Can the U.S. change Russia?
Ariel Cohen and Donald Jensen argue that the aim of U.S. policy toward Russia should be the latter's moral enlightenment:
When the Soviet Union fell in December 1991, Washington rushed to Boris Yeltsinâ??s assistance. The world expected that Russia would eventually grow to be more like the United States or Western Europe. By the late 1990s, however, Russia was rapidly regressing from Western political models. Beginning around 2000, the two sides returned to a relationship based on strategic security concerns resembling the old Cold War paradigm.Moscow and Washington quickly exhausted this security agenda for U.S.â??Russian rapprochement, however, and the pendulum swung back. During the rest of the decade, while Russia rejected American efforts to promote democracy in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Washington grew alarmed at the increasing authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin. George W. Bushâ??s proclamation of Americaâ??s duty to press for democratic values around the globe further alienated the Kremlin.
Then they take aim at the Obama administration's reset:
While the gains from the â??resetâ? relationship have been exaggerated, the cost in terms of the U.S. moral authority has been high. The Obama Administration has explicitly disavowed linkages within its Russia policy components, such as punishing Russian misbehavior in one area by withholding concessions in another.There is good reason to believe, moreover, that Russian leaders do not take White House efforts at promoting human rights seriously. They know that the U.S. Administration is chained to the â??resetâ? and will do little more than verbally object to the Kremlinâ??s abuses of human rights and the rule of law.
The authors then argue that the U.S. should once again make a play for changing Russia's internal governance. Leave aside the unsupported assertion that the reset delivered "exaggerated" gains (it's hard to tell if they're exaggerated if the authors won't deign to tell us what they are) and focus on the practicalities here. The authors admit that - despite Western efforts when Russia was weaker and in need of external help in the 1990s - the U.S. was unable to make Russia "grow to be more" like us. So why now, in 2011, are the prospects so much better?
One need not think that the "reset" was a major win for the U.S. to conclude that picking fights with Russia's leaders over how they rule (or misrule) their people is actually going to be productive - either at changing the behavior we disapprove of or securing cooperation on geo-political issues.
