On Obama's Plate in Moscow: Iran and Breakfast With Putin

Posted by: Steve LeVine on July 03

The philosophical underpinning of President Obama’s arms-control agenda in Russia next week is that — by allowing Moscow to preen on-stage, reviving its former role as a superpower state, ostensibly regulating peace in the world — Russia will be more amenable to persuasion on other topics.

But does this reasoning hold? Will Moscow see things Washington’s way on the Caspian, on Georgia, and on the balance of petro-power in Europe?

More important at the moment, could Moscow decouple from Iran, with which it has maintained an alliance of poking-fingers-in-the-U.S.-chest? Now that the chances for a game-changing U.S. opening with Iran have been all-but eliminated by the after-election crackdown in Tehran, is there anything to be done before Israel, for instance, decides it can no longer wait for Iran to become a nuclear state?

I’ve surveyed some old Russia and foreign policy hands from the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations, and the answer comes back that, at least on Iran, Moscow either can’t or won’t be able to help restrain Tehran. As for petro-power and the Caspian — Moscow is capitalizing on the global financial crisis to re-assert power in its struggling neighborhood, and will push back on any attempt to deny it regional domination.

Steve Sestanovich, ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union under President Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that Moscow is already effectively cooperating with U.S. aims on Iran -- while it committed to finishing Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor and providing S-300 missiles, Moscow for years has failed to deliver either. "Their policy is to avoid annoying anybody too much," Sestanovich says. "The middle ground allows them to make a lot of money. And they hold in reserve a role as a possible diplomatic mediator if the U.S. or Iran indicate they are reconsidering their position."

Georgetown Professor Angela Stent, a former State Department and National Intelligence Council expert on the region, just got off the plane from Moscow yesterday. She says that Russian officials and experts have a mixed view of Iran -- the latter say that Russia can live with a nuclear Iran, just as it lives with a nuclear Pakistan and India; and the former say they don't believe that Tehran is anywhere near obtaining nuclear capability.

Whatever the case, seeking Russian help on Iran is misguided, Stent suggests. "Russia doesn't have the power to deliver Iran," she says.

A former Bush administration official who preferred to speak not for attribution said that any stiffer sanctions -- even if the Europeans and Russia were to agree -- "would not work quickly enough." "They are on the threshold" of nuclear capability, this official said, and this again raises the possibility of an attack by Israel on Iran.

Interestingly, Obama administration officials still talk of the possibility of negotiations with Iran. That seems to ignore political reality both in Iran -- Sestanovich notes that Iranian officials themselves seem publicly at least not to welcome further talks -- and the U.S., where Obama could face a buzz-saw of criticism should he be seen as equivocating after the bloody aftermath to the June 12th Iranian presidential election.

Obama will spend some 10 hours with President Dmitry Medvedev while in Moscow. But on Tuesday, Obama is also going to have a private breakfast for an hour or an hour-and-a-half with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Obama told The Associated Press that Putin "has one foot in the old ways," while Medvedev understands "that the old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations are outdated." This is a nice public relations setup, but not likely to result in any progress -- Medvedev has done nothing so far to indicate any separation from Putin on foreign policy, and there's no reason I can think of to believe that he will.

The former Bush administration official asserted that Obama shouldn't dignify Putin's behind-the-curtain grip on power by spending time with him; technically speaking, only Medvedev is on the same protocol level, this thinking goes. For that reason, this former official told me, Bush didn't meet with Putin once he was no longer president and began serving as prime minister. That's technically correct but disingenuous. In fact, just prior to Putin's stepping down, Bush violated his own rule precluding meetings with other heads of state unless there was a concrete deliverable to be achieved: Bush did so by flying out to Putin's vacation home at Sochi, hence delivering much prestige to the Russian leader but nothing for the U.S.

Stent says rightly that it's not realistic to ignore Putin. "To move the agenda forward, you have to meet with both of them," she told me. "It wouldn't make sense not to meet with Putin."

Indeed, rolling back a few years earlier, when Bush's father went to Moscow as U.S. president, he met with both Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his antagonist-for-Soviet-power, Boris Yeltsin, who was then the mere president of the component state of Russia.

Putin is not ignorable, any more than Russia, as usual, keeps itself in the diplomatic game by its willingness to play the outsider.