To begin with, Barack Obama's planned summit with Vladimir Putin next month in St. Petersburg, in advance of the upcoming Group of 20 confab in that city, was not really "cancelled," as has been widely reported. It was "postponed," a semantic distinction with a difference, even in the style of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger diplomacy which now characterizes U.S. foreign policy. That fine scholar of the post-Cold War order, Leon Aron, has noted that an iced summit accomplishes nothing under the rubric of something, while Obama's boycott of the entire G20 might have actually had a measurable impact.
The American president's medium is usually his message and here, too, it's interesting to note where the overdue acknowledgement that Putin is presiding over an escalating dirty war on human rights finally occurred: The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "I have been very clear that when it comes to universal rights, when it comes to people's basic freedoms, that whether you're discriminating on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, you are violating the basic morality that I think should transcend every country." Obama was referring to a recent law passed by the Duma that bans "homosexual propaganda," an offense so nebulously defined as to be arbitrarily (and ominously) punishable. Already Dutch tourists have been arrested under this Draconian morality code and anti-gay pogromists, heeding the dog-whistle of state permissiveness, have set to work all throughout the country. One neo-Nazi group has even taken to luring gay men to rendezvous, then assaulting and humiliating them on camera. Despite reassurances from the Kremlin that such legalized bigotry will be put on hold during the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics, which is six months away, Russia's Minister of Sports recently said that, actually, it'll still be active then. If true, then this means that American and other foreign athletes will be subject to arrest. Raising this on a late-night talk show in Hollywood makes it seem frivolous.
I'd like to think that gay rights isn't just a convenient cudgel with which a fed-up White House chooses to smash Edward Snowden's new patrons over the head. But then, I've noticed that the one time White House Press Secretary Jay Carney had a good line - that Russia ought to indulge human rights organizations not just in the transit lounge of Sheremetyevo Airport - this, too, was uttered in relation to the NSA affair. Obama seems to loathe leakers more than he does stolen elections, murdered whistleblowers, show-tried oppositionists, the vicious harassment of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, the expulsion of USAID, the raids of foreign-funded or "political" NGOs.
So it has been amusing to read all the latest eulogies for the reset, particularly in those grumpy precincts of foreign policy realism where Putin is always misunderstood and never quite accommodated enough. Gone now, thanks to the commander-in-chief's prickliness, are those middling heights of term one: securing Russian cooperation on WMD de-escalation, the Afghan war effort, and Iran's quest for a nuke. Never mind that cooperation on these issues was a Chekist psych-out from the moment Hillary showed up in Moscow with a button that read "overcharge."
Obama's college thesis was on Soviet disarmament. As far as U.S. presidents go, he is certainly the greatest activist the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament never had. And so it must have stung him mightily to watch Putin withdraw from the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program last October, a program that has been responsible for decommissioning nukes and disposing safely of chemical weapons in the Eastern Bloc for twenty years, mainly on the U.S. taxpayers' dime. Why? Surely not because nukes and sarin gas are any less of a threat to geopolitical stability now than they were when the Wall came down but because, as George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, Putin thinks Obama's anti-proliferation policy is "a plot to take over the world with conventional weapons." You quite literally cannot argue with that.
One place Putin wouldn't mind America taking over in perpetuity is Afghanistan. Strange, then, the U.S. government is full of people who believe that a lieutenant colonel of the KGB needs convincing to allow American soldiers to fight and die to prevent the radical Islamists from overrunning Kabul again. The northern distribution network, a useful supply route from West to East via Russian territory, was always there for the taking, or rather for the same cost of seeing it derided and undermined in Moscow through not-so-subtle actions to force an increase in rent for the U.S.-leased airbase in Manas, Kyrgyzstan - an airbase now set to close permanently, thanks to Russian cajoling. We also know that Obama may adopt a "zero option" of maintaining no U.S. troops in Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal date. As my colleague Andrew Bowen has observed, so terrified is Putin of what will ensue with respect to heroin smuggling and cross-border terrorist attacks once the Taliban are resurgent that he has ordered the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a compact of post-Soviet states in Central Asia, to find "an effective algorithm of practical action should be developed to minimize possible risks for our countries." Don't be surprised if one day the effective algorithm is another Russian invasion of Afghanistan.