By MICHAEL CROWLEY
While Obama and Clinton ridicule Trump's vow to 'get
along great' with the Russian leader, the administration is quietly trying to
open a dialogue of its own.
Donald Trump was the
bogeyman of this week’s Democratic national convention. But placing a close
second to Trump was Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. Democrats linked the
two bad guys together, hammering Trump for his past words of praise for Putin
as a “strong leader” and his claim that the U.S. would “get along great” with
Russia if he is elected.
“He cozies up to Putin,” said President Barack Obama.
Vice President Joe Biden denounced Trump for “embracing dictators like Vladimir
Putin.” And on Thursday night Hillary Clinton herself said she would defend
NATO allies against any threat, “including from Russia.”
But just the day before,
on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry sat down with Russia’s foreign
minister, Sergei Lavrov. On their agenda was a U.S. proposal to cooperate with
Russia in Syria, which he presented in a meeting with Putin at the Kremlin
earlier this month. And on Thursday, a senior Obama administration official
reminded a national security conference that better relations with Moscow,
something Trump has been criticized for saying would be “a great thing,” remains
a core goal of U.S. foreign policy.
“We do not want to be adversarial with the Russians,”
said Elissa Slotkin, acting assistant secretary of defense for international
security affairs, in a panel at the Aspen Security Conference. “I think, I
hope, that the message that Russia is receiving now is that we want to talk to
you. We’ll send John Kerry to Moscow. We are open, we are ready to talk to
you.”
To be sure, Obama
officials have low expectations about the prospects for constructive dealings
with Putin, who has pursued an aggressive foreign policy while clamping down on
dissent at home. They are also outraged by what they believe to be a Kremlin’s
hand in the cyber theft and release of Democratic National Committee emails.
(Kerry sternly raised the issue with Lavrov on Tuesday, U.S. officials said.)
And Slotkin made clear that Washington’s offers of dialogue are part of a
“balance” that includes military muscle-flexing and steps like recent U.S.
reinforcements of NATO’s eastern flank. “We have to have a twin
deter-and-dialogue message,” Slotkin said.
But some Democratic national security veterans fear
that a potentially dangerous level of hostility to Russia has emerged in recent
weeks. They say the growing rivalry between Washington and Moscow, stoked by campaign
rhetoric aimed at discrediting Trump, may be taking on a life of its own,
making global problems harder to solve and increasing the risk of an accidental
conflict — potentially even a nuclear one.
“We’re sleepwalking into a new Cold War,” said William
Perry, who served as Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1996,
an era of relatively warm relations between the U.S. and Russia. “There’s
hardly any debate about it, and the public doesn’t understand the danger.”
Perry said he is particularly concerned that poor
communication, an arms buildup on both sides, and jangled nerves increase the
possibility of an accidental or unintentional nuclear confrontation. “In case
anyone thinks that’s an academic concern, I can tell you that’s not academic,”
Perry said, recalling a night when we was awoken at 3 a.m. by a night duty
officer and informed that radar was showing hundreds of Russian missiles en
route to the U.S.
At the moment, the Obama administration’s top worry is
not nuclear war but ending the Syrian civil war, which has left more than
400,000 people dead, fueled the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and flooded the
Middle East and Europe with refugees. With Obama’s approval, Kerry has been
working closely with Lavrov — the two men have spoken dozens of times this year
— to strike an agreement that would begin limited military cooperation between
Washington and Moscow in Syria. Many U.S. officials believe the Syrian conflict
can only be settled with Russian assistance.
Under the agreement, the U.S. would provide the
Russians — who are aiding the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad
against an armed opposition that includes the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, but
also more moderate rebels — with intelligence and targeting information against
Islamic radicals. In return, the U.S. would expect Moscow to use its its
leverage over Assad to halt Syrian military strikes against civilian areas.
Obama officials insist that any cooperation with
Russia would not be based on trust, but contingent on verifiable steps by
Moscow and Damascus. Their goal is to alleviate civilian suffering and advance
a potential political settlement to the Syrian conflict.
