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The “Reset” Has Nothing To Do With Promoting Political Reform

Ariel Cohen seems to think the “reset” has something to do with advancing political liberalization in Russia. No wonder he keeps being disappointed in it. The purpose of the “reset” was to remove needless provocations that were generating tensions between the U.S. and Russia, and to find areas of common interest where the two governments […]

Ariel Cohen seems to think the “reset” has something to do with advancing political liberalization in Russia. No wonder he keeps being disappointed in it. The purpose of the “reset” was to remove needless provocations that were generating tensions between the U.S. and Russia, and to find areas of common interest where the two governments could profitably cooperate. It was never supposed to make Russia’s political system more liberal or open or competitive, no one claims that it has, and I doubt that anyone believed that it could. To judge the “reset” to be futile because the Kremlin has banned an opposition party and fashioned its own center-right stalking horse, among other things, is to set a standard that it could never meet and was never supposed to meet. It’s rather like complaining that counter-terrorism doesn’t protect people from malaria, or declaring human rights advocacy to be useless because it doesn’t reduce the unemployment rate.

Cohen is applying an unreasonable standard for judging the “reset,” and unsurprisingly finds that it fails his impossible test. I am guessing that he believed from the beginning that the “reset” was misguided. He apparently thinks that promoting political liberalization in Russia ought to be a major goal of U.S. policy, so it’s no wonder that he would find a policy that doesn’t make this a priority to be flawed. That doesn’t tell us if the policy has succeeded on its own terms or not. What we might ask is whether the continuation of Bush-era practices of provoking Russia, promoting confrontational policies on NATO expansion, and hectoring the government on its abuses would have yielded greater internal political reform. In fact, the consolidation of Russia’s authoritarian populist system took place during the years when the U.S. pursued those very policies, so there’s little reason to think that abandoning the “reset” would lead to anything better in Russian politics. When will we acknowledge that the Russian political scene is not something that we can influence constructively, if we can influence it at all?

Cohen concludes:

As SAIS scholar Donald Jensen and I noted recently, the Obama administration bet on the wrong horse when it engaged Medvedev as the lead contact in its “reset” with Russia. This was a failure to realistically assess who are we dealing with, and who is making key decisions. The United States should take note, as the administration’s “reset” policy demonstrates its futility once again.

This remark about Medvedev is an odd one. Cohen and Jensen did say this in their earlier article, and it still doesn’t make sense. Whatever the real balance of power in the ruling “tandem,” Medvedev occupies the office of president, and he is therefore formally responsible for dealing with other heads of state and making decisions regarding Russian foreign policy. It seems unlikely that the administration could have engaged anyone else as the “lead contact.” If the administration bet on the “wrong horse,” what would the right one have been?

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