One could argue that the job of ambassador has been made obsolete by macrotrends in technology and politics.  Oh, sure, maybe traditional envoys from great powers still play an important role in smaller countries that don't normally capture much attention in major capitals.  Among the great powers, however, one  could posit that ambassadors are superfluous.  In a world in which heads of government and foreign ministers have multiple direct means of communication, in which you can't go a week without some big global summit, and in which leaders are wary of confiding with ambassadors because they'll quit and then run for head of government that's just another press leak waiting to happen, what can ambassadors really do?  Will we see the likes of Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, or even Anatoly Dobrynin ever again? 

Probably not, but even in the 21st century, great power ambassadors to other great powers still serve a purpose.  In the case of American ambassadors to Russia and China, they can excel at getting under the skin of their host country governments.  Gary Locke seems to be doing that pretty well in China, in no small part by being an ethnic Chinese politician that doesn't seem to be behaving like Chinese politicians. 

In the case of Russia, there's the new ambassador Michael McFaul, who before this was in Obama's National Security Council and one of the architects o the "reset" policy, and before that was a professor of political science at Stanford (full disclosure:  Mike's first year at Stanford as a professor was my last there as a grad student, and he's been a friend to me ever since). 

The New York Times' Ellen Barry, following up on the excellent reportage of FP's Josh Rogin, has a long story on how McFaul is really pissing off official Moscow.  The good parts version: 

 In the annals of American diplomacy, few honeymoons have been shorter than the one granted to Michael A. McFaul, who arrived in Russia on Jan. 14 as the new American ambassador.

Toward the end of the ambassador’s second full day at work, a commentator on state-controlled Channel 1 suggested during a prime-time newscast that Mr. McFaul was sent to Moscow to foment revolution. A columnist for the newspaper Izvestia chimed in the next day, saying his appointment signaled a return to the 18th century, when “an ambassador’s participation in intrigues and court conspiracies was ordinary business.”....

Mr. McFaul, 48, has arrived in a city churning with conjecture and paranoia. The public attack illustrates how edgy the Kremlin is about the protest movement that has taken shape, turning Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s re-election campaign into a nerve-racking test for the government. It also reveals how fragile relations are between Washington and Mr. Putin’s government, which has repeatedly accused the State Department of orchestrating the demonstrations.

If the blast of venom that greeted Mr. McFaul was intended as a warning to maintain a low profile in his new role, he seems unlikely to comply. At the end of his first week, he was exuberant, saying his goal was to “destroy cold war stereotypes,” especially misstatements about the United States’ intentions in Russia.

“I know I’m just going to go in full force, I’ve got nothing to hide, and we feel very confident in our policy and in selling our policy,” said Mr. McFaul, a native of Bozeman, Mont., who spent much of his career in academia. He does not need to fret over his next diplomatic posting, he added, because there will not be one.

“I ain’t going nowhere else,” he said, with a big smile. “This is it. I am not a career diplomat. And so I am here to do that in a very, very aggressive way.”

As someone who spent a short stint in DC, I recognize the sentiment McFaul expressed in that last paragraph.  The exit option is one of the greatest assets an academic has if they enter the foreign policymaking world.  Of course, that option can also encourage policymakers to stray way outside the reservation, so it kind of depends upon which academic has been appointed.  In the case of McFaul, I'm very confident he will use this power for the forces of good. 

Read the whole story -- and check out McFaul's (Russian language) blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube greeting to Russians.  Gonna be some interesting Web 2.0 diplomacy. 

Developing....

Yesterday I appeared on TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss Niall Ferguson's latest book, which argues that the West in general and the United States in particular is losing its mojo. 

The theme of Western decline was still running through my head as I perused the New York Times website this AM.  In his Damascus dispatch today, Neil MacFarquhar dutifully details the Syrian government's position on the cause of the sustained unpleasantness in the country:

Rather than responding to the motivations and demands behind the antigovernment uprising, opponents and political analysts say, the government has stubbornly clung to the narrative that it is besieged by a foreign plot....

Senior government officials — including Mr. Assad — and their supporters reel off a strikingly uniform explanation for the uprisings, blaming foreign agents and denying official responsibility for the violence.

“Most of the people that have been killed are supporters of the government, not the vice versa,” Mr. Assad said in an interview with ABC News broadcast on Wednesday. In the interview, Mr. Assad denied ordering a crackdown. “We don’t kill our people,” he said. “No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person.”

Virtually no one in the Syrian government links the uprisings to the sentiment inspiring revolutions across the Arab world, to a public fed up with the status quo. Instead, they say the United States and Israel, allied with certain quisling Arab governments, are plotting to destroy Syria, to silence its lone, independent Arab voice and to weaken its regional ally, Iran. To achieve this aim, they are arming and financing Muslim fundamentalist mercenaries who enter Syria from abroad, Syrian officials say.

“Syria is one of the last secular regimes in the Arab world, and they are targeting Syria,” said Buthaina Shaaban, a presidential political and media adviser, warning that the West would rue the day that it enabled Islamist regimes.

