Samuel Charap argues for the “reset” with Russia along much the same lines I did last week:

What it was, and remains, is an effort to work with Russia on key national security priorities where U.S. and Russian interests overlap, while not hesitating to push back on disagreements with the Kremlin at the same time. The idea is that engagement, by opening up channels of communication and diminishing antagonism, should — over time — allow Washington to at least influence problematic Russian behavior and open up more space in Russia’s tightly orchestrated domestic politics.

At the core of the reset policy is a determination that “linkage” — making bilateral cooperation on a given issue dependent on a given country’s behavior on other matters — is an ineffective instrument when dealing with states that are neither ally nor enemy. That’s especially true for great powers like China and Russia, which, whether Americans like it or not, play a major role on global issues that matter.

The usual tactic that the “reset-bashers” use when attacking this policy is to point to some Russian government move that Americans find objectionable, and declare on the basis of this or that episode that “the reset has failed.” Of course, what bothers the “reset-bashers” is precisely that the policy has not failed and keeps working, and their preferred policy of confrontation has been shelved because it already failed and made the “reset” necessary. These critics remain wedded to the notion of Russia as a neo-imperial power and a threat to regional stability, which is profound misunderstanding of post-Soviet Russia. Thomas Barnett comments on Dmitri Trenin’s new Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story*, and explains that the reality is quite different:

Meanwhile, America moved in militarily from the south as part of its global war on terror, and China progressively encroached — in an economic sense — on Russia’s “near abroad” in Central Asia. To Moscow’s credit, Trenin notes, it has not moved toward any remilitarization of its relationship with the outside world. If anything, the military reform movement begun in 2008 signals Moscow’s near-complete abandonment of the field of great-power warfare, save for a nuclear deterrent that it nonetheless continues to reduce in agreement with the United States, the one power it truly fears.

One reason why the “reset” has been possible is that Russian ambitions are fairly modest. Barnett writes:

Instead, for the first time in modern history, we have a Russia that just wants to be Russia, and not an imperial project.

Most of the disagreements between the U.S. and Russia today concern how much U.S. and other influence Russia can accept along its borders. The “reset” is an indirect acknowledgment that the U.S. had pushed too hard to acquire influence in post-Soviet space. Washington seems to have recognized for now that this push for influence and the reaction to it were ultimately harmful to U.S. interests and the interests of Russia and its neighbors.

* A review of Trenin’s book in The Financial Times can be found here.