The Arctic is the First Stop in the United States Reset with Russia

Mark E. Rosen

Security,

Much work is needed to find ways to accommodate Russian fears of NATO encirclement and its concerns that the heavily ethnic Russian populations in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea have political and social protections.  

Throughout the primaries President elect Donald Trump asserted that he wanted to have a more constructive relationship with Russia. Trump correctly asserted that President Vladimir Putin was not someone that the United States could pretend didn’t exist because he both loves his country and is enormously popular with his own people. Trump suggested that the United States needed to get past the finger pointing and find ways in which the United States could work cooperatively with Russia – especially in Syria. Mr. Trump would likely have also said that the U.S. needs to find ways to assuage Russian concerns that they were being politically and militarily encircled by NATO. The Trump approach was labeled by his political adversaries as coddling an authoritarian dictator. Obama by contrast seemed to believe that the only way to deal with Putin was by “calling him out” and imposing economic sanctions to target the most critical sectors of the Russian economy.    

Finding the right approach to Russian behavior towards Eastern Ukraine is something that cannot be ignored since the United States has legal obligations to Ukraine.  Under the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States agreed to safeguard Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up its nuclear weapons.  The United States needs to make good on those security guarantees; however, running to a microphone, as Obama did, and denounce Putin as a dictator who jails his own people and a “jackass” at a 2013 G20 meeting does little to advance the cause of constructive diplomacy.  Even if Obama was right to be critical, his public behavior only alienated Putin and made it nearly impossible to have someone to negotiate with.