And then I read David Herszenhorn's update on Vladimir Putin's thinking on the causes behind Russian protests earlier this week:

With opposition groups still furious over parliamentary elections that international observers said were marred by cheating, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday accused Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of instigating protests by baselessly criticizing the vote as “dishonest and unfair” and he warned that Russia needed to protect against “interference” by foreign governments in its internal affairs.

“I looked at the first reaction of our U.S. partners,” Mr. Putin said in remarks to political allies. “The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers.”

“She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Mr. Putin continued. “They heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

Mr. Putin’s assertions of foreign meddling and his vow to protect Russian “sovereignty” came after three days in which the Russian authorities have moved forcefully to tamp down on efforts to protest the elections, arresting hundreds of demonstrators and deploying legions of pro-Kremlin young people in Moscow to occupy public squares and to chant, beat drums and drown out the opposition.

Wow, I had no idea that the United States was this powerful!!  Hillary Clinton is apparently capable of getting thousands of Russians in the streets with just a few sentences. 

Now clearly, actual American influence over events in Russia and Syria is pretty limited.  Still, if the perception of power is a form of power in and of itself, I wonder if the Secretary of State -- perhaps after consuming too much egg nog at the State Department holiday reception -- would be tempted to give the following address to the diplomatic press corps: 

I'd like to take this oppportunity today to admit that the United States, is, in fact, responsible for the nine-month uprising in Syria and the recent unrest in Russia.  Oh, hell, who am I kidding -- we're responsible for the entire Arab Spring!  It's true, the whole thing started about a year ago, at the Policy Planning Staff's Secret Santa party.  One of them said, "hey, you know what would really advance American interests in the Middle East?  If we destabilized secular authoritarian despots and empowered Islamist parties across the region!  Those parties would really be more likely to back American policies in the region!  Oh, and we should start with Egypt too, because of their peace treaty with Israel."  

That initiative was sooooo successful that, again, my Foreign Service Officers came up with the brilliant concept of instigating the Occupy Wall Street movement, so we could demonstrate a template for how protests should naturally germinate in other countries.  Did you like how some of the policy forces overreacted to those movements?  Yeah, that was the State Department's idea too.  We were hoping to encourage authoritarian leaders to overreact and crack down -- because without our inspiration, they would never have brutally repressed on their own. 

Now, some of you might wonder, "if the United States was really this all powerful, why not target countries that pose even bigger security concerns, like Iran, or China, or even Venezuela?"  Well, they're next.  Think of the Middle East and Russia as just the out-of-town premieres before a show gets on Broadway.  We've been working out the kinks to our methods, and now we think we've really perfected a universally applicable formula to apply to all our enemies in one fell swoop.  Remember the baptism scene in The Godfather?  Well, Hugo Chavez will wish he was Moe Green when we're through with him. 

Happy holidays, authoritarian cabals!! 

Travel and the associated jet lag from the travel have left me a bit befuddled and confused about the foreign policy discourse of the last week. I keep having to re-watch or re-read things just to make sure I'm understanding them correctly. I mean, did Rick Perry actually give the answer he gave on the Pakistani nukes question? Did John Mearsheimer seriously claim that a self-hating Jew can provide an accurate analysis about the state of modern Judaism?

My biggest confusion, however, is over the announced Putin-Medvedev switcheroo over the weekend. Indeed, my confusion operates at many levels. First, I was flummoxed that, well, any Russia-watcher was surprised by this move. Second, I was at a loss as to explain why any Washington-watcher would be fretting about the effect of this move on the "reset" of Russian-American relations. As Walter Russell Mead correctly observed today, "There is a good case for a businesslike US-Russian relationship no matter who runs Russia."

What has really confused me, however, is the possibility that this planned transition might hit a few bumps in the road.... like the actual departure of a powerful cabinet official:

Dmitry Medvedev, Russian president, sacked the country's finance minister on Monday, in the clearest sign yet that a deal between Mr Medvedev and prime minister Vladimir Putin to swap jobs next year is provoking a furious backlash in Moscow political circles.

Alexei Kudrin, the finance minister, had said at the weekend he would refuse to serve under Mr Medvedev if he became prime minister next year. In dismissing the mutinous minister, Mr Medvedev sought to demonstrate that he still has authority, analysts said - despite the humiliation of voluntarily standing down as president in favour of Mr Putin.

Mr Kudrin, a fiscal conservative, is respected by investors and widely credited with seeing Russia through the 2008-09 financial crisis. His dismissal came after Russian financial markets closed but the rouble earlier lost more than 1 per cent against the dollar, partly due to apprehension about the conflict with Mr Medvedev....

At a meeting of a government commission in the town of Dmitrovgrad on Monday, the two men faced off when Mr Medvedev told Mr Kudrin that his statement on Saturday "appears improper ... and can in no way be justified. Nobody has revoked discipline and subordination."

"If, Alexei Leonidovich, you disagree with the course of the president, there is only one course of action and you know it: to resign."

Mr Kudrin responded with a jibe: "I will take a decision only after having consulted the prime minister."

"You can get advice from whoever you want, with the prime minister if you want," snapped back Mr Medvedev. "But as long as I am president, these decisions I will take myself."

