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maps syria maps ukraine 2014 15 ussr maps u s russia relations and the great trump disruption posted on april 9 2019 by edward w walker posted in geopolitics russian foreign policy us russian relations following is a slightly revised text of a talk i gave on march 21 2019 at uc berkeley for the institute of slavic east european and eurasian studies it s a pleasure to be back at berkeley not far from the office that i occupied for some 25 years i was privileged to have lived in the bay area privileged to have worked at ucb and privileged to have been part of a wonderful community of faculty and graduate students for a quarter century the people mattered most but it wasn t just the people it turned out that the job was well suited to my academic interests and dispositions my duties were in part academic administration in part scholarship and in part teaching but i had a good deal of freedom to choose how much i devoted to each more so than had i been regular ladder faculty in a political science department i was also able to chase what i was interested in in part because i didn t have to worry about the demands of the discipline in part because i could influence the institute s research agenda and in part because the institute covers so much ground geographically and thematically and as it happened my interests changed a lot over the years both in terms of region initially russia then the caucasus then central asia and finally ukraine and topic of which there were too many to name i also loved being part of a truly interdisciplinary scholarly community including not just scholars in the harder social sciences but many wonderful historians and faculty and graduate students in the slavic department in short it was the perfect job for someone like me who likes being a jack of many trades but master of none my talk today reflects my focus in the last five years or so at berkeley which for lack of a better term was the geopolitics of our region in the lead up to and wake of the ukraine crisis i felt i had something to say about that dramatic turn of events so i started a blog that i immodestly called eurasian geopolitics and i decided the blog would be forward not backward looking i d focus less on the how we got here and who is to blame questions and more on the where we re likely headed question the goal was to forecast and to do so as accurately and clearly as i could my talk today is organized as follows i m going to start with some brief remarks about the science and art of forecasting i ll then discuss how trump has made accurate forecasting about geopolitics and us russia relations even more difficult that it was previously next i ll turn to the kremlin s strategic goals and how it assesses the risks and opportunities in this uncertain geopolitical moment finally i ll conclude with some thoughts about the implications for russia if the kremlin gets what it wants in the way a post liberal great power international order continue reading review of michael mcfaul from cold war to hot peace an american ambassador in putin s russia houghton mifflin harcourt new york 2018 posted on april 1 2019 by edward w walker posted in geopolitics russian foreign policy us foreign policy us russian relations the following appeared in the newsletter of the uc berkeley institute of slavic east european and eurasian studies spring summer 2018 michael mcfaul president obama s russia hand on the national security council from 2009 through 2011 and u s ambassador to russia from january 2012 to early 2014 has written a compelling readable and self reflective memoir of his long engagement with russia his special focus is the failure of the policy with which he is most closely associated the so called reset in u s russian relations from 2009 2011 as mcfaul bluntly admits that policy led not to engagement cooperation and even partnership as he and his colleagues had hoped but to today s hot peace what went wrong he asks and more particularly what had i gotten wrong xi as a comparative political scientist at stanford with an interest in empirics and public policy a long list of academic and non academic publications and years of experience in russia mcfaul has an excellent command of the facts his record of offering prescriptions with real world consequences also accounts for his emphasis on contingency and uncertainty indeed much of the book is preoccupied with counterfactuals the what might have beens had different choices been made in moscow or washington and he uses contingent probabilistic language intended to persuade not prove i agree with much of what mcfaul writes but dissent from his explanation for the failure of the reset the core argument of the book the post cold war relationship between russia and the united states has had its ups and downs but the overall trend has been negative since at least the mid 1990s nato expansion russia s 1998 economic meltdown moscow s wars in chechnya the 1999 u s led nato military operation against serbia the 2003 iraq war the u s decision to withdraw from the abm treaty and its ballistic missile defense development and deployments and the bush administration s efforts to bring georgia and ukraine into nato helped turn a cooperative relationship into an adversarial one then came russia s military intervention in georgia in august 2008 which mcfaul argues changed everything 76 as a result by the time the bush administration ended american and russian were barely talking to each other 75 mcfaul goes on to describe the origins of the reset during obama s presidential campaign highlighting in particular a major working paper that he helped write he had been advising obama s campaign team since early 2007 he and his co authors concluded that u s interests would be served by a détente with russia but they worried about domestic political fallout from appearing weak especially after russia s invasion of georgia to square the circle the reset would be framed as serving particular american interests not as an end in itself as the working paper put it improved relations with russia should not be the goal of u s policy but a possible strategy for achieving american security and economic objectives in dealing with russia 79 the strategy in short was to seek cooperation on issues of mutual interest while downplaying areas of disagreement including deeply rooted ones such as nato expansion mcfaul narrates the twists and turns of the reset after obama took office arguing convincingly that it helped achieve many american foreign policy objectives payoffs included a new strategic arms control treaty new start increased sanctions on iran russian acquiescence to an expanded northern distribution network through central asia to support the u s war effort in afghanistan russian accession to the world trade organization more efficient visa processing by both sides increased trade and investment cooperation to defuse a political crisis in kyrgyzstan and russia s abstention on a u n security council resolution authorizing a limited use of force by the united states and some of its allies in libya despite these successes mcfaul makes clear that the obama white house did not expect the reset to lead to another u s russian honeymoon washington would work with the russia it had not the russia it wanted the relationship would be transactional cooperate where cooperation was mutually beneficial meanwhile the united states would continue to strengthen