Official Russian reaction to Ambassador Michael McFaul’s first few days at work has been negative, and Russia has issued warnings about possible Western military interventions in Syria and Iran. This puzzles Dan Drezner, who asks, “[W]hy is Russia acting more bellicose towards an accommodating policy from United States, whereas China is reacting calmly towards a more aggressive United States?” I’m not sure that bellicose is the right word to describe the Russian response, but here is what I think has been happening. The short answer is that Russian and Chinese reactions are not as different as Drezner suggests, and their reactions are quite predictable.

The U.S. has been more accommodating to Russia on missile defense than Bush was (though the Russians have not been all that pleased with Obama’s alternative), and the arms reduction treaty and WTO accession have been important for both parties, but from the Russian perspective the “reset” has been lopsided and not in their favor. Russia supported the last round of U.N. sanctions on Iran, but that was far as it was prepared to go. There is increasing talk of military action against Iran, which Russia absolutely does not want. As their outgoing ambassador to NATO said last week, Russia would view an attack on Iran as a threat to their security. On Iran, the U.S. hasn’t been accommodating Russian concerns at all. Russia is also not going to be supportive of any policies or interventions that threaten Moscow’s client in Syria. The Russian government is always going to react badly to any meetings between U.S. officials and political dissidents, and that is what happened when Amb. McFaul chose to start his time in office by holding such meetings. It’s unfortunate, since McFaul is one of the people most responsible for the “reset,” and critics of that policy are going to seize on this to say that it has “failed,” when the reality is that these critics don’t want good relations with Russia anyway.

Drezner’s phrasing of his question is a little misleading, since he is mostly discounting all of the things that the U.S. has done in recent months that Russia might see as provocative or irritating while emphasizing the accommodating gestures that occurred in 2009 and 2010. This creates the impression that Russia is rebuffing U.S. generosity, when it is responding predictably and as it usually does when Western governments appear to interfere in its internal affairs and threaten its clients with military action. Because of the initially good relationship between Bush and Putin at the start of the century, there was a fairly common view that the U.S. had been accommodating to Russia during the Bush years, but after 2003 that was completely untrue. Even so, that misunderstanding continued to shape the way that a lot of Americans interpreted Russian actions in the last decade.

We can understand Chinese reactions much the same way. If the U.S. and regional allies were openly discussing how and when to start bombing Burma or North Korea, we could expect the Chinese reaction to be much stronger. When Gary Locke said critical things about China’s human rights record and the political conditions in the country, Beijing objected strongly as it always does. The more confrontational approach that the U.S. has taken in the last year and a half is certainly not to Beijing’s liking, but there are no U.S. policies that directly threaten Chinese clients with attack. Even so, the more confrontational approach will have consequences for the relationship:

However, Rein says Beijing will retaliate over the next six months by making China a more difficult environment for American firms, through means such as taking longer to approve business licenses.

Huang Jing, Visiting Professor and Director, Centre on Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, who agrees with Locke’s view of China political atmosphere, says that further escalation of the issue will hinge on whether the issue rises beyond the ambassador level.

“If it goes higher to the Obama Administration, China’s response will get more aggressive,” said Jing, adding that Beijing is likely to give Locke “the cold shoulder” after this incident.

So the Chinese reaction to Locke’s recent statements is very close to the Russian reaction to McFaul. It probably hasn’t helped in Russia that McFaul was a well-known critic of Putin and advocate of democracy promotion before serving in this administration. Even though McFaul obviously favors good relations with Russia, his background will be used as the Kremlin’s explanation for anything about U.S. policy that it doesn’t like.