Gilbert Doctorow wrote this article.
President
Trump’s hasty decision to attack Syria may have lightened political
pressure at home but Russia’s retaliation – suspending a key
“deconfliction agreement” – left Secretary of State Tillerson as supplicant at the Kremlin.
The Russian media offered no
complete account of what may have been accomplished during Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson’s two-day visit to Russia, but there were hints of what the
Russian negotiating position would have been behind closed doors and what may
have justified Vladimir Putin making two hours available for Tillerson in what
was otherwise a very busy day for the Russian President relating to domestic
concerns.
Before Tillerson’s arrival Russian media reported widely on his failure
the day before at the G7 meeting to win support for imposing more sanctions on
Russia for backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in light of the chemical
weapons event in Idlib on April 4. That proposal was raised by U.K.
Foreign Minister Boris Johnson and affirmed by Tillerson but rejected by all
other G7 members. With that resounding defeat, Tillerson had no sticks from
“the international community” to wield as an ultimatum against the Russians,
telling them to get behind a U.S.-imposed “regime change” in Syria or suffer
the consequences of further economic isolation from the West.
Tillerson also carried little in
the way of carrots, given President Trump’s retreat on his campaign pledges to
improve relations with Russia. Tillerson’s empty diplomatic bag was a topic discussed on Russian
prime-time television the evening before his arrival. Senior Duma member and
United Russia Party leader Vyacheslav Nikonov rhetorically demanded of Tillerson
on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show: “So, make us
an offer of what it means to go with America, what it brings us, and then we
will consider it.”
In effect, Nikonov was calling the Trump administration’s bluff. He and
the Russian elites understand perfectly that Donald Trump has no political
capital to spend to get Congressional approval of normalized relations with
Russia.
Just as the Tillerson-Putin
meeting was taking place on Wednesday, another widely watched Russian talk
show First Studio on the Pervy Kanal state channel opened with
host Artyom Sheinin posing a baiting question to the American journalist
Michael Bohm, a frequent visitor to the program who is often used as a punching
bag. Referring to Tillerson’s initial meeting with Russian Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov and the doubt that Putin would grant Tillerson a meeting, Sheinin
said, “I believe there is the practice in big corporations for a new visitor
who has come to see the boss to first undergo a ‘screening interview.’ It looks
as if Tillerson passed this screening process and so he was allowed in to speak
to the boss. Do you think this was a positive thing?”
In other words, the Russians knew that Tillerson came with empty hands
and that he was the suitor, not the one being wooed. Tillerson came to discuss reinstatement of the
Memorandum of Understanding on Deconfliction in Syria because on the U.S. side
there was great concern over Russia’s refusal now to speak at the regional
level to U.S. military counterparts and avert clashes on the ground and in the
air that could lead to escalation of confrontation and possibly to all-out-war.
The Russian withdrawal from the deconfliction arrangement following the U.S.
missile strike on a Syrian airfield on April 6 put the continuation of U.S.-led
military operations against Islamic State militants inside Syria in danger.
On April 8, senior Pentagon
officials were denying that the Russians had severed all military-to-military
hot lines, but there was a cold sweat in Washington. The uncertainty over whether Syrian and Russian
air defenses might take aim at NATO aircraft had already led the Belgians to
publicly announce cessation of all their flights within the U.S.-led
anti-terror coalition. Presumably other NATO members had come to the same
conclusion.
The Russians set down their preconditions for reinstatement of the
deconfliction arrangements: no further U.S. air attacks on Syrian government
positions. We may be sure that this was the
major subject for discussion and possible agreement during Tillerson’s talks
with Putin.
The result may be something
similar to the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when the U.S.
claimed victory publicly as the Soviets pulled their missiles out of Cuba, but
privately the U.S. had granted what Moscow had wanted, the removal of U.S.
missiles from Turkey. But Putin is no Nikita Khrushchev, who lost prestige
among his Kremlin peers for striking the agreement with the Americans;
Putin is likely to gain stature from such an arrangement.
The U.S. Media’s Take
Meanwhile, the mainstream U.S.
media presented the Putin-Tillerson meeting in relatively neutral terms given
the American press corps general hostility to all things Russian. The
Washington Post did better than other media outlets, with Moscow
Bureau Chief David Filipov and his colleague covering the State Department in
Washington highlighting the undeniable fact that the parties were “sharply at
odds” and noting:
“Russia made it clear it was unwilling to roll
back its strategic alliance with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The talks
appeared unlikely to bring any significant breakthroughs after last week’s
missile strike plunged U.S. relations to one of the lowest points since the
Cold War. But despite the growing rifts, some general compromises were
discussed.”
The areas of potential compromise
were possible reinstatement of the information-sharing “deconfliction”
Memorandum of Understanding with the United States that the Russians suspended
immediately after the April 6 missile attack and creation of a U.S.-Russian working group to find ways
to ease tensions between the two nuclear superpowers.
After that, the authors moved on
to more trivial pursuits such as Donald Trump’s latest remarks about Assad
being “an animal.” However, even amidst this swill there were a few points
worthy of note because they gave expression to Russian policy positions at the
talks: Russia’s refusal to accept ultimatums, such as Tillerson brought with
him over choosing ties with the U.S. or Syria; Russia’s rejection of the
allegations that Assad was behind the chemical attack in Idlib; Russia’s call
for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to investigate the
use of chemical weapons there; and Putin’s likening the present situation to
the one immediately preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq. All of these important
points are presented in the article at face value, alongside U.S., U.K. and
other Western accusations directed against Russia
The New York Times coverage gave more attention to American
action than to Russian reaction, as the opening of its cover headline for its
several related articles indicates: “U.S. Pressures Russia …” The sub-article
dealing with the Tillerson visit devotes more attention to what came before and
after Putin’s meeting with Tillerson than to what they may have agreed on. The Times bureau chief David
Sanger noted how Tillerson was held in suspense as his anticipated meeting with
Putin was left in doubt until the last minute, what was described as a typical
maneuver by the Russian president to keep his interlocutors off balance,
a characterization which ignores the widely reported urgings of Russia’s
talking heads before Tillerson’s arrival that their President not receive
him because of the objectionable message on Syria that he had laid out on
Monday at the meeting of G7 foreign ministers in Italy.
Indeed, the Times article said
almost nothing about what may have justified the Putin meeting and what was
agreed other than the working group to ease tensions, which Sanger correctly
identifies as devoted to small and not the big divisive issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment