Posts Tagged ‘michael weiss’
Resetting the Reset
What’s behind Obama’s push against the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act?
MICHAEL WEISS
April 13, 2012
For all his pretensions of being a “transformative” president, Barack Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions are rooted in a deeply conservative and nostalgic tradition. When it comes to Russia, the tradition this White House channels most is that of Richard Nixon. This seemingly incongruous resemblance was well illustrated in a recent controversy over the nullification of a Nixon-era piece of legislation, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which binds U.S. trade relations with autocratic regimes to those regimes’ human rights records. Jackson-Vanik is the thorn in the side of Obama’s “reset” policy with Russia, which wants to accede to the World Trade Organization—a major component of the reset. So long as Jackson-Vanik still applies to Russia, American businesses won’t be able to fully profit from that accession. President Obama’s push to repeal Jackson-Vanik has been described as cynical and manipulative by both the veteran Russian dissidents who benefitted from its passage in the 1970s and the younger generation of oppositionists who seek new instruments of American leverage against Vladimir Putin.
The Jackson-Vanik amendment was originally bundled into Title IV of the 1974 Trade Act and restricts bilateral trade with non-market economies on the basis of their allowance of foreign emigration. Written in categorical language and conceived by the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) as a counterweight to Henry Kissinger’s policy of detente with Leonid Brezhnev, the amendment was clearly designed to punish the Soviet Union for refusing to grant emigration visas to its embattled minorities, particularly Jews. The Final Act of the Helsinki Accords was signed the following year, committing the Warsaw Pact nations to conforming to international human rights norms. Brezhnev thought that basket wouldn’t matter so much as the one over which the toughest negotiations about the Final Act depended: “Questions Relating to Security in Europe”, a suite of ten principles that respected the territorial integrity of member states as well as a policy of nonintervention in their internal affairs. Brezhnev was confident that the human rights component would be quietly ignored: Kissinger told him so.
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Human Rights Bill Roils US-Russia Relations
First, Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, accused Washington of backing protests against him. Then, on Monday, Mitt Romney, the leading U.S. Republican candidate, told CNN that Russia is Washington’s “number one geopolitical foe.” The incidents stand as another roadblock to better U.S.-Russia relations.
Russia is finally set to join the World Trade Organization in August, after 20 years of talks. When it does, American companies could lose out because of a law passed almost four decades ago that restricted trade with the Soviet Union over its refusal to allow Jews to emigrate.
The Soviet Union no longer exists. There is visa-free tourism between Israel and Russia. But a Cold War relic – the 1974 Jackson-Vanick Amendment – would result in higher tariffs for American exports to Russia.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul speaks of the impact.
“Now that Russia is joining the World Trade Organization, if we still have Jackson-Vanick on the books, then our companies will be at a disadvantage vis-a-vis other European, Chinese, Brazilian companies doing business here in Russia,” said McFaul.
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Man On A Mission: Bill Browder vs. the Kremlin
“There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!” thundered Max Shachtman—once known as Leon Trotsky’s “foreign minister”—in New York City in 1950. By popular account, the line had been cooked up that night by a young Shachtmanite named Irving Howe; it ended the debate between the anti-Stalinist socialist Schachtman and his opponent, Earl Browder, former head of the Communist Party USA, who had been expelled from the party in 1946 at the behest of Moscow Central after suggesting that Soviet Communism and American capitalism might coexist after all.
Browder’s grandson Bill, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, has continued the family tradition of heretical defiance of the Kremlin and as a result has had an experience that in all its eccentricity defines the malign brutality of Russian political life today.
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The Autumn of the US-Russia Reset
A colleague and I have described the post-Soviet era in Russia as the “age of impunity,” whereby even the most howlingly obvious crimes of man or state are implausibly denied or whitewashed in a manner redolent of Stalinist propaganda. Two such examples have furnished themselves in quick succession in the last month, one relating to the conviction of a notorious Russian arms dealer and the other to a Russian nuclear scientist’s facilitation of Iran’s atom bomb project. Both acts would have spelt the end of the US-Russian “reset” without the added complications of renewed brinkmanship over the placement of a US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and the drubbing delivered to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in a transparently fraudulent parliamentary election on December 4th.
First the arms dealer. On November 2nd, Viktor Bout was sentenced in a New York court of attempting to sell heavy weapons to FARC, Colombia’s Marxist-Leninist terrorist group. Nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” and vaguely the model for Nicolas Cage’s character in the forgettable film Lord of War, Bout was a one-man clearinghouse of post-Soviet munitions for dictators and murderous regimes. There was scarcely a civil war fought in Africa in the 1990s and 2000s—and consequently, a limb dismembered or body decimated—without Bout’s hardware. He was chummy with the indicted war criminal and ex-president of Liberia, Charles Taylor. According to Bout’s biographer, Douglas Farah, the Merchant of Death was also seen schmoozing with Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, just prior to the second Israel-Lebanon War, which saw the Party of God firing Russian-made, armor-piercing antitank weapons that shocked even the IDF in terms of their sophistication and impact.
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The Age of Impunity: Russia After Communism and Under Putin
Alexander Solzhenitsyn made this prediction just prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the revival of Russian autocracy in the last decade has sadly demonstrated the prescience of Solzhenitsyn’s prophecy.
This is not to say that the Russia of 2011 was fated to endure the “sovereign democracy” of Vladimir Putin, as is all too-often suggested. As the country prepares for its next round of pantomimed elections, it is important to reflect upon the developments and decisions which led the country to its current state.
Indeed, a closer inspection reveals a country which is reaping the consequences of poor decisions made in the panicked days of the first post-Soviet decade. Seven decades of totalitarianism left the country with a devastated economy, atomised society and perverse political culture. The political developments of the twenty years following the collapse of the Soviet Union bear significant implications for Russia’s future political development, and important lessons for transitioning societies around the globe.
This report provides an overview of the key developments of post-Soviet Russia which contributed to the current status quo, including the formative decisions of the Yeltsin era; the origins and reasons for the success of “Putinism;” the merger of oligarchic and state interests under Putin; the decline in political freedom; Putin’s economic policy and foreign policy.
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Barack Obama’s UN speech goes from cutting to confused
Here’s a quick take on President Obama’s just-concluded address before the UN General Assembly:
1. There’s a reasonable chance he’ll have to give another speech reaffirming – sorry, “clarifying” – his commitment to a free and independent Palestine. In short, Barack barracked Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO’s heedless effort to unilaterally attain statehood via plebiscite. Obama, incensed that the Palestinians would go around him in this way after all the work he put into the “peace process,” stuck mainly to a US election-year script on the issue. GOP front-runner Rick Perry has accused this administration of selling-out Israel. So Obama tilted back: America has got an “unshakable” attachment to Israeli security (an old line); men, women and children in southern Israeli are being bombarded with thousands of rockets and mortars from terrorists in Gaza (true); Israeli adolescents grow up knowing that their counterparts in Arab countries are being taught to hate them (long true); and – in a nice little double-barreled blast aimed right between the narrowly spaced eyes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad- the Jewish state faces an existential threat to be “wiped off the map” and the Holocaust is a fact that cannot be denied.
One PLO representative in the audience was shown shaking his head “no” during some of this (contrast to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s blinkless, Aztec-faced stare throughout.). The full statehood bid at the UN Security Council may be averted anyway in a last-minute compromise, as Adrian Blomfeld just reported.
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