A few hours later Mr Medvdev's spokesperson announced Mr Kudrin's departure for reasons "that were laid out clearly in the commission meeting".

The humiliating public swipe from Mr Kudrin is a measure of how far Mr Medvedev's authority has eroded since he announced at the annual congress of the ruling United Russia party on Saturday that he would stand down next year to make way for a return of Mr Putin for a third term as president, assuming the role of prime minister under Mr Putin.

Could this kind of elite discord lead to even greater political discord in Russia? Reading Joshua Tucker's collection of expert commentary, as well as Julia Ioffe's FP observations, my initial answer would be no. Kudrin quit because he wanted to be the next prime minister and was therefore the odd man out of the Putin-Medvedev exchange. That would not seem to be a great foundation for a mass backlash against this move.

On the other hand.... in the case of Russia, mass backlash might be less important than elite backlash, and Kudrin is hardly the only member of the elite to be on the outside of the Putin-Medvedev axis. The self-interested reasons for the backlash matter less than the very public signal that the leadership transition is not playing out so smoothly after all.

In the short term, the most likely outcome is that this contretemps will blow over, and the worst-case scenario for Putin is that he decides to ditch Medvedev for someone a Kudrin clone/deputy. In the longer term, however, I do wonder if this move will push the Russian regime towards greater instability.

So, as I said, I'm pretty confused right now. What do you think?

As I'm typing this very sentence, it looks like the New START treaty will be passed.  This happened even though GOP arms control pointman Senator Jon Kyl acted like a petulant child for the last month came out in opposition to the treaty (along with Mitch McConnell). 

Slate's David Weigel Fred Kaplan has an excellent summary of why the GOP leadership failed to halt ratification, even though the threshold for blocking it was only 34 senators: 

If a Republican were president, the accord would have excited no controversy and at most a handful of diehard nays. As even most of its critics conceded, the treaty's text contains nothing objectionable in substance.

There were two kinds of opponents in this debate. The first had concerns that President Barack Obama would use the treaty as an excuse to ease up on missile defense and the programs to maintain the nuclear arsenal. In recent weeks, Obama and his team did as much to allay these concerns as any hawk could have hoped—and more than many doves preferred.

So that left the second kind of opponent: those who simply wanted to deny Obama any kind of victory. The latter motive was clearly dominant in this debate (emphasis added)

Let's step back here for a second and contemplate the truth and meaning of that last sentence.  Is it true?  Kevin Drum and Greg Sargent clearly think the answer is yes, and they've got some damning quotes to back up their argument.  Rich Lowry is particularly revealing on this point: 

As the sense builds that ratification is inevitable, Republicans are lining up to get on the “right side.” Lamar Alexander’s support, noted below, is a crucial sign of which way the wind is blowing, although he’ll probably be the only member of the Republican leadership to vote for it. At least Jon Kyl was able to get more money for modernization and that letter from President Obama making assurances on missile defense. Otherwise, this is a dismaying rout (emphasis added)

Um... at best, this is a dismaying rout for the GOP, not the USA.   As Weigel Kaplan points out, however, it's not elements of the GOP didn't favor the treaty:  

The task of Obama and the Democratic floor managers, Sens. Harry Reid and John Kerry, was to convince enough Republicans to view the issue not as political gamesmanship but as an urgent matter of national security. Hence their rallying of every retired general, former defense secretary, and other security specialist—Republican and Democrat—that anyone had ever heard of. (At one point, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she might vote for the treaty if former President George H.W. Bush endorsed it. A few days later, Bush released a statement doing just that.)

A few other things happened as well.  Beyond the U.S. foreign policy establishment, the Eastern European foreign policy establishment got behind the treaty.  There's also the fact that some GOP senators are still nursing a grudge against other GOP senators.  Josh Rogin also points out that the treaty always had GOP supporters.  And, finally, the Obama administration wisely decided to go to the mat on what was a rather unobjectionable treaty, no matter how hard John Bolton bloviates on the matter.  

What does this mean going forward?  In my bloggingheads with Matthew Yglesias last week, I was optimistic that Kyl's blatant obstructionism was a step too far, and that maybe this will lead to a little less needless obstructionism when it comes foreign policy.  There's also the fact that the American people seems to really like what's happened during the lane duck session.  Perhaps the GOP legislators that want to get re-elected will take note of that fact and decide that some cooperaion with the Obama administration on things like KORUS and arms control are a decent idea (there's also the fact that more GOP legislators from Democrat-friendly territory means more moderate Republicans). 

That said, the nuclear negotiations with Russia only get harder from here.  Plus, my gut tells me that the GOP leadership will become even more obsteperous going forward in order to bolster their reputation as the really tough bargaining party and eliminate the bitter aftertaste they're feeling from the lame duck session. 

What do you think? 

So I see that Jackson Diehl's Washington Post column attracted a lot of eyeballs yesterday.  He argued that Obama thinks that the same things that were important 25 years ago are important now.  Diehl closes with the following:

[T]his administration is notable for its lack of grand strategy - or strategists. Its top foreign-policy makers are a former senator, a Washington lawyer and a former Senate staffer. There is no Henry Kissinger, no Zbigniew Brzezinski, no Condoleezza Rice; no foreign policy scholar.

