A realistic reset with Russia

MEETING FOR THE first time in London on April 1, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama declared in their joint statement they were" ready to move beyond Cold War mentalities and chart a fresh starts in relations between [the] two countries. It is rather startling that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the leaders of the two nations believe they need to stress their readiness to overcome Cold War mentalities. But is it really Cold War mentalities that have been the problem? The dashing of expectations that has occurred often in the past two decades should lead us to be somewhat sober about the prospects going forward, despite the Obama administration's worthy goal of pushing the "reset button" and its early achievements. Looking back through the history of the intervening years can help us understand why we have made such little progress in forging a strong U.S.-Russian relationship since the hopeful days after the collapse of communism. Doing so reveals that the problems in the relationship have been caused not by lingering Cold War mentalities, but rather by two very different visions of the post-Cold War world, as well as by the sharp asymmetries in power that emerged when the Soviet Union imploded. While Medvedev and Obama followed their April meeting with a productive summit in Moscow in July, we should be realistic about what we can expect given the underlying differences in both worldview and power that will continue to exist. A false start THE RUSH OF events that occurred as the Soviet Union unraveled seems rather surreal in retrospect: Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in August 1991, staring down a drunken band of coup plotters. The Baltic countries and then Ukraine declaring their independence. Yeltsin meeting with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus in the Beloveschaya forest in early December 1991 to effectively declare the end of the Soviet Union, followed by Mikhail Gorbachev's formal admission a few weeks later that the state built by Lenin and Stalin was no more. In early 1992, a triumphant Yeltsin visited Camp David to meet with George H.W. Bush. Yeltsin was enthusiastic about the prospects for U.S.-Russian friendship. Gorbachev had been the darling of the West for his programs of perestroika and glasnost, opening up the Soviet system, and creating opportunities for both democracy and the stirrings of a market economy. To outmaneuver his Soviet rival in 1991, Yeltsin had decided to be more pro-democracy, more pro-market, and more pro-Western than Gorbachev, hoping to garner American support to ensure his defeat of the communists. Meeting at Camp David in February 1992, Yeltsin pressed Bush to declare that America and Russia were now allies rather than using the more ambiguous phrase "friendship and partnership." Bush demurred, saying "We are using this transitional language because we don't want to act like all our problems are solved." (1) While Bush missed an opportunity to draw closer to Yeltsin (toward whom the American president never had the warm feelings he displayed toward Gorbachev), "Cold War" mentalities did not linger too long into the 1990s (outside of certain Republican circles on Capitol Hill or old-school communists in Russia), and certainly not in the relationship between Bill Clinton and Yeltsin. A new American Cold War policy would have focused on containment, which was not a policy that Clinton or his top Russia adviser, Strobe Talbott, were going to pursue. Meanwhile, for the Russians, a truly Cold War mentality would have emphasized undermining the American-led order by trying to rebuild a network of proxy states to balance the West; Yeltsin instead was a prime cause of the independence achieved by the post-Soviet states, and he did not stand in their way as they (and he) pursued closer ties to America and the West. The American policy in those years had conceptual flaws, but not due to a desire to continue the Cold War. …