Like clockwork, whenever Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev move forward on resetting U.S.-Russia relations, another senior American official is sent on a «reassurance mission» to Washington’s Eastern European and Eurasian partners. In 2009, it was Vice President Joe Biden who emerged as the administration’s perestrakhovshchik («the reinsurer»). After the Moscow summit between Obama and Medvedev last summer, Biden was dispatched to Tbilisi and Kiev. When the Obama administration cancelled the Bush administration’s missile-defense plan (to deploy a system in Poland and the Czech Republic), the vice president traveled to Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic to reaffirm America’s interests and commitments to the region.
With Biden in Baghdad attempting to nudge competing Iraqi factions toward creating a national government, the reassurance mission this time fell to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who followed the Biden script in insisting that the United States can "walk and chew gum at the same time«—meaning that it can pursue better relations with Moscow without sacrificing the interests of Russia’s neighbors. She also raised the issue of democracy and human rights, putting Russia in the category of states exercising a «steel vise» to limit civic and political freedoms.
But the secretary travels to a region now in flux. Ukraine’s elections brought to power Viktor Yanukovych, in many ways the real reason for the improvement in U.S.-Russia relations. Kiev’s new management has extended the lease of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea, formally renounced any intention of seeking NATO membership and worked to restore lucrative economic ties with Russia. This has led to a de-escalation of the geopolitical rivalry for influence between Washington and Moscow in the Eurasian space.
Poland is an interesting case. With Warsaw’s own security concerns assuaged by the U.S.-Polish agreement on military cooperation, and building on the noticeable thaw in Warsaw-Moscow relations after the tragic accident which claimed the lives of so many senior Polish leaders on their way to the memorial at Katyn, the Polish government under Prime Minister Donald Tusk has steadily moved forward on its own version of the «reset» in relations with Russia.
Some Georgian analysts were pleased that Clinton openly referred to Abkhazia and South Ossetia as «occupied» territories during her visit to Georgia. But words are cheap. Tbilisi should confer with its counterparts in the Republic of Cyprus—after nearly four decades of rhetoric (and UN resolutions), the separatist regime in the northern part of the island, backed up firmly by some forty thousand Turkish troops, shows no sign of going away anytime soon. The United States is not going to put the territorial integrity of Georgia at the heart of its relationship with Russia, just as it was never willing to put the Cyprus question on the front burner of its relationship with Turkey. The Obama administration seems to have come to the conclusion that fundamentally changing the geopolitical and geoeconomic orientations of the states surrounding Russia is a task that the United States cannot and should not undertake—both because Washington lacks the resources to do this (and the Europeans will not take up this burden) and because Moscow’s cooperation on a number of international-security issues is still required. It has thus shifted its approach to Russia’s neighbors toward ensuring that they retain sufficient links to the West in order to give them a greater degree of independence and leverage vis-à-vis Russia, rather than taking active measures to break Russia’s remaining tools of influence. Moreover, by again ignoring the Georgian request for rearmament to replace what was lost in the 2008 dust-up with Russia, the administration is signaling that it will not support neighbors against Moscow in violent conflicts where the U.S. has little or nothing at stake.
Nothing, of course, is permanent. We can also view the secretary’s tour as a form of contingency planning—keeping ties intact if the U.S.-Russia reset should derail. And, from Moscow’s perspective, even a reduced U.S. role in Eurasia—continued economic support for Georgia, a more limited missile-defense partnership with Poland, an ongoing U.S. military presence in Central Asia—is not welcome, if perhaps more tolerable. But the administration has moved to a more targeted application of U.S. influence in the region, and seems prepared to accept the reality of a resurgence of Moscow’s position. All the rhetoric on this current «reassurance tour» cannot mask this reality.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev, a senior editor at The National Interest, is a professor of national-security studies at the U.S. Naval War College.