Instead there is Obama, who likes to believe that he knows as much or more about policy than any of his aides - and who has been conspicuous in driving the strategies on nuclear disarmament and Israeli settlements. "I personally came of age during the Reagan presidency," Obama wrote in "The Audacity of Hope." Yes, and it shows.

Oh, snap.

I'm shocked, shocked to discover that conservatives think this critique is really spot-on and liberals find it absurd.   Four thoughts on this:

1)  If one takes Diehl's list of grand strategists as given, I'd have to conclude that presidents do much better without one.  If you reflect on the Nixon, Carter and Bush 43 administrations, only one of them had a grand strategy that looks even semi-respectable at the present moment.  Maybe grand strategists don't lead to great foreign policy (then again, I'm not sure I'd take Diehl's list as given -- Condi Rice is many things, but no one thought of her as a grand strategist.  Even if she was, I don't think the Buswh administration's foreign policy followed this blueprint at all.  And, let's face it, the word "strategist" is already in mortal danger of being demeaned into nothingness). 

2)  Having edited a book on the subject, I've become more and more dubious of those who complain about grand strategy in foreign policy.  Bemoaning the lack of a grand strategy is the first refuge of the foreign policy critic.  Often, it's not that the president in question lacks a strategic vision, it's that the president has a grand strategy that the critic doesn't like.   If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that it is possible to have a coherent, well-articulated grand strategy that is nevertheless completely counterproductive in advancing the national interest. 

3)  Even though it's possible to nitpick Diehl's op-ed to death, there's a grain of truth buried in those last few paragraphs.  No one disputes that Obama has a White House-centric foreign policymaking process, but I'm not sure Obama's White House staff merits that allocation of power.  The recent shifts in foreign policy personnel have narrowed the foreign policy circle even more than before.  And there are real mismatches between the Obama administration's grand strategy and its current foreign policy priorities. 

4)  Ordinarily, none of this would matter.  So long as really stupid policies are avoided, I don't think that grand strategies matter for most  countries most of the time -- what matters are good fundamentals like a robust economy.  The thing is, this is one of those rare moments when strategy does matter.  Any time you have a systemic shock -- like a great power war or a massive global recession -- you get massive uncertainty about the future direction of world politics.  Add on the fact that there's now a potential challenger to the most powerful state in the world, and there are a lot of key actors in the world wondering what's going to happen next. 

These are moments when a well-articulated and executed gramd strategy can reassure allies and signal possible rivals about a country's future course of action.  And I'm unconvinced that the Obama administration's existing strategy documents provide any kind of clear signal at all. 

What do you think? 

FP's own Steve LeVine has an essay at The New Republic that notes the Obama administration's efforts to dial down U.S. intervention in Central Asia. LeVine is clearly ambivalent about this policy shift: 

President Obama's public rationale for this shift is clear. He wants arms control agreements, victory in Afghanistan, and the denuclearization of Iran -- and Russia has a role to play in all three. Reset has lubricated new agreements with Russia that enable, for example, the speedy overflight of U.S. military planes across the North Pole and on to Kyrgyzstan, in support of the war in Afghanistan; the sale of Russian military helicopters, to be paid for by the Pentagon, to the Afghan government; and a tighter financial squeeze on Iran. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, absent any other fulfillment of Obama’s campaign vow to win hearts and minds abroad through civility, the "reset" is Exhibit Number One that good manners work.

In addition, Obama officials believe that, while the great-power-rivalry strain of geopolitics in the region may have been necessary in the 1990s, it is now obsolete. When Heslin's policy was initially drawn up, its concrete objective was to provide the Caucasian and Central Asian states with a financial channel independent of Moscow's grip. That meant the construction of energy pipelines to alternative markets, especially the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline from the Caucasus to Turkey. But that policy has largely succeeded: The full flow of oil Baku-Ceyhan began in 2006. The Central Asian states of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are not linked in -- and given their cautious nature, they are unlikely to risk Russia’s ire by agreeing to be connected by pipeline with the West -- but they have also developed alternate export routes through China, which has constructed its own pipelines that serve precisely the same function....

President Obama must realize that his new policy ultimately represents a trade-off. While the geopolitical gains from deemphasizing the Great Game have been substantial, the local costs of America's hands-off approach have been quite high. In Kyrgyzstan, which is still embroiled in ethnic strife, deferring to Russia has meant leaving a largely powerless government to its own devices. Azerbaijan has nervously struck up negotiations over natural-gas with Russia’s Gazprom in order to forestall any possible trouble of its own with Moscow. And the United States has adopted a far different approach toward local leaders, swallowing Kazakhstan's backsliding on what they believed was the country's private commitment to release imprisoned opposition political activist Yevgeny Zhovtis, and deepening relations with Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov, probably the most brutal leader in the former Soviet Union. In other words, the reset has a serious downside: By deciding that the politics of Central Asia are what they are, Washington risks losing its justly earned reputation as the region's protector of political and economic independence.

