No matter who takes office following the upcoming presidential elections in the United States, he had better start making relations with Russia a top priority, argues an editorial in Sunday’s Boston Globe:
The next U.S. president will have to deal with an energy-rich Russia that bears little resemblance to either the vanished Soviet Union or the economic basket case of the immediate post-Soviet years. Though run by a mafia of Kremlin-connected moguls and KGB veterans, Russia has an abiding interest in cooperating with the West. Yet so far, John McCain and Barack Obama have paid too little attention to Russia and how it sees its role in the world. (…) Because the Bush administration’s mishandling of relations with Russia may be easier to rectify than some if its other blunders, Obama and McCain ought to be talking about their plans for the future of US-Russian relations. Russia can act either as a crucial partner or a troublesome spoiler on nettlesome security issues – the safeguarding of nuclear weapons and materials, nonproliferation, terrorism, and energy security. (…) Bush’s successors should relieve these Russian grievances. In return, the next president should be able to count on firm Russian support in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, combating terrorism, and managing the transition to a global economy bereft of cheap oil and natural gas. That should be America’s game plan.
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This is one of the most vapid and pathetic analyses of Russia I’ve ever read.Why does Russia have “an abiding interest in cooperating with the West”? Because it needs us as a market for its oil? So did the USSR! And the USSR needed our wheat, too. But that didn’t stop the USSR from seeking to destroy us.Not one single example of any “abiding interest” of Russia is given by these editorial writers, who palpably know nothing about Russia.No acknowledgment that the value system espoused by Russia is wholly contrary to our own.And they claim Putin’s Russia bears “little resemblance” to the USSR even though it is ruled by the KGB and has the Soviet hymn for a national anthem!How mind-bogglingly stupid is this: “President Bush needlessly provoked Russian paranoia by rushing to recognize Kosovo’s independence without UN authorization or a negotiated deal between Serbia and the Kosovars.”So let me see if I understand. If Bush had only asked the UN and the Serbs, then Russia and the Serbs would have agreed to let Kosovo be free, huh? Presumably, if we only ask nicely enough, Russia will also stop buzzing us with nuclear bombers and stop supplying weapons to Venezuela and Iran.And meanwhile, we are supposed to just ignore the endless chain of political murders, the destruction of the press, the obliteration of local government and opposition parties, and the sham elections.We are, in short, supposed to sell the Russian people’s future down the river for our own temporary convenience.What gibberish!
I don’t know about all that, but the editorial is naive to suggest that simply giving in on the missile shield (too late) and giving up on Kosovo (impossible now) would be sufficient bargaining chips to get Moscow’s help on Iran.The paper’s editors seem to have little understanding of the nature of Kremlin decision making, nor do they seem to realize that Moscow very much benefits from the Tehran-Washington tensions, and would prefer to keep them in frozen conflict.