Compared to the G8 meeting in June in Northern Ireland, when he seemed isolated on the issue of Syria, Vladimir Putin seemed to have lots of company in opposing any possible U.S. military action at last week’s G20 meeting in St. Petersburg. Reasonable people can have legitimate differences over what should be done in Syria after Assad’s use of chemical weapons, but before one aligns with Putin on this issue—or accepts at face value his latest proposal on international oversight of Syria’s chemical weapons—it is important to understand that the Russian leader doesn’t merely oppose use of force against his like-minded Syrian colleague.
After all, Putin is providing not only political backing and promises to block any resolutions at the UN; he is supporting and arming Assad and enabling that regime to carry out the slaughter of the Syrian people. Moreover, Putin has ordered Russian naval assets to the Mediterranean to offer support and provide intelligence to Assad. In other words, Putin is certainly on diametrically opposite sides from just about every other member of the G8, and perhaps even the G20 as well. Putin is in league with Iran and Hezbollah. Other leaders may not support military action against Syria, but at least they’re not arming the murderous Syrian regime. And yet the Obama Administration’s inept handling of the whole issue has inadvertently enabled Putin to adopt the patina of statesman, especially now with the latest proposal being worked out with the oh-so-trustworthy Syrian regime. How unfortunate.
This comes against the backdrop of an overall worsening in U.S.-Russian relations and in the personal dynamics between Obama and Putin. Obama did the right thing in canceling his trip to Moscow ahead of the G20 for a bilateral meeting with Putin; he did even better by meeting with nine Russian civil society activists instead after the G20 ended. Giving Putin a little of his own treatment while signaling support for Russia’s beleaguered civil society was a long overdue correction in the U.S. approach toward Putin.
The big question now is whether Obama will continue on this course correction or simply abandon his efforts to develop relations with Russia, given how frustrating he has found dealing with Putin and all the other demands on his time. One of the main reasons Obama canceled his meeting with Putin was because there was little they were going to accomplish. Beyond ocean-wide differences over Syria, the two sides are miles apart on missile defense and have little prospect of making further progress on arms control; Putin is also ramping up pressure on his neighbors to discourage them from signing agreements with the European Union in November.
After months if not years of silence from Obama over Russia’s deteriorating human rights situation, he could no longer maintain this position amid the worst crackdown since the break-up of the USSR, including but by no means limited to Russia’s LGBT community. The convictions of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and, posthumously, Sergei Magnitsky, expectations of new charges against Mikhail Khodorkovsky (whose ten-year arrest anniversary is next month), the campaign against NGOs and their foreign funding, and the rising number of activists and opposition figures seeking asylum—all of these left Obama no choice. Putin’s anti-American rhetoric continues apace, with the latest example being his accusation that Secretary of State John Kerry, who still holds out hope for a Geneva conference on Syria with the Russians and a reinvigorated reset push, is a “liar”. Nice way to treat those who give you the benefit of the doubt.
All this is by way of saying that the outlook for U.S.-Russian relations is bleak. As long as Putin sits in the Kremlin and needs to hold up the United States as an enemy in order to justify his corrupt and authoritarian way of governing at home, the potential for developing partner-like, to say nothing of strategic, relations will be close to zero. Obama made serious efforts to develop better relations; Putin in return figuratively spat in his face, viewing his American counterpart as weak on the one hand and, when convenient politically, a threat on the other. Were Obama to essentially neglect Russia for the remaining three and a half years of his term because of the difficulties of dealing with Putin, that would be good neither for Russian civil society and human rights nor for Russia‘s neighbors. This is not to argue for a knee-jerk, confrontational approach toward Russia, nor for a return to the Cold War days; the U.S. should work with Russia wherever possible while pushing back on Putin wherever we must—and the latter occasions are becoming more frequent. But for Obama, the reset policy and the Medvedev days were the easy part, relatively speaking. The real test comes now.
