The West and Russia

So here's what I've been saving all this time: in an interview last July with the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad, the Obama administration's ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, said that NATO will be able to expand while maintaining a good relationship with Russia, just like in the 1990s. (The english translation I linked to here differs from the Dutch original in the print version from the July 4-5 issue of the paper, although in both the suggestion is made that NATO expansion does not cause problems with Russia). This is of course not what has happenend. On the contrary, NATO expansion is widely cited as one of the main reasons why relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated the past decade. So what is Daalder saying? What does his answer suggest about the Obama administration's view of relations with Russia? Well, Daalder will speak in The Hague this Thursday, so maybe I'll have an opportunity to ask. But think it basically conveys a pretty hard-nosed view of how one should deal with Moscow, not too different from the way Putin approaches his foreign policy. We'll do business where we can, and that's important, but we're not going to worry too much about how you feel about actions on our part that you know are not meant to threaten you. "Hitting the re-set button" in relations with Moscow doesn't signify a fresh start, at least not in the basic approach. Russia, the administration seems to say, is important, but there are also clear limits to the kind of relationship we can have. Vice president Biden's comments this summer (about Russia's backwardness) are also revealing in this respect. They seem to suggest that because of the way the country is being run under Putin, Russia just won't see the world the way the U.S. and the Europeans (in spite of all their differences) do. This has consequences for what we can achieve with Russia, the administration seems to have concluded. In some areas we just should not even try to satisfy Russian demands, because they're not reasonable, and Moscow can't be satisfied anyway because it sees the West primarily as a rival although not with the same intensity as during the Cold War. NATO expansion is an example, and as Daalder continued in the interview: independent countries have fundamental right to choose their alliances. Of course, this doesn't mean that Georgia and Ukraine will enter the alliance any time soon. A more realistic, hard-nosed policy still does not need to be a stupid policy. Allowing these two countries in soon would certainly anger Russia needlessly, and so I doubt if there will be much action there in the near future (the emphasis is likely going to be on all the things these two countries still need to do to meet the criteria for membership). You can see something similar on the issue of the (anti-Iran) missile defense system planned for deployment in the Czech Republic and Poland, where there are rumors that the administration may put that on hold. The Poles aren't happy, just as they're unhappy with the low-level delegation Washington sent to the World War II commemorations this week where many other countries (Germany, Russia) sent their heads-of-government. But whether that's in any way connected to U.S. Russia policy, I'm not sure. Something for a different post anyway.