But the proposal has drawn strong internal opposition.
Two weeks ago an anonymous critic leaked the text of the Kerry’s plan to the Washington Post.
Opponents say it could facilitate Russian strikes on so-called moderate Syrian
rebels trained by the CIA. They also fear that it would strengthen Assad’s
position, thereby extending the conflict.
One former U.S. official who has worked on Russia
issues called that leak a dramatic display of dissent: “There’s a rift. It’s
really bad.”
More generally, skeptics of dialogue with Moscow — who
are mostly found at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, but also within the
State Department — warn that simply talking to Putin rewards and may even
encourage his bad behavior. Giving the Russian a seat at the international
table feeds his wish to re-establish his country, whose economy is smaller than
South Korea’s, as a top global power, and gives him stature at home. If Putin
thinks he will be invited to solve problems he has caused, the fear is that he
will gin up more of them.
After Putin’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean
peninsula, Obama threatened to “isolate” Russia, and undercut its “status in
the world.” The U.S. has imposed economic sanctions on Russia, and on several
Putin allies, over Ukraine.
But in recent months
Obama has spoken frequently with his Russian counterpart. The two men met three
times last fall, and spoke most recently in a July 6 phone call. Kerry visited
Moscow five days later — his second trip to Russia this year and his fourth in
the past year.
Feeding the concerns of hard-liners in Washington, the
Kremlin seems to delight in these contacts. At a May 6 press briefing, Russian
foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova teasingly recited an English-language
poem about Kerry’s contacts with Moscow, modifying a work by the 19th century
Scottish poet Robert Burns titled “My Heart’s in the Highlands.”
“His heart is in Moscow, his heart is not there. His
heart is in Moscow, chasing a bear. Chasing not Grizzly but Kremlinese. His
heart is in Moscow wherever John is,” Zahharova said, concluding with a laugh.
Whether or not it’s true
of Kerry, that verse does not apply to U.S. intelligence and cyber security
officials, who are doing battle with aggressive Russian cyber espionage and
hacking. Also speaking in Aspen Thursday, National Intelligence Director James
Clapper said the U.S. is in a “version of war” with Moscow in those areas.
Slotkin acknowledged the many tough obstacles to
dialogue with Russia. “How do you get the balance right? Are we being too
charitable and giving them too many opportunities to come back to the table? Or
are we providing such a high level of deterrence that we’re potentially
provoking them? That’s the fundamental question,” Slotkin said.
Some European officials have also warned about the
risk of provocation. After a major NATO military exercise in Poland last month
that simulated a confrontation with Russia, Germany’s foreign minister
expressed his unease.
“What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation
further through sabre-rattling and warmongering,” said the minister,
Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew
an old confrontation,” he said, adding that it would be “fatal to search only
for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
Even Obama’s former Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel,
has issued a similar warning.
“If I were secretary of Defense today, I’d be careful
with this,” Hagel said at a May 11 media round table hosted by the Atlantic
Council. “We can find ourselves very quickly in another Cold War buildup here,
and that really makes no sense for either side.”
U.S. officials say they believe Russia likely
understands that campaign rhetoric doesn’t fully reflect American policy, and
that dialogue with Moscow can continue even as party leaders hammer at Putin.
But the tough talk is likely making public opinion more hostile towards Russia,
encouraging harder-line policies from members of Congress.
The stakes are highest when it comes to nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, said Sam Nunn, a former Georgia Democrat
who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee when the Soviet Union collapsed
in 1991. In the following years, Nunn led cooperation with Moscow to that
locked or dismantle poorly-secured nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
But that cooperation has slowed in recent years, and
this spring Russia declined to attend Obama’s annual nuclear security summit in
Washington, developments that Nunn calls troubling. “The United States and
Russia cannot afford to treat dialogue as a bargaining chip” given their huge
remaining nuclear stockpiles, Nunn said.
“Even when we have profound differences, we still have
to communicate,” Nunn said. “I think we are in danger of losing sight of that.”
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