From a U.S. perspective, this is fine. Let Russia and China jockey for influence. Geographic proximity and the 'stans' own geopolitical interests will prevent either great power from establishing hegemony over the region. This will allow them to maintain as much political autonomy as possible when bordering two civilizational entities. 

I can't get too worked up about this. First, Central Asia is about as far away from the United States as one can get -- if there was any region in which a low U.S. profile was called for, this is the region. 

Second, Central Asia is not being left to Russian hegemony. Indeed, my official U.S. sources tell me that the Russians don't care about the U.S. influence in the region. What freaks them out is China's growing regional influence. That's understandable. With a rapidly growing and energy-thirsty economy, China has a compelling interest in the 'stans.   

Third, I'm not sure that the U.S. is sacrificing all that much. LeVine argues that the U.S. has played a constructive role by fostering human rights and political autonomy. I don't think the latter is going away. As for the former, to be  blunt, the U.S. doesn't have all that shiny a track record. With the partial exception of Kyrgyzstan, the countries in this region have ranged from mildly authoritarian (Kazakstan) to wacky totalitarian (Turkmenistan). U.S. human rights interventions accomplished little in the 1990s, and have been even less effective since 9/11 -- indeed, Kyrgyzstan has backslid pretty dramatically. 

There are a lot of regions in the world where I think a robust U.S. presence is a good idea. Central Asia is no longer one of them. 

Peter Baker provides some lay of the land on START in his New York Times write-up: 

With time running out for major votes before the November election, the White House is trying to reach an understanding with Senate Republicans to approve its new arms control treaty with Russia by committing to modernizing the nuclear arsenal and making additional guarantees about missile defense.

The White House pressed allies in Congress in recent days to approve billions of dollars for the nation’s current nuclear weapons and infrastructure even as administration and Congressional officials work on a ratification resolution intended to reaffirm that the treaty will not stop American missile defense plans....

The critical player is Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, who has criticized the treaty but also signaled that his reservations could be assuaged. In particular, he has sought to modernize the nuclear force, and the administration has proposed spending more than $100 billion over 10 years to sustain and modernize some strategic systems.

“I’ve told the administration it would be much easier to do the treaty right than to do it fast if they want to get it ratified,” Mr. Kyl said Thursday in an interview. “It’s not a matter of delay,” he added, but “until I’m satisfied about some of these things, I will not be willing to allow the treaty to come up.”

Mr. Kyl sounded hopeful that he could reach agreement, ticking off three ways the White House could assure him that the proposed nuclear modernization program would be adequate: ensure enough first-year money in the next round of appropriations bills, include enough second-year money in a follow-up budget proposal and revise the long-range modernization plan to anticipate additional costs in later years.

“I’m not questioning the administration’s commitment to this,” he said, “but this is a big deal, and it needs to have everybody’s commitment to it at takeoff, and I really don’t see that the groundwork has really been laid.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has met with Mr. Kyl once and invited him and other senators to talk about the treaty again next week. Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has likewise been talking with Mr. Kyl regularly and is trying to help resolve Republican demands to inspect at least some of the secret negotiating record.

For all the hand-wringing, this sounds like START is gonna get ratified.  Kyl has been very careful to avoid boxing himself into a situation where he has to vote no.  His asking price is not unreasonable, and it sounds like the Obama administration will meet it. 

This would be good - not because START is all of that and a bag of chips, but because it suggests some Very Useful Conclusions:

1)  Mitt Romney's Know-Nothing anti-START gambit failed to have any effect;

2)  Republicans are being reasonable and constructive on arms control (Kyl's requests make a good deal of sense to me);

3)  There can be bipartisan cooperation on important foreign policy questions.

4)  Spencer Ackerman was wrong and I was right.  Ha!!  [It's all about score-settling with you this week, isn't it?--ed.  It's the summer -- allow me my small, petty victories.]

Am I missing anything? 

My latest bloggingheads diavlog is with The Atlantic's newly-betrothed Megan McArdle.  The topics covered include Weigelgate, the Rolling Stone story on McChrystal, the Russian spy ring story, whether austerity or deficit spending is the thing to do right now, and the geekiest things we brought on our honeymoons. 

So, in the past 36 hours there has been news about two deals involving Iran.  The first one involved an arrangement brokered by Turkey and Brazil: 

In what could be a stunning breakthrough in the years-long diplomatic deadlock over Iran's nuclear program, Tehran has agreed to send the bulk of its nuclear material to Turkey as part of an exchange meant to ease international concerns about the Islamic Republic's aims and provide fuel for an ailing medical reactor, the spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry told state television Monday morning.

Whether this was really a breakthrough or just a last-minute dodge by Iran to fend off sanctions, commentators mostly agreed on two things:  A)  This showed how Turkey and Brazil were new heavyweights in international relations; and B)  This would complicate and delay a new round of United Nations sanctions.  

All well and good, except that now there's another breakthrough.... on a new round of Security Council sanctions: 

The United States has reached agreement with Russia and China on a strong draft resolution to impose new United Nations sanctions on Iran over its uranium-enrichment program, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Tuesday.

