The first summit between President Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev is only days away and, so far, there has only been perfunctory mention of this potentially momentous occasion in the media. The silence on this meeting is odd, if not irresponsible.
If played right, this could be the most important U.S.-Russia summit since Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, having torn down the Iron Curtain, decided that they had enough confidence in each other to introduce unilateral nuclear arms cuts, a valuable ancillary to the formal deal.
In the opinion of Georgi Arbatov, Gorbachev’s foreign affairs advisor (and before that Brezhnev’s),
the time is overdue for more unilateral cuts. He said to me, some two summers ago, that “we in Russia are not right in our approach. We have so many weapons we could decrease the numbers unilaterally and set an example. We could dismantle our rockets, take others off alert, and the Americans would be obliged to follow us.”
When I recently asked Igor Yurgens, one of Medvedev’s advisors, about what the “reset” button statement by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meant, he replied that “the tone is different.” He then added, somewhat amusingly, “We have a new generation—Obama and Medvedev. Since they are both Internet lovers, then the promise of change could be substantiated.”
Joking aside, Yurgens notes that “the line up on the U.S. side seems more broad minded than before.” Between Rose Gottemoeller, who spent four years in Moscow and is the head of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and Gen. James Jones, a national security advisor to Obama who worked constructively on Iran, Yurgens said the Russians “see very good signs.”
“The United States and Russia have identical views on Afghanistan,” says Yurgens. “We are on the same page as the United States with [regard to] North Korea. We have some nuances in policy towards Iran, but I think they are surmountable. So, on those three issues (plus Pakistan, plus broader Middle East) there is more that unites us than divides us.”
At the July 7 summit, the new Obama administration must begin by giving a little. The Russians are still extremely angry at the way the expansion of NATO was implemented. This, they say, has broken the vows of then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker given to Gorbachev in 1990, which promised that the West would not take advantage of the Soviet Union by expanding NATO into Eastern Europe if East and West Germany were allowed to unite.
While Moscow accepted that the United States could expand the alliance membership, Russia believed the promise would not include not developing military infrastructure on the ground. But Washington has set up military bases in Latvia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and has begun building an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Washington has also made no bones about brushing aside Moscow’s claim that it considers the ex-Soviet republics within its zone of interest—much as it accepts that the Monroe Doctrine still applies to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
The Kremlin is also gravely upset that, after former President Vladimir Putin gave George W. Bush all the help he could after September 11, (for example, by not objecting to, and even encouraging, the establishment of U.S. military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to fight the war in Afghanistan) there was again no give, only take. Indeed, under Putin, Russia also dismantled its base and listening post in Cuba and pulled out of its naval base in Vietnam.
Under Presidents Clinton and Bush the United States took advantage of Russia while it was in a weakened state. To truly press the restart button at this upcoming summit, Obama will have to give more than he takes.
Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine, London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).