What's next for the U.S. and Russia?
Now that the New START debate is over, attention turns to what's next in U.S.-Russian relations. While it appears the Obama administration will work on limiting shorter-range arms, conservatives want to focus on how Russia is ruled. Here's Robert Kagan:
'Relations with Moscow are about to grow more challenging. This is partly because some of the easy pickings - including this treaty - have already been harvested. The problems that lie ahead are going to be a tougher test of the reset: what to do about Russia's continued illegal occupation of Georgia; how to handle Russia's increasingly authoritarian domestic behavior, its brutal treatment of internal dissent and its squelching of all democratic institutions. '
Jennifer Rubin thinks the conviction of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky indicates the reset was "mostly spin."
I'm not sure why we're defining the "reset" as somehow hinging on whether the United States can successfully change the internal politics of Russia - as ugly as they unquestionably are. As I understood it, the goal was to improve U.S.-Russian relations and advance, to the extent possible, American interests in areas where Russia also wielded influence.
It's also not quite clear to me how the United States can go about changing Russia's political institutions (have public figures whine loudly about them?) or why such a complex and ill-defined effort should be the key priority going forward.