Even now, gazing back through the jaundiced lens of subsequent experience, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign speech in Berlin still seems an extraordinary occasion. Tens of thousands of mostly young Germans gathered in the center of the city to listen to the American presidential candidate, in an atmosphere The Guardian described as “a pop festival, a summer gathering of peace, love—and loathing of George Bush.” Streets were closed for the occasion. Bands played to warm up the crowd.
When he spoke, Obama said just what the Germans, and so many other Europeans, wanted to hear. He reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Europe, evoking the Berlin airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He praised the virtues of “allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.” He listed a series of global problems and declared that “no one nation, no matter how large or how powerful, can defeat such challenges alone.” That one phrase—again, according to The Guardian’s gushing account—prompted long and hearty cheers.
Germany was not alone in its rapture. Soon after he was elected president, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—simply, it seems, for the fact that he was not George W. Bush. With those kinds of absurd expectations surrounding his presidency, it was clearly impossible for Obama to avoid disappointing the Europeans. What is only surprising, in retrospect, is the speed with which he did so—and with which the Europeans disappointed him.
A TELLING 2009
Three early incidents illustrate the nature of the problem. The first was the so-called reset with Russia. In March 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and presented him with a gift: a giant red “reset button,” made especially for the occasion. Despite an unfortunate mistranslation (the Russian word printed on the gift actually meant “overcharge,” not “reset”), they smiled and pressed the button together for the cameras. The implication of the stunt was clear: U.S.-Russian relations, inexplicably damaged by the Bush administration, could now begin afresh. Surely, there were no fundamental differences or important divides that could not be bridged with dialogue.
The second important event was the NATO summit of April 2009, which also happened to mark the 60th anniversary of the alliance. Like so many NATO events, this one seemed designed to bore. Each of the members had sent its head of state, and all of them felt they had the right to make a long speech, with the usual words about commitment, significance, and so on. Nothing important was said or decided at the event. An American request for more troops in Afghanistan met with almost no response.
The third was the Obama administration’s decision, in September 2009, to cancel the eastern European missile defense program, which had been proposed by Bush and which would have required the placement of hardware in the Czech Republic and Poland. The decision was not altogether surprising: Obama had expressed perfectly reasonable doubts about the value and feasibility of the expensive program earlier. But the manner of the announcement caused some distress. Apparently reacting to what they thought was a leak, White House officials roused the Czech prime minister in the middle of the night to tell him about the decision; the Polish prime minister refused to take a similar call. Both governments had invested a large amount of political capital in the program, not for its own sake but because both wanted a U.S. military presence on their soil for their security. Both were unprepared for the decision and embarrassed by it.
Looking back at 2009, in other words, the patterns that would determine the shape of relations among the United States, Europe, and Russia over the next five years were already visible. At least until nearly the second half of Obama’s second term, neither the president nor anyone on his foreign policy team took European security seriously. The continent was considered safe and dull, a place for photo opportunities rather than real debate. NATO, which even then was desperately in need of radical institutional change, was thought too uninteresting to bother reforming. Europe’s refusal to contribute more troops to Afghanistan created not concern but a kind of disgust. The security fears of central Europe and the Baltic states were an afterthought, not even worth any extra diplomatic effort. Although the EU was slowly developing a deeper relationship with Kiev, Ukraine scarcely figured in U.S. thinking at that time. Despite the support that Europeans had given him during his election campaign, the president seems to have quickly concluded that his real efforts should lie elsewhere.
The patterns that would determine the shape of relations among the United States, Europe, and Russia over the next five years were already visible in 2009.
As for Russia, the analysis was straightforward: all the problems in U.S.-Russian relations were the fault of the previous president, with his bellicose rhetoric and his missile defense shield. Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia was quietly blamed on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president. The profound differences in psychology, philosophy, and policy that had actually been the central sources of friction between the U.S. and Russian governments for the previous decade were dismissed or downplayed.
Yet even in early 2009, those differences were growing sharper. Given what came later, it is worth looking at remarks that Lavrov made at the German Marshall Fund’s March 2009 forum in Brussels. Speaking to past and present policymakers—several of whom had helped dismember the Warsaw Pact and expand NATO in the 1990s—Lavrov suggested that the West had lied to Russia, that NATO remained a threat to Russia, that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe should replace NATO as the primary Western security organization, and that Russia would have plenty of potential clients for its gas in East Asia should its Western customers ever become problematic.
MISSED SIGNALS
None of that sounded like the rhetoric of a country ready for a reset, and Russia’s evolving military strategy wasn’t any more comforting. During Zapad 2009, major military exercises that Russia held in 2009, the Russian army practiced a particularly aggressive scenario: the defense of a Baltic invasion of Belarus and a war with NATO-like forces, culminating in a first-use nuclear attack on Warsaw. Alarmed by this, Poland and the Baltic states stepped up their lobbying for a greater NATO presence in the region. In private, many officials worried that Russia would, sooner or later, do what its military had exercised. That was certainly what had happened in Georgia. But neither NATO nor the Obama administration was yet inclined to take such extreme scenarios seriously. The idea that Russia might again pose a real military threat to Europe still seemed absurd.
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Moscow used the good relations of the reset era to rebuild Russia’s military and strengthen its internal repression.
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Russian efforts to undermine Ukraine continue; financial catastrophe, as well as more fighting, may follow. In the current atmosphere, Russia doesn’t need to invent Europe’s problems; it just needs to exacerbate them.
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Originally Posted by davidbfpo
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