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a scheduled hearing on a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia, Clinton shrugged off a surprise deal announced Monday in which Iran would swap a portion of its low-enriched uranium for higher-grade uranium to power a research reactor that produces medical isotopes. The deal, brokered by Turkey and Brazil during a high-level visit to Tehran, was meant in part to assuage concerns over Iran's nuclear program and discourage new U.N. sanctions.

"Today I am pleased to announce to this committee we have reached agreement on a strong draft with the cooperation of both Russia and China," Clinton said in an opening statement. She said the United States has been working closely for several weeks with five other world powers on new sanctions and plans to "circulate that draft resolution to the entire Security Council today."

Well, this is an interesting development.  What's going on? 

I think the key is that Russia was not persuaded by the Turkey-Brazil-Iran deal: 

Sergei B. Ivanov, the deputy prime minister of Russia, was similarly skeptical at a lunchtime speech in Washington. He said he expected the sanctions resolution to “be voted in the near future,” and said that the new Iranian accord should not be “closely linked” to the sanctions effort. “Iran should absolutely open up” to inspectors, he said. That statement was significant because Russia had been reluctant to join sanctions several months ago. China, which has also been hesitant, issued no statement.

With Russia firmly on  board, and China apparently unwilling to ge the lone P-5 holdout, Monday's Iran deal had no effect on the calculus of the Security Council.

Why was Russia unpersuaded?  To date, Russia and China have taken advantage of any Iranian feint towards conciliation as an excuse to delay sanctions.   What's different now? 

I'd suggest three possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive: 

1)  Russia is genuinely unpersuaded that Monday's deal is anything more than marginally useful;

2)  Russia is just as annoyed as the United States at the young whipperrsnapper countries rising powers of the world going rogue in their diplomacy.  Russia is, in many ways, more sensitive to questions about prestige than the United States;

3)  Cynically, there's little cost to going along with the United States on sanctions that will have very little impact on the Russian-Iranian economic relationship. 

Commenters are encouraged to provide additional explanations below. 

Over at the Foreign Policy Association's website, Sean Goforth has ginned up a handy new acronym to describe the latest constellation of threats to U.S. national interests: 

Ever since "axis of evil," broad characterizations of geopolitical threats have been considered impolitic, if not ignorant....   The hesitation to label a global threat as such is now sacrificing substance for political correctness. Venezuela, Iran, and Russia constitute a VIRUS of instability that threatens the United States and Western order. This recognition is needed, but the US should learn from past mistakes and avoid a hard-line path similar to the one that resulted from branding "axis of evil."

Clearly, there's some rhetorical tension in that paragraph.  One the one hand, VIRUS is just an awesome acronym, and Goforth deserves some props for coming up with it.  Seriously, it's catchy, it effectively captures the relationship between the salient actors, and it sounds quite menacing.   I can already picture the cable news teasers and one-liners:

"After the break:  can the Obama administration combat the VIRUS?"

"When we come back:  is the VIRUS running rampant across Latin America?"

"Coming up:  forget Tiger Woods, Sean Penn is in danger of spreading the VIRUS!"

The thing is, Goforth concludes with his recommended policy responses to the VIRUS coalition.  And they appear to be.... pretty much what's being done right now: 

[T]he VIRUS alliance is playing a sophisticated game of brinksmanship. Venezuelan government documents suggest that Chavez hopes to get the US to perceive an immediate threat and overreact, igniting a series of events that will eventually collapse "the empire." More realistically, if Colombia or Israel, key American allies, were to misstep and launch a limited-scale attack against Venezuela or Iran it would further boost anti-Americanism and add weight to claims of imperialism. A final objective appears to be presenting a dilemma that will drive a fissure between the US and Israel, a prospect that Iran's nuclear program may well realize.

Responding to the VIRUS needn't require one bold policy. Talk of regime change should be scuttled for sure-it only justifies more arms purchases and feeds anti-American rhetoric. And focusing just on Iran is feckless. Iran is embedded in an alliance that cobbles Russia's diplomatic protection with a network that spreads "business" investments across three continents to serve strategic purposes.

Instead of antagonizing the VIRUS the United States should seek inoculation through savvy diplomacy that breaks the bonds between its constituent members, which is a realistic objective because Venezuela, Russia, and Iran don't share deep-seeded cultural or economic ties. Luckily for Western security, the VIRUS' venom is being diluted by economic realities on the ground: unemployment is extremely high in all three nations, and Iran and Venezuela have the world's highest rates of inflation. If oil trades at moderate prices, Chavez and his "brother" Ahmadinejad will be left to account for their failure to bring development, though Putin's popularity seems assured no matter how badly the Russian economy sours.

So, according to Goforth, the proper U.S. response to VIRUS appears to be: 

A)  Don't overreact or overreach;

B) Try to split the constituent members of the VIRUS  through assiduous diplomacy; and

C)  Be patient and let these economies collapse under their own weight.

Is there anything different betwqeen these policy recommendations and what the Obama administration is currently doing?  The only new thing here is the idea of letting oil prices stay relatively low to prevent new infusions of cash into the coffers of these regimes -- although, truth be told, this isn't really that new an idea. 

