, both past and what is still to come. Yet, all is not lost. Kyrgystan's agreement to allow U.S. use of a military base is a reversal for Moscow, and a comparatively less-important but still an unexpected boon for Washington.

In Iran, some reporting -- over at Eurasianet, for instance -- has had it that a highly irritated former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been in the holy city of Qom, working to persuade its powerful clerics to turn against paramount leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Unless they do -- and this report frankly appears to reflect wishful thinking by regime critics rather than a credible news leak -- there is no logical reason to anticipate any change in the current crackdown, and thus any thaw of U.S.-Iran relations.

There simply is no political scenario in which either the Obama administration, or Tehran, can be seen locally as making concessions to the other side. That includes talks on Iran's nuclear program. According to a report by Barbara Slavin in The Washington Times, the Obama administration sent a letter last month to Khamenei suggesting "cooperation in regional and bilateral relations." But the events since June 12th put the kabbosh on this notion.

Not incidentally, the Iranian crackdown about shuts off the last ray of hope for the Nabucco pipeline, the leading western option for balancing off Russian petro-power in Europe.

Then there is Kyrgyzstan. Since the Soviet collapse, U.S. influence has been on the ascent in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Kyrgyzstan has no natural resources to speak of, but managed to grab western attention by embracing the free market earlier and more tightly than anyone else; the cliche became that this nation bordering China was the Switzerland of Central Asia. That link to the west was cemented by 9/11/, when the U.S. opened the Manas Air Base to serve troops in Afghanistan.

Yet in February, Kyryz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev went to Moscow and, while standing next to Dimitri Medvedev, announced that the U.S. was out; and Russia would now get the base. Oh, and incidentally Moscow was granting $2 billion in economic assistance to Kyrgyzstan.

The loss of the base was another blow in U.S. influence in the region after the Russian defeat of Georgia in last August's war. There seemed to be no arresting the slide, either.

Knocked back on its heels, the U.S. didn't see much wiggle room. Yesterday, though, both sides confirmed that the U.S. will keep the base. The base's name will change to a "transit center," and the U.S. will pay a lot more ($60 million a year outright, in addition to various other sweeteners, compared with $17 million previously).

Over at RFE-RL, Bruce Pannier quotes Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev as putting down the shift to the turbulence in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

"Unfortunately, it needs to be stated that despite the efforts of forces of the government of Afghanistan and forces of the international coalition, the situation in [Afghanistan], especially in light of the events in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, show a tendency toward becoming worse. And in the event of instability in the future, this could have an effect on the security situation in the states of Central Asia, in particular on Kyrgyzstan."

Is Sarbayev providing the whole, or even any, of the genuine reason for the shift? That's impossible to say. Other elements of the Kyrgyz decision must have been after-the-fact remorse over losing its careful U.S.-Russia balance by lurching to one side. In Moscow itself, the Kremlin is trying to put the best face on the shift, with one official claiming that Russia itself agreed to the quick-switch.

Whatever the case, the bigger picture is how rapidly events can shift in the region. It also underscores that, though most events seem to point to lessening U.S. influence in the region, Washington remains an important player.