Only in his second statement, a week into the Iranian uprising, did President Obama realize it was important to speak up for justice and nonviolence, even while he declined to directly express support for the thousands of Iranians who were risking their lives to defend those ideals. I understood Obama’s reluctance to provide the Iranian regime with the opportunity to smear the protestors with the brush of American support. But could the leader of the free world find nothing more intimidating than “bearing witness” when it was evident that Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could not care less who was watching?
Senator Richard Lugar and Fareed Zakaria on CNN, among others, defended Obama’s extreme caution. Zakaria even compared the situation to how George H. W. Bush responded timidly to the impending collapse of the USSR and its hold on Eastern Europe in 1989. But when has a dictatorship ever used violence as a reprisal to public remarks from a foreign leader? Dictators make their calculations based on force and its likely consequences, not on the genteel bickering of politicians. President Eisenhower said nothing in 1956 and that certainly did not hold back the Soviet tanks that were rolling into Budapest. Little was said in 1968 and the vicious Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia still ran its bloody course. Regardless of what Obama or anyone else had said, the Iranian regime would have used all the force at its disposal to keep its grip on power.
On July 7, 2009, Obama gave a speech at the New Economics School in Moscow. It was, of course, a very good speech. Aside from his natural gifts in that department, Obama had several knowledgeable and savvy Russia hands on his team, including future ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul, whom I had known for several years and held in esteem for his support of the color revolutions.
Obama’s speech was strong and he gave a consistent message. I said in a press conference after Obama met with me and other opposition leaders that the speech was “less than what we wanted but more than what we expected.” He repeatedly emphasized that the important relationship between America and Russia was about the people, not their regimes, which was exactly what I had hoped for. Obama opened direct lines of communication instead of dealing only with official Kremlin channels.
Ideally he would have named names, of course. Obama made some strong statements about the failure of totalitarianism and pointed to the solution of democracy; in fact, he made far stronger statements regarding Putin’s Russia than anything we had heard from the two administrations before him. But he avoided criticizing the track records of Putin and Medvedev, the architects and wardens of our dictatorial system. Of course, as their guest in Russia Obama could hardly insult his hosts, but remarking on the anti-democratic trend of the previous nine years would have made the point. Nor did Obama mention Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose jailing by Putin and continued imprisonment by Medvedev exemplified everything Obama was criticizing about authoritarian states.
But Obama didn’t give anything up, either, which impressed me and likely came as a surprise to Putin, who probably expected the young new American president to be eager to make deals to have a big Russian success to report back home. Obama surprised some Republicans in the United States as well. Before he started his trip, several conservative GOP members wrote an open letter to Obama with recommendations: not linking missile defense to nuclear arms reduction, defending the rights of Ukraine and Georgia, and meeting with the opposition. From what I could tell, Obama followed each one.
In my statement to Obama at the meeting, I emphasized that all the conjecture about the power structure of the government in Russia at that time was a terrible waste of time, and that what mattered was that it was anything but a democracy.
My statement went on, “The Russian constitution describes three branches of government. Unfortunately, all three are now contained between the walls of Mr. Putin’s office. To all of President Medvedev’s talk of liberalization, I can say only that talk is cheap. We have seen no meaningful policy changes in the past year to indicate a new course.”
In a reverse mirror image of Reagan’s custom with Soviet leaders, I presented the American president with a list of Russian victims of state oppression at the end of the meeting. But I was under no illusion that Obama would ever toss it on Putin’s desk.
In a sentiment soon to be shared by many Americans, Russians quickly felt let down after a great Obama speech. The strong rhetoric about democracy and shared values faded into a bureaucratic jumble that accompanied Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s gaffe-filled “Reset” meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov earlier in the year.
For just one example, the first meeting of the loftily named US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission’s Civil Society Working Group took place in Washington, DC, on January 27, 2010. Top Russian administration official Vladislav Surkov was the group’s co-chair, despite a letter of protest signed by seventy-one members of the US Congress pointing out that Surkov was “one of the masterminds behind Russia’s authoritarian course.” The letter also urged President Obama to boycott the meetings until Surkov was replaced, perhaps by someone who hadn’t spent his career actively destroying the sort of civil society the working group was intended to promote.
Another potentially awkward part of the DC meeting involved a presentation by the head of Transparency International, the corruption watchdog that on its latest list ranked Russia as number 146 of 180 nations listed, between Kenya and Sierra Leone and by far the lowest of the leading industrialized nations. But Surkov and his Kremlin kin felt no embarrassment. It’s even possible they considered that ranking a form of recognition of how far from the path of lawfulness they have succeeded in pulling Russia under Vladimir Putin.
That this ineffectual working group convened at all showed that the Obama administration was placing form over function. Obama’s speech in Russia in July raised expectations that his administration would look at the Kremlin’s record of brutality at home and transgressions abroad and attempt to ally with the beleaguered Russian people instead of our repressive government. But instead of lines in the sand we got words in the air, with dozens of these commissions established on the American president’s initiative, each more wretched and moribund than the last. This one on civil society was simply insulting.
Putin’s functionaries were happy to pass the time in the world’s capitals being treated as equals instead of being berated for rigging elections and shamed for the growing list of dead Russian opposition figures. But why should the United States provide credentials of legitimacy and good faith by sitting down at the table with such people?
Meanwhile, just a week earlier, an advisory panel set up by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev released a report full of grand liberalization ideas. As positive as this may sound, the institute’s chief, Igor Yurgens, then admitted in an interview that in the end “Putin will make any decision he likes” and that “free elections are impossible in Russia today because the Russian population is politically ignorant, passive, and dislikes democracy.” His conclusion was that therefore “Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev should decide” who was to be president! This was Surkov’s design for “sustainable civil society”: a Pinochet with a law degree.
These silly commissions only demonstrated that the Obama administration was engaged in a campaign to make people believe problems could and would be solved eventually instead of actually taking the tough steps required to solve them. It was a pattern that would come to dominate his foreign policy. It is true that doing what must be done can be a thankless task and that telling the truth does not always poll well. But promises are for candidates. Fulfilling promises is for leaders.