I suspect, however, that Goforth's policy recommendations will not garner much attention.  I expect the VIRUS acronym, on the other hand, to spread across the foreign policy community like... well, you know. 

Three Five quick thoughts on the Moscow subway bombing:

1)  Who gets the blame?  As Clifford Levy points out in the NYT, "Mr. Putin built his reputation in part on his success at suppressing terrorism, so the attacks could be considered a challenge to his stature."  On the other hand, one could see Putin trying to shift the blame onto Russian president Dmitri Medvedev or Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov as a way to thwart future rivals.  On the other hand, a lot of Russians are already unhappy with the government, and diversionary tactics might not work this time. 

2)  Is there an international dimension?  Russia's neighbors in the Caucasus and Central Asia, along with the United States and China, are praying right now that the suicide bombers were entirely domestic in origin and execution.  If there was an international link, one could easily envision nightmare scenarios about Russia's international response.

3)  How screwed is the North Caucasus?  They were already pretty screwed because of the Putin administration's attempts to crack down on secessionist groups in the region.  I seriously doubt that this attack is going to cause Russian leaders to rethink their strategy.  If anything, a doubling-down approach is the likely outcome.   

4)  Hey, Europe might be relevant again!!  The New York Times' Steve Erlanger reported on the latest Brussels Forum meeting, at which European security and foreign policy officials kept saying, "we're relevant!!"  Given that the highest-ranking U.S. attendee was an Assistant Secretary of State, I'm pretty sure that U.S. officials didn't think that dog would hunt ex ante.  A Russia ready to lash out, however, is guaranteed to force more transatlantic consultations. 

5)  Obama's counter-terrorism policies don't look so bad in comparison.  This is unfair -- the process matters just as much as the outcome, and it might be that the Obama administration is just luckier than the Medvedev/Putin administration.  Still, the comparison will be made (though Michelle Malkin attempts to link the attacks to Obama's weaknesses on counterterrorism). 

Developing....

Blake Hounshell highlights a tidbit from Henry Paulson's new memoir that caught my attention as well.  According to Paulson, in the summer of 2008 Russia approached China to sell off their Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt.  This merited stories from Bloomberg and the Financial Times.  According to the FT:

Russia proposed to China that the two nations should sell Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 to force the US government to bail out the giant mortgage-finance companies, former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson has claimed....

Mr Paulson said that he was told about the Russian plan when he was in Beijing for the Olympics in August 2008. Russia had gone to war with Georgia, a US ally, on August 8.

“Russian officials had made a top-level approach to the Chinese, suggesting that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings to force the US to use its emergency authorities to prop up these companies,” he said.

Fannie and Freddie are known as GSEs or government sponsored enterprises.

“The Chinese had declined to go along with the disruptive scheme, but the report was deeply troubling,” he said. A senior Russian official told the Financial Times that he could not comment on the allegation.

The Russians deny the story in the Bloomberg story, but Ashby Monk points out the possible implications: 

Paulson’s report is pretty amazing. If true, it would appear that Russia was plotting economic warfare against the US during the summer of 2008; I don’t really know what else to call it. Their intention was to use their sovereign wealth to purposely weaken and damage the US economy. The fact that all this apparently occurred around the same time that Russia was engaged in a traditional war with Georgia, a US ally, lends some credibility to the idea.

This revelation–while unconfirmed–will not comfort those in the West that fear SWFs; it doesn’t help anybody if these funds are seen to be potential weapons of economic destruction…

Let's assume this is true for the sake of making life interesting.  There's still a few more pieces of data I'd like to have before drawing conclusions. 

Monk assumes that the Russians did this for geopoltical reasons. If memory serves, however, China and Russia were both concerned about protecting the value of their GSE debt.  Forcing the U.S. government to intervene would have helped protect their remaining holdings.  So this might have been an entirely commercial gambit. 

Second, this really isn't about sovereign wealth funds per se but about official holdings of U.S. debt and equities.  Some people think this is a real problem -- others don't.  Readers should provide their thoughts in the comments.

Third, the fact that the Russians thought the Chinese would go along with them on this says a lot about the delusions Russian leaders had during the Russian-Georgian conflict.  They really seem to have believed that China, other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the rest of the Collective Security Treaty Organization  would be perfectly cool with Russia recognizing the independence of two secessionist states -- just because it would be an affront to the U.S.A.  Whoops.

This raises my provocative but closing point -- that the Russian-Georgian war might have been the best thing that could have happened for the bilateral relationship.  Despite all the doomsaying at the time, the conflict -- combined with Great Recession -- had a modest humbling effect on Russian ambitions.  The commodity bubble - which had fuelled Russia's economic growth and self-confidence for the past decade - popped in the summer of 2008.  The recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia abetted a capital outflow that had begun in reaction to the Russian government's heavy-handedness in picking winners and losers in the domestic economy.  These trends, if nothing else, likely highlighted the opportunity costs of continued bellicosity to Russian elites and Russian policymakers. 

