US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton left Russia yesterday at the end of her European tour, full of smiles. At first sight this seems odd. Before she went to Moscow, aides had briefed that a major goal of her visit was to bring the Russians round to backing sanctions against Iran if Tehran does not cooperate fully over its nuclear program. Yet Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after his talks with Clinton that he did not believe that the Iranians should be pressured.
This appeared to reverse the more amenable line President Dmitry Medvedev took when he met US President Barack Obama last month. At that time Medvedev seemed to accept that sanctions might in the end be necessary. It was widely believed that this response was prompted by Obama’s decision to scrap the Bush European missile shield. Therefore apparently Clinton’s main mission in Moscow this week was a failure and Obama’s goodwill gesture over the shield was not being reciprocated. The visit seemed further undermined by the fact that Premier Vladimir Putin was away in China and therefore the real power in Russia was out of town.
It would, however, be a mistake to take the Russians at face value. Few things in Russia are ever quite what they seem. If Washington does carry the argument in the UN Security Council for greater sanctions against Iran, with the Russians and Chinese abstaining, it does not mean that the Russians will keep on trading with Iran. Certainly arms manufacturers are eager for more orders and Moscow has been supplying equipment for Iran’s nuclear power generation. There is also a clear view that if the Iranians do acquire nuclear weapons, they are not going to be aimed at Russia.
Yet if the Russians are serious about a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the US and they see it as another step toward a nuclear-free world, then it makes no sense for them to block attempts by anyone to stop the spread of atomic weaponry. There is also a growing Israeli lobby in Moscow. As the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, Israel has a vested interest in ensuring that its status is not challenged by Iran or any other regional state. Whether pro-Israeli lobbyists will be able to win the ear of Premier Putin and his president remains to be seen. Russia’s shrinking democratic credentials and powerless Parliament make US-style lobbying far harder.
Therefore it is perfectly possible that even though Moscow’s trade with Iran will not be embargoed officially, it may still become disrupted as Russians apply the sort of innocent-faced obstruction that they have developed into an art form. Was that indeed what they told Clinton this week in Moscow, that the Kremlin will support Washington over sanctions, but only covertly? It seems unlikely that at this early stage, much progress has been made on the preliminary negotiations for a START III deal. Therefore the odds must be that the good news the secretary of state heard was all about Iran.
Opening a border
That several US Armenian groups have endorsed the accord between Turkey and Armenia is a victory for common sense, said The Washington Post in an editorial on Wednesday. Excerpts:
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton executed some deft diplomacy last weekend as the leaders of Turkey and Armenia signed a potentially historic deal to establish normal diplomatic relations and reopen their borders. We say “potentially” because there are some big obstacles to implementing the accord, which we’ll come back to. But Clinton helped to ensure that the signing ceremony in Zurich went forward after four hours of last-minute mediation. Not for the first time in her short tenure, she proved capable of overcoming an impasse and teasing out a favorable outcome for the United States.
The rapprochement between these two nations matters to the United States for a number of reasons. It could help stabilize the volatile Caucasus region, open the way for new corridors for the export of gas and oil to the West, ease Russia’s political domination of Armenia and remove a major irritant from US relations with Turkey. The Obama administration worked diligently to promote the accord: Clinton made 29 phone calls to the leaders of the two nations. President Barack Obama played a part by sidestepping a campaign promise to formally recognize the mass killing of Armenians by Turks during World War I as “genocide.”
The genocide issue — and the refusal of some in the American Armenian community to compromise on it — still threatens to undo the deal. The opening of the border, closed since 1993, would be a huge benefit to impoverished and landlocked Armenia. But there is resistance to a provision of the accords that would set up a joint commission to study the history of the massacres. Opponents say this could give Turkey, which denies that a genocide took place, a means to filibuster the issue.
A more formidable obstacle to the deal may be Armenia’s unresolved dispute with another neighbor, Azerbaijan, over the ethnically Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is occupied by Armenia along with some neighboring Azeri territory. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan took the courageous step of declining to make the settlement of this “frozen conflict” a precondition to his accord with Armenia — thereby inviting the wrath of Azerbaijan, which is an ally and energy supplier to Turkey.
