The Russian challenge for America’s odd couple

Picture Barack Obama in the White House. The US president is closeted with advisers, examining and re-examining every dimension and detail of the administration’s foreign policy. Now take a short walk to the State Department. You will not find John Kerry at home. The secretary of state has jetted off somewhere in search of a crisis to be defused or a diplomatic deal to be struck.

The analyst president, and the activist secretary. Such are the two faces of US foreign policy as it plays out around the world. There are circumstances in which this synergy of opposites could work. This has not been the case so far. The chatter in other national capitals is about a US punching far below its weight. Mind you, Europeans should be careful about stones and glass houses.


There is much to be said for Mr Obama’s deliberative approach. The shoot-from-the-hip style of George W Bush was hardly a roaring success. Nothing has done so much to deplete American power as the costly and failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The unipolar moment has passed. There are limits on Washington’s ability to set the world to rights.

There is a point, however, when analysis begets paralysis – when an unwillingness to act itself diminishes the capacity to act. Prudence slides towards nothing-to-be-done fatalism. Staying out of wars is a noble but insufficient ambition for the world’s sole superpower.

Mr Kerry’s style could not be more different. While the president cogitates, his secretary of state agitates. As a senior European diplomat puts it, Mr Kerry never enters a room without a burning conviction that, whatever the crisis, he can find a diplomatic solution. Forget digital communications – Mr Kerry does his diplomacy face to face. How many times has he jetted to Israel and Palestine during the past year? A dozen at least.

This approach also has its advantages. Hillary Clinton, his predecessor, steered clear of the big challenges. Diplomacy only succeeds when the chief diplomat is ready to risk failure. If Mr Obama is content with his legacy as a peacenik, Mr Kerry wants to leave his own mark on history. Why not if the result is a Middle East peace deal or an end to the nuclear stand-off with Iran?

True, Mr Kerry’s self-belief and disdain for process does not endear him to everyone in the state department. One or two at the top are said to be casting an eye at the exit. Something may well be going wrong when officials feel a need to tune in to CNN to check whether the secretary of state has dreamt up a new policy on a flight.

More pertinently, Mr Kerry can be effective only if his interlocutors are persuaded that he is speaking for the president. They often have their doubts. Mr Obama certainly wants a deal with Iran – if only to avoid another war. Less certain is how much capital he will invest in pressing Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to accept an equitable peace with the Palestinians.

In a curious way, Russia’s march into Ukraine and its military annexation of Crimea present an opportunity as well as a danger to this the administration’s odd couple. It would be foolish to underestimate the possibility of a dangerous escalation. Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Duma this week was that of a Russian president who has unequivocally rejected the liberal international order. His grievances, we heard, reach back far beyond the collapse of communism to centuries of supposed western calumnies.

That said, the Russian leader’s ugly nationalism has brought rare clarity to the relationship. Even the most dovish of Europeans will now struggle to argue that a softly-softly approach will persuade him to bring Russia into the community of nations. In the long term Mr Putin’s revanchism is unsustainable. Russia is in secular decline. It desperately needs investment and technology. The problem is that no one knows how long Mr Putin can prop up his aggression with oil and gas revenues.

Two things are needed urgently of the US president. The first is convincing resolve – a sense of purposefulness that persuades allies and the Kremlin regime alike that the US is unshakeable in its determination to push back against Moscow’s expansionism. Everyone needs to know that Mr Obama really does mean it this time.

The second is a plan to rebuild the Euro-Atlantic community. Mr Obama will be in Brussels next week, visiting the headquarters of the EU and Nato. What better opportunity to invite America’s European partners to show there is substance to the old alliance. Europe must be told to do its bit but with the US leadership and the sustained grip that ensured that Soviet communism eventually collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.

The US and Europe have been talking on and off for years about a transatlantic trade pact to cement economic ties and about weaning Europe off Russian gas. Now is the moment for both sides to stop arguing about chlorinated chickens, for Europeans to end the dithering about a unified energy market, and for Washington to offer its allies access to US shale gas. It is also the time for Europeans to put more into Nato and for the US to strengthen security guarantees for central and eastern Europe.

Mr Obama will meet other leaders of the Group of Seven nations in The Hague on the margins of a summit on nuclear security. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for a guarantee of its territorial integrity. Russia’s invasion has sent a dangerous message to would-be nuclear proliferators around the world. Mr Obama must counter it with strategic leadership. Then he can leave the diplomacy to Mr Kerry.

Philip Stephens


Fonte: FT