At the same time, the invasion itself provided a moment of clarity to U.S. policymakers about the precise limits of their influence when dealing with balky republics in the Caucasus.  Even as a candidate, Obama articulated a "realist internationalist" position towards the Russian Federation.  This approach recognizes Russia's great power status and the utility of a great power concert in dealing with global trouble spots.  Rather than prioritizing human rights, democratization, or even economic interests in the bilateral relationship, this policy position prioritizes great power cooperation on matters of high politics, such as nuclear nonproliferation and the containment of rogue states that transgress global norms.

You can argue about the priorities, but on the whole I think this policy has worked.  The war allowed both sides to confront the costs of continuing down a very negative trajectory.  They both stepped away from the brink.

This is worth thinking about whem mulling over a different bilateral relationship that's had a bad few months.

If it's early January, then it's time for Russia to play hardball with one of its neighbors and put a mild scare into Western Europe: 

Russia has stopped shipments of oil to Belarus following a dispute about pricing, oil traders said on Monday.

The move will set off alarm bells in Europe, triggering memories of last January’s natural gas war between Russia and Ukraine that left several eastern European cities without gas for days. Oil, however, is more fungible than gas, and easily made up with alternative suppliers, so the consequences of the dispute are unlikely to be as severe....

The cut-off follows the failure of negotiations between Minsk and Moscow in the closing days of last year on new tariff arrangements for transit of Russian oil onward to Europe.

On January 1 a spokesman for the Belarus government told Interfax news agency that “unprecedented pressure” had been put on their delegation during the negotiations. Minsk called on Russia to continue supplies to Belarus under the old terms, until a new agreement could be reached.

It warned that Russian demands would violate a customs union agreement signed last year by Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan, and “would undermine all agreements reached on the further integration of our states”.

The dispute is likely to present an?obstacle to closer ties between the two countries. Belarus is virtually Russia’s only ally among former Soviet republics.

In this bilateral relationship, Belarus is Charlie Brown to Russia's Lucy.  Every time the Belarusian government believes it has embedded Russia into an institution that affords it some protection, Russia pulls away the football. 

Belarus' geostrategic problem is that its a buffer state with no natural ally, no natural resources, and a human rights situation that is so God-awful that no one in the West likes the country very much. 

Seth Robinson has a interesting essay over at The New Republic that explains why Russia is loathe to sanction Iran over nuclear issues.  The key part: 

How does Russia benefit from its nuclear cooperation with Iran? Simple economics provides a compelling first answer: The Russian economy has not only reaped the benefits of the Bushehr deal, but it has also been bolstered by the sale of fuel and the potential sale of additional reactors. What's more, the nuclear project is only one of many economic agreements between the two countries. Total bilateral trade hovers around $2 billion, as Russia supplies Iran with consumer goods, oil and gas equipment, and military technology. Russia also enjoys privileged access (along with China) to Iran's Southern Pars gas fields.... Second, Iran is still a powerbroker in the Caspian oil trade; its position on the Caspian Sea, which is estimated to hold more than 10 billion tons of oil reserves, makes it an important and influential partner for Russia. Tehran has been extensively involved in coordinating transnational oil and gas deals, arranging transportation of exports with a number of regional states. Russia is in a position to use its good relations with Iran to challenge Washington's efforts to create new pipelines and foreign direct investment in the Caspian region. Iran has already proven an effective regional ally for Russia--in addition to cooperating on energy deals, Tehran has pointedly refrained from criticizing Moscow's Chechnya policy and has held strategic meetings with Moscow on the Taliban.  Finally, Russian nuclear cooperation with Iran provides the Kremlin with leverage over the United States. Moscow remains guarded against Western advances into its "near abroad," and has fought to keep neighboring states from being brought into the NATO fold. By dangling the Iranian nuclear issue in front of the United States, Moscow may believe it has a means to maintain regional dominance. Russian leaders have already extracted concessions from Washington, as the United States recently altered plans for missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic. Yielding on the Iran issue would strip Moscow of the ability to coerce the United States and damage its own ability to reassert local influence.  

The first reason is both sufficient and compelling; I'm not entirely sure I buy the latter two.  Iran's nuclear program gave the United States just cause to insert missile programs into Eastern Europe in the first place -- so Iran's nuclear ambitions have caused as many problems for Russia's near abroad as they have ameliorated.  As for the Caspian argument, it's not clear how a Russian-Iranian axis challenges U.S. energy diplomacy in the region.  If anything, that axis probably incentivizes the smaller energy producers to find a viable pipeline alternative that flows outside of Moscow and Tehran's orbit. 

That said, the economic interest argument is pretty powerful.  So, does this mean sanctions would be fruitless?  Not necessarily.  The paradox about economic sanctions is that although allies are more reluctant to coerce each other, they are also more successful once they make the decision to coerce.  At the same time, successful sanction efforts almost always end at the threat stage.  So if Russia ever signaled that it would seriously contemplate a cut-off in bilateral exchange, the Iranians would be likely to concede before implementation. 

This is the outcome the Russians would prefer the most -- a mild threat from the P5 + 1 prods Tehran into taking just enough action to avoid further isolation, and any further implementation of sanctions.   

But I could be wrong.  Persuade me in the comments.