Even without the tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon this week, it is unlikely that the visit of U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon to Moscow would have generated front-page news. But his meetings -- including direct contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to whom Donilon handed over a personal letter from President Barack Obama -- could end up being quite significant.
After a year in which U.S.-Russia relations have deteriorated, Donilon's visit, which had already been postponed twice, was intended to reverse this decline and break the deadlock created by disagreements over Syria and human rights. Unfortunately, Donilon arrived in Moscow shortly after the first tit-for-tat exchange over dueling laws passed by the U.S. Congress and the Russian Duma. Last week, 18 Russians were sanctioned
under the provisions of the Magnitsky Act, which mandates the State Department to identify those responsible for human rights abuses, starting with those identified to have been involved in the mistreatment of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in police custody. The identified parties are barred from entering the United States and any of their assets held in U.S. institutions are frozen. The Russians then exercised provisions of a mirror law and placed 18 U.S. citizens, including several former officials involved in the creation of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and others who authorized enhanced interrogation techniques for detainees, on a list of those prohibited from entering Russia.
While many of those on the Russian list, including John Yoo, the former assistant U.S. attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration, are not likely to travel to Russia anyway, their inclusion on a Russian blacklist may encourage other countries to emulate Moscow's decision. That could end up creating headaches for the Obama administration, which would find itself under pressure to defend the right to travel without fear of prosecution of individuals involved in Bush administration programs that President Barack Obama has criticized in the past. Given the release of the two lists, Alexey Pushkov, the chairman of the Duma's International Relations Committee, opined that Donilon had chosen an "unsuitable moment" for his visit to Moscow.
However, Donilon's journey seemed to avoid the expected pitfalls. By limiting the list to only 18 names -- admittedly, 18 more than Moscow would have preferred -- the Obama administration,
as Matthew Rojanksy noted, "did not launch a broad new human rights crusade against the Russian leadership, and so the Kremlin reacted with only mildly ruffled feathers." Pragmatists in the Russian government seem to have recognized that the Obama administration cannot completely discount American domestic politics in how it conducts U.S.-Russia relations and apparently are coming to terms with the fact that members of Congress, in their public statements, do not take direction from the White House. As a result, holding the Obama team responsible for the comments of U.S. legislators, particularly those from the opposition party,
is not a productive stance.
One item on Donilon's agenda was well-received in Moscow. Putin's national security assistant, Yuri Ushakov, noted that the U.S. side brought some new initiatives to the table, including "some considerations in the trade and economic area, and they are quite specific proposals." Because bilateral ties lack a "safety net" in terms of strong business relations to help buttress the relationship "when the political situation creates some kind of difficulties," deepening U.S.-Russia economic cooperation would help ground the relationship. The mutual cooperation framework outlined by the Russian state oil company Rosneft and Exxon-Mobil, which would see a U.S. firm gain access to the Russian Arctic while a Russian company would take part in projects in the United States, is an encouraging example of the benefits broader ties could bring both sides.
While no breakthroughs occurred during Donilon’s visit, both sides in their public statements confirmed the "productive" tone of their discussions, which,
as Rojansky notes, "laid the groundwork for bilateral relations to pivot to . . . the long list of shared U.S. and Russian interests, from nuclear security and arms control to enhanced economic ties and implementation of a new visa liberalization agreement, all of which have been on hold thanks to 2012’s election-year politics and the fallout from Magnitsky." It remains to be seen whether the continuing crisis in Northeast Asia, for instance, provides a face-saving way for the U.S. to downgrade missile defense plans in Europe to which Russia has vociferously opposed.
But beyond the U.S.-Russia relationship, the Donilon visit raises another question, which has to do with how the Obama administration itself plans to conduct foreign policy in its second term. After all, when Secretary of State John Kerry met with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in February, Kerry conveyed similar sentiments about wanting to move beyond the irritations in the U.S.-Russia relationship and to find a stronger base for bilateral ties.
That meeting conveyed the impression that the two countries' top diplomats had forged a cordial working relationship, in contrast to Lavrov's sometimes frosty ties with previous secretaries of state. Yet Donilon's visit seems to be laying the groundwork for the White House to directly handle U.S.-Russia relations. Given the clear tendency of the Obama administration to want to centralize decision-making as much as possible, and with reports about the White House
taking its time to staff senior positions at the State Department, the president may want to reduce the influence of Foggy Bottom in how U.S.-Russia relations are managed. On top of that, given both Kerry's continued close ties to Congress and his constitutional obligation to testify before Congressional committees, as well as last year's open-mike incident in Japan, in which Obama was overheard telling outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have more room to maneuver after the elections, Obama may want to keep details of ongoing talks with the Russians under closer wraps.
But Donilon's role also raises the question about the extent to which Kerry, like Clinton before him, speaks with the president's own voice. In his recent inaugural tour of East Asia and in his visit to the Middle East, Kerry was seen as the administration's spokesman. But if the Russians, and other major powers as well, conclude that Donilon is a better conduit to Obama and that Donilon more accurately represents the president's perspective, then Kerry's role as the chief diplomat of the United States could be diminished. Donilon's mandate this past week was to get the U.S.-Russia relationship on a more even keel, but in so doing, the Obama administration will want to avoid the unintended consequence of undermining its new secretary of state.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the Navy or the U.S. government. His weekly WPR column, the Realist Prism, appears every Friday.
Photo: U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Washington D.C., July 28, 2010 (Official White House photo).
