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.

America's Deal in Europe

I've been critical of the West's decision to allow Kazakhstan to chair Europe's chief political watchdog in the former Soviet bloc. I've puzzled over why Europe and the U.S. would choose to be led by a country that's never run a free election.

The issue is important because the group we're talking about, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, is the face of Western credibility on a number of issues. Compromise the name, compromise the credibility.

For the last few days, I've exchanged messages with people knowledgeable about the talks over the OSCE leadership. They've told me the political calculus -- at least within Washington -- in consenting.

And it's all about Russia, and the dealmaking-within-dealmaking that characterizes the most skillfully conducted diplomacy.

Here it is: Kazakhstan, its name tarnished because of a huge U.S. corruption case known as Kazakhgate, has been trying for years to polish its public image through a bid to chair the OSCE. But it was making little headway -- until, that is, Russia got behind it.

Why did Russia's Vladimir Putin back Kazakhstan? Because the assertive leader has his own political aims in Europe, one of which is to halt the West's presumption of the right to judge Russian human rights practices. (Putin has one point -- it's humiliating for a foreign power to slam your elections. But he could easily get around that by running a fair election.)

Specifically, Putin proposed to weaken the power of the OSCE's election observation arm, which has condemned about every single former Soviet election since the 1991 breakup. And, for cover, Putin got Kazakhstan to help spearhead the Russian proposal.

So what you had when the OSCE met in Madrid at the end of last month were two proposals on the table -- Kazakhstan's petition to chair the group, and Russia's to weaken its powers. And once Russia's lobbying was over, almost all the OSCE's 56 members were backing Kazakhstan to chair the OSCE in 2009.

So the U.S. did a deal. It got Kazakhstan to reverse itself on Russia's proposal and become effectively the leading opponent to weakening the OSCE's election activities. In exchange, Kazakhstan got the chair -- but a year later than it wanted, in 2010.

There's much bureaucratic gibberish on Kazakhstan's pledges to reform its election practices, meaningless clauses unless one believes that there's a chance that anyone apart from Nursultan Nazarbayev can be president and control Parliament.

In a nutshell, Europe caved to Russia on Kazakhstan, but not on the election watchdog issue.

That's a perilous calculus, but it reveals the reality of influence in Europe -- Russia's is growing, and Washington's shrinking.

Photo: MyBoyDodger
Rights: Creative Commons

Putin's Churchillian Aspirations

Ninety-dollar-a-barrel oil is wonderful for one's self esteem, as well as for stimulating the deference of one's acquaintances. But can it earn genuine respect?

That is Vladimir Putin's challenge. His best chance of securing that much-craved legitimacy is to pull off a diplomatic miracle. One such as resolving the Iranian crisis.

His high-minded actions and statements with his Caspian Sea neighbors in Tehran this week imply that Putin recognizes this. But can he do it?

One piece of intriguing news involves Putin's meeting with Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. According to Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, Putin gave Khamenei a "message" of which the nuclear issue was a component, and that "we are now examining it."

Yesterday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad undercut Larijani by saying that Putin had not even mentioned the word "nuclear."

Still, let's take Larijani at his word. One enormous factor calling for optimism is that the two parties involved -- Russia and Iran -- would love to resolve the nuclear issue in a way that raises their own diplomatic credentials while diminishing the West's.

It's not known what Putin's message was. But we can imagine. For instance, on the difficult issue of electricity-production, he might have suggested a Russian agreement, for example, to build, supply and manage a self-contained nuclear power facility for Iran. In order to make Iran feel both safe and part of a bigger club, Putin might have suggested a comprehensive mutual defense accord building on the declaration that the Caspian republics made Tuesday. Putin definitely would have included a face-saving measure that allowed Iran to climb down on the nuclear issue without appearing to have done so.

Any agreement that gets Iran to renounce nuclear weapons-making ambitions would catapult Putin, and Russia, into a different and higher global sphere, while improving Iran's image as well.

Putin would not be spending so much diplomatic time and effort simply being a spoiler. He would receive -- and deserve -- genuine deference.

The General's Bungled Opportunity in Pakistan

Pakistan seems headed for even worse trouble than seemed possible last week. Now both of its discredited former prime ministers seem poised to return from exile. The upshot: This perpetually strategic country is again unable to break its cycle of corruption and politics-of-entitlement.


Here is the first paragraph of The AP story: The party of exiled former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ruled out reconciliation with Pakistan's embattled military leader after a court said he can return home before upcoming elections. Read rest of story

Steve's comment: Sharif and his constant rival, Benazir Bhutto, both seem to see blood in the water, and a chance to grab back the power they lost when Gen. Musharraf seized control in 1999. Both are enjoying portraying the democrat.

Of course, neither is anything of the kind. Both represent crooked politics, crooked business, bribes and madness for power. That their respective parties have failed to grow up and find someone new after eight years in the wilderness demonstrates their own bankruptness.

Musharraf is ultimately at fault. Eight years after promising his country a new way, he failed to cultivate any civilian politician to replace him in the event of just the situation he now faces. Because of that, he, too, resembles the same old generals of Pakistan's past, who seized power and could imagine no one else sitting in their seat.

Without fail, Pakistan with regularity has found itself at the vortex of world events since its birth in 1947. It seems genetically strategic. So its politics cannot be ignored. As to what those politics will ultimately be this time, all bets are off.

One thing seems sure. Musharraf appears to be hanging on to power by a slender reed. Zahid Hussain of the Times of London has this typically incisive analysis of Musharraf's predicament.

The Sultanate of Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev carried off the latest in a remarkable string of election victories. His party won every single seat up for grabs in yesterday's parliamentary election. Read AP story. The upshot: the Caspian states are not republics, but sultanates.

The question is not how it is possible to lose no local election, nor whether the election was free and fair (the Europeans said progress was made toward that goal; the former Soviet observers deemed it another grand election in the state); obviously Nazarbayev's deputies rigged the outcome.

Instead, one might ask why Nazarbayev no longer feels it necessary while he is rigging his elections to throw a few crumbs to the opposition.

The answer is that Nazarbayev has now fully made the political transition from Communist Party boss. For a long time, Nazarbayev regarded himself as the most statesmanlike and worldly of the region's leaders, and hesitated to assume some of the accouterments of power that his neighbors took on. Nazarbayev's lieutenants routinely defended him by comparison, snickering at the late Turkmen leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, who ran a personality cult, they would say.

Nazarbayev has shed any hesitation. The election shows that.

Some of the smart thinking says that Nazarbayev's most recent actions -- his very public family spat, his pursuit of his former son-in-law around Europe, his ejection at least for now of his eldest daughter from politics -- actually show that he is weak and frightened. That is probably wishful thinking.

The West should stop the farce of dispatching election monitors to Central Asia and the Caucasus. For starters, it's old and failed international politics, a 1990s approach to diplomacy that didn't move the countries toward truly competitive elections and stronger institutions.

The other reason is that none of the 'Stans, nor Azerbaijan, is a truly elected government. Whatever label one chooses -- kingdom, sultanate, sheikhdom -- all of them have chosen to be unapologetically self-appointed, and that is the way it is going to be for some time to come.