Posts Tagged ‘obama’
Obama Suckering America into Loving Russia
American Thinker
April 22, 2012 By Kim Zigfeld
Lies have consequences. And the lies told by the Obama administration about Russia for the past four years, lies which can be characterized only as Goebbels-like propaganda, have had devastating consequences indeed.
Polls show that from the moment Vladimir Putin took power, Americans began to think ill of Russia. Throughout the Gorbachev years, the American view of Russia as an enemy was waning, and when Boris Yeltsin took power for the first time, more Americans reported viewing Russia as a friendly country, or even an ally, than saw it as unfriendly or an enemy. By the middle of the Yeltsin term in office, the gap in Russia’s favor had become enormous.
But throughout the Putin years this process reversed itself, so that by 2008, significantly more Americans saw Russia as a threat than as a balm. In fact, the process began even before Putin, when Americans were shocked to see Yeltsin bomb his own parliament building and give virulent support to the genocidal maniacs in Serbia, which Russians look on as their “little brother.” To top that off, of course, Yeltsin named Putin, a proud KGB spy, as his successor.
Then Barack Obama took power and placed Michael McFaul in charge of his Russia policy, which soon came to be labeled as “reset.” McFaul and Obama deluged Americans with brazen lies for four years, telling them that Putin was no longer in charge of Russia; that a new generation led by Dmitri Medvedev, the new president, had taken power; and that this generation could be trusted and befriended.
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Nocera Hits the Bulls-Eye on Magnitsky Act
Seth Mandel
04.17.2012 – 12:45 PM
President Obama has been decrying “the way Congress does its business these days” and promising to act “with or without this Congress,” so fed up is he by the lack of bipartisan solutions coming from the legislative branch. So the president, one would think, would be delighted that Congress has come together to produce a bipartisan, popular bill that would also give the president a strong foreign policy move while simultaneously beefing up his credentials on human rights and democracy.
I’m talking, of course, about the “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011,” a bill that would sanction Russian human rights offenders. It is named after the Russian attorney who was detained without trial for investigating Russian corruption and then beaten and left to die in prison. It is intended to replace the Cold War-era Jackson-Vanik amendment, aimed at getting the Soviet Union to allow Jewish emigration, but which is outdated and will likely be repealed now that Russia is joining the World Trade Organization. The bill was introduced by Democratic Senator Ben Cardin and has broad bipartisan support. But Obama staunchly opposes the bill. Today, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera adds his voice to the growing chorus of commentators, both liberal and conservative, who support the bill:
I have to confess that when I first began receiving press releases about this effort, which has gained traction in Europe as well as the U.S., I didn’t take it very seriously. Visa restrictions didn’t seem like much of a price for allowing an innocent lawyer to die in prison. But after watching the reaction of the Russian government, which has repeatedly and vehemently denounced the bill — and which is now, out of pure spite, prosecuting Magnitsky posthumously — I’ve come to see that it really does hit these officials where it hurts them most.
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Khodorkovsky Wants U.S. Visa Ban Over Yukos Lawyer Death
By Henry Meyer – Apr 10, 2012
Former Yukos Oil Co. owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky is pressing the U.S. to impose a visa ban and freeze the assets of some 30 officials involved in the imprisonment of a company lawyer who died after being denied medical care in prison.
Vasily Aleksanyan, who had AIDS and developed cancer while in jail, was imprisoned for more than 2 1/2 years until December 2008. The European Court of Human Rights had demanded his release, saying that Russia violated several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights by denying him specialized treatment for AIDS. He died in October 2011 at the age of 39.
A group of U.S. senators last year proposed a bipartisan bill that would impose a visa ban and asset freeze on 60 Russian officials implicated in the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow jail, as well as others guilty of human-rights violations. Four senators last month said they wouldn’t support an Obama administration effort to repeal trade restrictions against Russia without support for the legislation.
“To ensure the deaths of both Aleksanyan and Magnitsky were not in vain, actions must be taken against those responsible for the abuses of their human rights,” Khodorkovsky’s defense team said in an e-mailed statement from New York. “This is the only way to achieve some justice for victims and to dissuade further tragedies in Russia.”
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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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Obama Must Reset Relations with Russia Along Economic Lines
As Vladimir Putin prepares for his May inauguration and return to the Russian presidency, the United States must design a new relationship with this often difficult leader and his country.
The “Russian Reset” of President Obama’s first term sought to overcome the strain in relations of recent years in order to achieve some specific foreign policy goals. It brought a new arms control treaty, Russian cooperation in transiting military material to Afghanistan, and help in pressuring Iran. But simply continuing the reset along the same lines is a dead end.
There is little likelihood of any significant progress in nuclear arms control because any new accord would require more meaningful reductions in weapons. The US and NATO engagement in Afghanistan is winding down. And Russia seems unwilling to pursue further sanctions against the Iranian threat of proliferation.
When Mr. Putin arrives in Camp David for the G8 summit in May, President Obama must be ready to lay out the framework for a new reset.
