Four years ago, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. used an audience of world leaders at an annual security conference in Munich to propose a “reset” with Russia, the Obama administration’s first big foreign policy statement. But as Mr. Biden arrives in Germany for the same conference this weekend, the United States is quietly adopting a new approach to its old cold war rival: the cold shoulder.
The intense engagement on the reset led to notable achievements, including the New Start nuclear arms treaty and Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization. But after more than a year of deteriorating relations, the administration now envisions a period of disengagement, according to government officials and outside analysts here and in Washington.
The pullback — which may well be a topic of discussion when Mr. Biden meets with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on the sidelines of the conference — is a response to months of intensifying political repression in Russia since Vladimir V. Putin returned to the presidency last May and a number of actions perceived by Washington as anti-American.
Because American officials do not want to worsen the relationship and still hope for cooperation, they declined to publicly describe the plans. But within the administration it is taken for granted that the relationship with Russia is far less of a priority.
“We have real differences, and we don’t hide them,” said Tony Blinken, who has served as Mr. Biden’s national security adviser and is now joining the president’s national security team.
Briefing reporters before the Germany trip, Mr. Blinken said: “We have differences over human rights and democracy. We have differences over — in a number of areas that have been in the media in recent days and weeks.”
The distancing began with the recent withdrawal by the United States from the “civil society working group,” one of 20 panels created in 2009 to carry out the reset between Moscow and Washington under an umbrella organization known as the Obama-Medvedev Commission.
If that step was barely perceptible outside diplomatic circles, the strategy will soon become far more obvious. American officials say President Obama will decline an invitation — publicly trumpeted by Mr. Lavrov and the Russian news media — to visit Moscow on his own this spring. Instead, he will wait until September, when the G-20 conference of the world’s largest economies is scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg, Russia.
And while Secretary of State John Kerry has yet to select his first overseas destination, officials said Russia had been ruled out.
The main goal seems to be to send a message that the United States views much of its relationship with Russia as optional, and while pressing matters will continue to be handled on a transactional basis, Washington plans to continue criticizing Russia on human rights and other concerns. As for the anti-Americanism, the new approach might be described as shrug and snub.
Nevertheless, Mr. Blinken said there was real potential to work through the differences. And American officials are clearly betting that Mr. Putin desires a prominent role on the world stage and will ultimately decide to re-engage.
But the chances of that seem slim. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, warned that a pullback would be a shirking of American responsibility to work with Russia to maintain global stability. He said that Russia wanted to improve economic ties and build a stronger relationship, but that the United States must stay out of Russia’s affairs.
“We have heard numerous times the word in Washington that Russia’s domestic affairs are not satisfactory,” Mr. Peskov said. “Unfortunately these voices cannot be taken into account here, and we cannot agree with them. We are a genuine democratic country, and we are taking care of ourselves.”
In the nearly three years since the signing of the New Start treaty, followed by Russia’s vote two months later at the Security Council in support of sanctions on Iran, American officials say only one major thing has changed: the return of Mr. Putin to the presidency.
Confronted by the emergence of a potent political opposition movement among Moscow’s urban middle class, Mr. Putin has taken steps since his inauguration last May to suppress political dissent. Many of those steps were also seen in Washington as anti-American and undermining human rights.
These included the prosecution and jailing of members of the punk band Pussy Riot; the decision to end more than 20 years of cooperation on public health programs and civil society initiatives run by the United States Agency for International Development; cancellation of a partnership to dismantle unconventional weapons; and approval of legislative initiatives clamping down on pro-democracy groups and other nonprofit organizations.
The final straw appeared to be a law signed by Mr. Putin in December prohibiting the adoption of Russian children by American citizens, which the Kremlin said was retaliation for a new American law punishing Russian human rights violators. Senior Obama administration officials viewed the adoption ban not only as geopolitically disproportionate, but so utterly cruel in denying orphans the chance to join a family that it left many speechless and some near tears.
That the Russian government would put children in the political cross-fire convinced American officials that they were not confronting political theatrics, as they believed when Mr. Putin was running for re-election, but rather an increasingly idiosyncratic government driven by Russian domestic concerns, especially Mr. Putin’s fears of popular unrest.
“It’s a feeling of frustration that Putin and company are unnecessarily imposing strains on the Russian and American relationship,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser, now a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a telephone interview.
“I would not construe that as saying that Russia needs to be downgraded, or is irrelevant,” Mr. Brzezinski said, but that “we do not need it for everything.”
Even Russia’s most critical role in the global economy, as a major supplier of oil and gas — particularly to American allies in Europe — has ebbed, given the rise of the United States as a major producer of shale gas and the return of Iraq as a big oil producer.
At the same time, outside its borders, Russia remains indisputably relevant on a range of global issues, including the threats and opportunities from climate change in the Arctic and the political uncertainty in North Korea, that prevent the United States from pulling back too far.
“We can manage these issues effectively together, or end up shouting at each other,” said James F. Collins, who was ambassador to Russia from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. “Anybody who suggests we are going to disengage and let them stew just doesn’t get it. We will have to deal with them.”
Matthew Bryza, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Eurasian affairs, said it would be best to deal dispassionately with Moscow.
“Every American president in my career has come into office thinking that they are going to be the great communicator that makes a breakthrough with Russia,” Mr. Bryza said. “As their terms have continued, every president has been disappointed.”
He added: “Russia behaves like Russia. Russia pursues its own hard-core national interests. That is realpolitik. We should de-sentimentalize our relations.”
Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington, and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin.
sourche: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/world/europe/another-reset-of-relations-with-russia-in-obamas-second-term.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=world
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