Stung by Vladimir Putin’s refusal to return the NSA leaker, a frustrated Obama administration is pulling back from cooperating with their Russian counterparts. By Josh Rogin.
The Russian immigration ministry granted Snowden a document
this week that would allow him to leave the transit area of the Moscow
airport, where he has been confined for a month, and live in Russia for
up to a year. In response, Secretary of State John Kerry phoned Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Wednesday and informed him that a planned
meeting of foreign and defense ministers set for August in
Washington—known as a 2+2 meeting—was now in jeopardy of being canceled,
officials told The Daily Beast.
“I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” President Barack Obama said last month as part of the administration’s public campaign to downplay the trouble Snowden has caused in U.S.-Russian relations.
But behind the scenes, the dispute is deeply affecting an already troubled relationship
and the administration’s reaction is part of an overall frustration
with various Russian government actions that date back well before
Snowden ever landed in Moscow.
Obama is not expected
to attend his scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin
in Moscow in September following the G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg, but
that is only the most visible example of a new U.S. government approach
to dealing with the Russian government.
Kerry’s
threat to Lavrov is just the latest in a string of decisions to cancel
or postpone various interactions between U.S. and Russian officials in
several agencies, many of which have nothing to do with the Snowden
affair, officials said.
At
Wednesday’s press briefing, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said
that Kerry pressed Lavrov on the Snowden case, but she did not reveal
that Kerry had threatened to cancel the 2+2 meeting, which was meant to
cover a range of bilateral diplomatic and security issues.
“[Kerry]
reiterated our belief, the belief of the United States, that Mr.
Snowden needs to be returned to the United States, where he will have a
fair trial, that Russia still has the ability to do the right thing,”
Psaki said.
Responding
to The Daily Beast Thursday, deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf declined to
say if the 2+2 meeting was on or off. “We have no announcements to make
on schedules,” adding that “we’ve consistently made clear that we’d like
to avoid harm to the bilateral relationship.”
The
U.S. and Russia have canceled meetings and summits to signal
displeasure before. In 2008, the U.S. scrapped nearly all instances of
bilateral cooperation following the Russian invasion of Georgia, an
attack that sparked a five-day war and resulted in an occupation of two
Georgian territories that continues to this day.
And last year, Putin snubbed Obama
by refusing to attend the G-8 meeting in Chicago, sending Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev in his place. By the time Obama and Putin met
in Northern Ireland last month, the personal relationship had
deteriorated to the point that the awkwardness was palpable and no progress was made.
Two
weeks ago, Obama phoned Putin and asked him to send Snowden back to the
U.S., but Putin refused, according to one official who was briefed on
the call. Following that perceived rebuke, the Obama team doubled down
on its new policy to show the Russian government the cold shoulder.
“The
Snowden affair is definitely affecting U.S.-Russia relations, no
question. When you make it clear that something is very important to the
U.S. and we are asking for cooperation and that request is rejected,
that rejection is going to have an impact on the broader relationship,”
said Samuel Charap, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the
International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There’s only so many
times you can thumb your nose at a U.S. president and not expect
consequences. When the president himself has gotten involved personally
and been rebuffed, the rule book kind of goes out the window.”
Both
the Obama-Putin summit and the Kerry-Lavrov meeting are problematic for
the Obama administration because they could be overshadowed in the
media by the Snowden affair, said Toby Gati, a former senior White House
and State Department official dealing with Russia.
“Nothing
very concrete can move forward while there’s such a big elephant in the
room. Whatever is discussed would get drowned out by the desire of the
Obama administration to convince the Russian government to remove this
huge irritant in bilateral relations,” she said.
Moreover,
in order to persuade the Russian government that the Snowden case is
top priority, it can’t hold regularly scheduled meetings as if nothing
is wrong in the relationship, Gati said.
‘Putin is not going to give this guy up for nothing.’
“This
would be seen as ‘business as usual’ by the Russians, and the
administration’s message now is that real progress requires real
consideration of our interests on an issue of great importance for the
U.S.,” she said.
The
U.S.-Russian relationship has faced a number of other challenges in
recent months, including Russian prosecution of leading opposition
figures, Russian government harassment of American NGOs, Russia’s
expulsion of USAID, Russia’s unilateral withdrawal from a program to
secure loose nuclear materials, and Russian insistence on arming the
military of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while thwarting U.N.
Security Council action to punish his government for atrocities.
With
all that going on, there’s not much positive that could come out of
these meetings anyway, said Fiona Hill, a former national intelligence
official on Russia, now at the Brookings Institution. For years, the
Obama administration pursued a “reset” policy with Russia, with some
results; now the relationship is reverting back to the more familiar
pattern of mutual antagonism and suspicion from the Cold War.
Still, the Obama administration’s new get-tough strategy
isn’t likely to change Putin’s calculation on whether or not to send
Snowden back to the U.S. Putin doesn’t want to be seen as caving to
American pressure and, although he likely doesn’t want the burden of
hosting Snowden, he isn’t going to give him back to the U.S. without
greater incentive.
“There’s
no prospect that the Russians are going to send Snowden back. Snowden
is in the land of spy swaps now. Putin is not going to give this guy up
for nothing,” said Hill.
In
the end, the Obama administration may see very little upside in
continuing to press for engagement with a Russian government that
doesn’t seem to be interested in working to pursue a positive and
aggressive bilateral agenda, she said.
“These
guys are basically giving us the finger, so we are saying ‘Why are we
going out there and doing these things?’” she said. “You could say that
by standing up to Russia, the U.S. is finally getting some balls.”
Josh Rogin is senior correspondent for national security and politics for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He previously worked at Foreign Policy magazine, Congressional Quarterly, Federal Computer Week magazine, and Japan’s leading daily newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C.
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