Stratfor
February 10, 2009
It appears that quite a few pieces in the U.S.-Russian game moved this past weekend and Monday at theMunich Security Conference. Though the public negotiations between U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov were tense, both men left the meeting with favorable remarks about the U.S.-Russian relationship. But there was another powerful American 
present in Munich, and not by coincidence. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was at the conference to accept an award for his past role on the international stage — yet Kissingerʼs principal role on that stage appears to be ongoing. The Obama administration virtually subcontracted Kissinger to deal with the Russians, long before the presidentʼs inauguration took place. Kissinger has a long and intriguing history with the Russians. He is a Cold War veteran who understands what Russia wants and what it is willing to trade to get it — an essential skill for any successful negotiations, and something the Russians respect.
Kissinger quietly visited Moscow on behalf of Barack Obama in December, meeting casually with President Dmitri Medvedev and secretly with the real dealmaker, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Now he has returned to the negotiating table in Munich. But Kissinger has never been recognized formally as part of Obamaʼs plan. This is because Kissinger isnʼt formally part of the U.S. government, and as a Republican from the Nixon administration he is despised by many Democrats.
But there have been many meetings of late that affect the Russians. Bidenʼs meetings with Russian officials in Munich concerned the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus recently toured the Central Asian states to broker a deal on new routes to Afghanistan, without taking into account the larger deal on the table with Russia. And U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is being as active as one would expect the secretary of state to be. The members of Obamaʼs public team are taking on different issues, but none of the talks seem to fit together into a holistic plan. Put another way, Moscow feels it is receiving schizophrenic signals from such a scattered approach.
If anything, such an approach is undermining the Kissinger effort, which is attempting to forge some sort of grand bargain that includes the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, the soon-to-expire START, NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) installations slated for Poland and the Czech Republic, Russiaʼs push for preeminence in Central Asia and routes for NATO supplies through former Soviet turf to Afghanistan.
Thus far in the talks, Kissinger has not budged on any major items of friction. This is certainly something that has gotten the Russiansʼ attention; they were pretty sure they held the upper hand. In fact, Kissinger has explicitly noted that the United States had no intention of trading an Afghanistan supply route for recognition, in public or private of a Russian sphere of influence. The Russian leadership is well aware that it is operating on borrowed time. The countryʼs demographic picture is nothing short of horrid, but there is a bit of a respite since Russians born during the 1980s Soviet baby boom are now having their own kids. This is slightly delaying the enervating impact of a population that is simultaneously dwindling and aging. But after the next three to five years,all trends are down. This is not to say Russia as a state will die in the next few years, but instead that it needs to push back Western influence as far as possible before its own (probably terminal) decline begins. So it looks as if Moscow is pulling back from demanding a deal on the entire picture and working from the short list of itemst hat are most critical — the items that change the strategic picture in ways that most worry the Russians.
That list consists of NATO expansion, BMD and START. The NATO item is fairly self-explanatory: every country that joins the Western security alliance is one less that can be a buffer between NATO and Russia. But BMD is a more complex issue. Russiaʼs real concern with BMD in Poland is not the BMD systems, but U.S. boots on the ground in a former Warsaw Pact buffer state. It is uncomfortably close for Moscow. While Russia is certainly uncomfortable with the long-term trajectory and implications of a renewed American focus on BMD, in this case, Russia is using BMD mostly to publicly attack developments on the world stage, hearkening back to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
But the granddaddy of them all is START. Renewing the treaty would keep the Russians and the Americans at precisely the same level of strategic nuclear arms. This is far more than simply ego. START allows Russia to demand American attention at any time on any strategic issue. Thatʼs what happens when the other guy has as many nukes as you do.
U.S. policy for the past decade has held that START, which is set to expire in December, does not need to be renewed because the Russians cannot afford the price in dollars or skilled manpower to maintain their deterrent. Why bother negotiating a treaty that will limit American policy options when there is no need to make concessions to Russia? From Moscowʼs point of view, a continuation of START limits the Americans and keeps Russia in the game. But an end to START forces the Russians to compete on everything, and there are not a lot of fields in which the Russians consistently can succeed against the combined forces of the West.
And so the willingness of Kissinger, Biden and Clinton to put START on the negotiating table is a gesture that the Russians could not fail to notice. In fact, negotiations seem to already be affected. Russia gave a little on the U.S. plans for a Central Asia route to Afghanistan: On Monday, Kazakhstan — which hardly moves these days without checking with the Kremlin — announced that it would permit U.S. logistical supplies to be shipped to American troops in Afghanistan.
Just a small glimpse of what it might mean to work with the Russians.