the nato alliance support democracy and state sovereignty throughout europe and eurasia reduce russia s energy leverage in europe promote human rights and liberal democracy and tellingly reach out to the russian people to promote our common values 80 over the longer run the mcfaul and his colleagues hoped that russia s objections to u s policies notably nato expansion nato military activities near its borders u s missile defenses and washington s promotion of liberal democracy colored revolutions and regime change in eurasia and elsewhere including russia itself would pass into history its political elite would realize that participation in a u s led liberal international order was a win win outcome that served russia s interests better than confrontation suspicion and an imagined security threat from nato meanwhile points of disagreement were manageable hiccups bumps in the road of cooperation 415 mcfaul placed special hopes on russia s modernization prospects during the presidency of vadim medvedev 2008 2012 medvedev he argues convincingly was committed to the success of the reset as well as to measured liberalization and democratization and he emphasizes the personal rapport between medvedev and obama arguing that medvedev wanted obama s respect 420 and wanted obama to believe that he too was a progressive a new young post cold war leader 421 in mcfaul s telling the key driver for the failure of the reset was vladimir putin and his return to the presidency in 2012 putin s decision to serve a third term coupled with the mass demonstrations that broke out after electoral fraud in the december 2011 parliamentary elections meant that putin needed the united states again as an enemy 416 he explains to be elected a third time as president of russia in 2012 putin needed a new argument in the face of growing social mobilization and protest he revived an old soviet era argument as his new source of legitimacy defense of the motherland against the evil west and especially the imperial conniving threatening united states putin his aides and his media outlets accused the leaders of russian demonstrations of being american agents traitors from the so called fifth column we were no longer partners but revolutionary fomenters usurpers enemies of the nation 418 the implication is that had putin retired from the scene in 2011 there would have been no mass demonstrations by the opposition at the end of the year no crackdown at home no pivot away from the west and no end to the reset u s and western policies may have contributed to the pivot but only at the margins i have two main objections first i disagree at least in part with mcfaul s explanation for why putin pivoted after 2011 and second i think he underplays the explanatory weight of u s and western policy in alienating the russian political elite in general and putin in particular as noted mcfaul s explanation for putin s pivot after 2011 emphasizes perceived self interest in the face of the mass demonstrations of late 2011 putin concluded he had to save his presidency by playing the nationalism card and that meant playing up fears of an external enemy the united states even as he cracked down on dissent at home to prevent a colored revolution there is however a different explanation for putin s actions that i think is rather closer to the truth i suspect that putin s decision to return to the presidency as well as his 2012 policy pivot were the product of his understanding of russia s and not simply his own interests in my view putin and indeed most of the russian political elite genuinely believe that the united states and the west broadly pose a threat to russian political stability and security they are convinced that western democracy promotion and the west s public embrace of universal values are hypocritical smokescreens masking u s ambitions to remain the world s sole superpower and geopolitical hegemon they also are convinced that the changes advocated by western democracy promoters would produce chaos at home and weakness abroad not prosperity and strength and they understand the tolerance entailed in liberalism as incompatible with traditional russian values and russian civilization mcfaul is aware of this russian worldview and indeed one of the many strengths of the book is his fair minded summarizing of it as well as the views of critics of the reset at home nonetheless his explanation for the failure of the reset attaches no obvious weight to russian beliefs instead the argument is that putin pivoted toward illiberalism authoritarianism and confrontation with west simply to preserve his own power we cannot be certain about what motivates putin let alone the russian political elite but i believe it would be a mistake for western policy makers to accept mcfaul s explanation for the 2012 putin pivot the core of putin s political project is certainly regime stability and after his return to the presidency that meant keeping himself in office but there is a difference between leaders who believe they are serving the state from those who serve only themselves one takes personal political risks on behalf of the state the other doesn t moreover explaining the pivot as a product of putin s self interest risks misleading western policy makers into assuming that russia s challenge to the west comes from putin and putin alone not from russia s political elite broadly and less clearly from the russian public were putin to pass from the scene it s very unlikely that we would see a return to the policies of the medvedev era let alone rapid liberalization democratization and partnership with the west russian decision makers see the world and russian interests very differently and that they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future my second objection is that mcfaul underweights the role of western policy in producing the hot peace he argues that american foreign policy decisions both real and perceived cannot be cited as the source of our current conflict with russia for one major reason the successful cooperation between russia and the united states during the reset from 2009 to 2011 414 he goes on to claim that u s policies pursued during the reset to which moscow objected the magnitsky act u s missile defense deployments in europe and elsewhere the mission creep of the u s led intervention in libya and u s criticism of russia s antidemocratic behavior 415 were not determinative and were instead the bumps in the road of cooperation noted above again there is another possibility that is consistent with the facts and probably closer to the truth this is not the place to rehash debates over nato expansion and u s unilateralism since the end of the cold war but suffice it to say that the russian political elite including those few who are still relatively well disposed toward liberal democracy have cause to believe that while the united states insists that other states comply with the rules of the liberal international order it acts as if it and it alone has the right to violate those rules most are likewise unconvinced by western arguments about nato expansion u s military exercises near russia s border s and u s force posture for them these are not benign efforts to promote stability and democracy in central europe or ensure american security rather they are directed at containing russia subverting russian interests and projecting american power and they are a threat to russian national security for these and other reasons by the t...