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The Limits of Cheeseburger Diplomacy
President Obama’s “hot mike” comments to Dmitry Medvedev represented a classic Kinsley gaffe. Unaware he was being recorded, Obama assured the Russian leader that he would “have more flexibility” on missile defense after his reelection. Medvedev, in turn, promised to “transmit this information to Vladimir,” a reference to the once and future President Putin.
If anyone was still wondering why Republicans remain skeptical of Obama’s commitment to missile defense, now they understand. Yet the significance of the hot-mike incident goes beyond that one issue. In a broader sense, the president has indicated that he is doubling down on his “reset” policy toward Moscow, despite a mountain of evidence that the policy has largely failed.
The most recent evidence of its failure was Russia’s March 4 presidential election, which restored Putin to the top job — his former job — in the Kremlin. That election was sullied by “procedural irregularities,” not to mention a political and media environment that forestalled genuine democratic competition. The same could be said of Russia’s December 4 parliamentary elections, in which the government’s mischief was even worse. As the New York Times reported, OECD election observers said they “had observed blatant fraud, including the brazen stuffing of ballot boxes” — which makes it all the more remarkable that Putin’s United Russia Party suffered such major losses.
In short, the country is sliding deeper into lawless autocracy. Meanwhile, Moscow continues to resist imposing tougher sanctions on Iran and Syria, and it continues to supply Damascus with all sorts of weaponry that is being used to massacre innocent civilians. When Russia and China vetoed a recent U.N. resolution on Syria, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called their actions “despicable.”
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Why is Obama Giving Up His Human Rights Leverage Against Russia?
At two separate events in Washington recently, Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, insisted that it should be a “total no brainer” for Congress to end the application of the Jackson-Vanik amendment—which denies normal, unconditional trade to non-market economies that restrict emigration—to Russia. The waning utility of Jackson-Vanik, McFaul claimed, was entirely exhausted by the completion of WTO negotiations. Now that the deal’s done, he said, “it’s really hard to understand in whose interest holding [onto this] does serve.”
But in predicating his argument on the grounds of free trade—citing, for example, imports and exports of “poultry and pork” between Russia and the United States—McFaul has shown a failure to grasp the essence of the legislation he’s discussing. By ignoring the Jackson-Vanik amendment’s historic significance for the promotion of human rights in the Soviet bloc and China, he is doing a disservice to Russia’s current democratic opposition figures.
Conceived by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Congressman Charles Vanik during the Cold War, the Jackson-Vanik bill tied trade status for communist countries to the freedom to emigrate, which Jackson saw not only as an important issue in its own right, but also as a wedge for improving respect for other human rights. That’s why it misses the point to simply note, as many have, that the Soviet Union no longer exists and today’s Russia doesn’t restrict emigration (indeed, quite to the contrary, Russia is suffering a massive brain drain). The main point about Jackson-Vanik—and the reason it is still relevant to U.S.-Russia relations—is that it has always been about maximizing America’s leverage on human rights and demonstrating a willingness to use it.
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Anti-Russian Amendment Now Headache for U.S.
Economic sanctions against Russia imposed by the United States in 1974 could backfire on America this year, but are likely to stay in place because of persistent political and ideological grudges between the two Cold War rivals, analysts said.
The Jackson-Vanik amendment was defunct in practice over the last two decades, but things got tricky after Russia completed its 18-year-long path to the World Trade Organization (WTO) last year, with more than a little help from the White House.
WTO rules ban formal trade restrictions such as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which means the United States could face economic sanctions from Moscow and pressure from WTO once Russia completes the treaty’s ratification, expected this summer.
Elections First
“Russia has no practical interest in canceling the Jackson-Vanik amendment,” Konstantin Kosachyov, then-State Duma lawmaker with United Russia and deputy head of the international affairs committee at the lower chamber, said in late February.
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Obama’s Open Microphone
The remarks of President Obama to Dmitry Medvedev over an open microphone, in which he promised that in a second term, he will have flexibility on the issue of global missile defense, shows that when it comes to U.S.–Russian relations, Obama is a stunningly slow learner.
The relations between a U.S. president and a Russian leader often follow a depressing pattern. The American leader charms (or thinks he charms) his Russian counterpart. The Russian leader begins to engage in criminal behavior, which gets steadily worse. Finally, something big happens — the invasion of Afghanistan, the nuclear poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London, the invasion of Georgia — and the realization dawns that the Russian is neither a Christian nor a friend and he has to be approached with realism.
Since taking office in 2008, Obama has had ample reason to reconsider the wisdom of relying on Russian goodwill, including Russia’s fixed elections and official involvement in the murder of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. But he persists in seeing the Putin regime as a “partner” and the real threat as coming from the political opposition in the U.S.
Obama hinted in his now-public conversation with Medvedev that he is ready to meet Russian concerns. In fact, he needs to be prevented from doing so because the steps the Russians are demanding will not lead to a real improvement in relations and are inimical to the security interests of the U.S.
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