The 1980s Called, And They Want Their Russia Sanctions Back The expanded Russia sanctions have come at a low point in U.S. relations with its allies and an increased lack of trust in American leadership, calling into question how effective they will be.By Nikolas K. Gvosdev
August 8, 2017 One unfortunate outgrowth of the way the United States formulates its national security policy is the tendency to view the “battle” in Washington as the centerpiece, with the actual foreign policy effects relegated to a sideline. The debate over whether to institutionalize (and increase) sanctions on Russia has followed this pattern, with Congress’s passage of legislation over the objections of President Donald Trump viewed primarily as a domestic political “humiliating rebuke” to the administration rather than as a step that has significant foreign policy implications to the United States.
Many seem to view the heavy lifting as over and done, with all that remains to count the days until Vladimir Putin is ousted from power and Russia meekly withdraws its forces from Ukraine and Syria. In contrast to the years of careful preparation and negotiation with other key partners over the Iran sanctions, which the latest legislation took as a template, the expanded Russia sanctions have come at a low point in U.S. relations with its allies and an increased lack of trust in American leadership, calling into question how effective they will be in the absence of a new trans-Atlantic (and trans-Pacific) consensus on how to move forward.
The gamble of Congress’s approach is that the United States can put back together the coalition of states it assembled to defeat the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The problem is that, despite all the nostalgia for the 1980s—and the consistent slips by many U.S. officials who still refer to the “Soviet Union”—we aren’t living in 1985. The Russian Federation of 2017 is a smaller and weaker state than its Soviet predecessor, but paradoxically that also makes the Moscow of today far less threatening to a number of key countries than it was 30 years ago, even if a post-Soviet Russia is still the biggest kid on the immediate Eurasian block. That has important geopolitical ramifications.
Alienating Russia Is Good for ChinaFor one thing, the Soviet threat was perhaps the biggest factor inducing the People’s Republic of China to avoid creating problems with the United States and its allies. China has always claimed extensive maritime zones in the South and East China Seas; the difference was that when the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to Beijing, the Chinese leadership was not particularly interested in ginning up problems with Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian states over disputed islands and the Nine-Dash Line.
Today, China no longer fears that a post-Soviet Russia poses a threat to its ascendancy in East Asia, and is more interested in preventing Moscow from becoming part of an encircling coalition of states. As much as many American analysts deride the Obama administration’s effort to “reset” relations with Russia as a failure, it did create heartburn in Beijing because of the prospects that Moscow might develop a closer partnership with Washington.
U.S. sanctions, in contrast, are welcomed by China. Not only does it drive Russia closer to China, it guarantees that China’s northern and western frontiers are safeguarded, while any U.S. pivot back to Europe to deal with a resurging Russia takes away from the American rebalance to the Asia-Pacific.
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/08/1980s-called-wants-russia-sanctions-back/
