Snowden in the Greater Scheme of U.S.-Russian Relations

Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Edward Snowden (Photo: telegraph.co.uk)

On Thursday, Aug. 1, 2013, Russia granted temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, permitting him to leave the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport for the first time in nearly six weeks. The Obama administration immediately expressed its disappointment with the Russian decision, and some members of Congress have called for retaliatory measures against Russia. While President Putins foreign policy adviser, Yury V. Ushakov, has asserted that the issue was not important enough to derail U.S.-Russian relations. Nevertheless, Obama canceled a presidential summit meeting scheduled for September, and there was talk in Washington of boycotting the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

To be sure, the charges against Snowden are serious. He has released official documents revealing the methods used by the National Security Agency (documents, not mere whisperings to reporters that the authorities could deny, and the actual methods, not a few random details picked up by those methods). This was not like the 1970s disclosure of secret CIA operations unknown even to Congress. The existence of these programs has already been known to the public in broad outline since 2006, and it has been known that Congress revised the laws governing them in 2007 and 2008. It appears so far that the Obama administration (unlike the Bush administration) has operated the programs within the confines of current law. (Granted, people may disagree with the law, and Congress may change it again if it so chooses.) While Snowden presents himself as a whistleblower, his evidence relates to the governments capabilities, not to any specific abuses of those capabilities or other wrongdoing. He and journalist Glenn Greenwald have made assertions that abuses are occurring, or must have occurred, but they have not proved it or described any specific instance of abuse. At times, their descriptions of the technologies involved and of the documents themselves have been inaccurate.

On the other hand, it is not like the United States rolls over and surrenders everyone the Russians want extradited. Take, for instance, Ilyas Akhmadov, former foreign minister of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (not to be confused with the Islamists of the Caucasus Emirate, who have subsequently dominated the Chechen rebel movement). He is wanted in Russia on charges of terrorism, but was granted asylum in the United States in 2004. The Department of Homeland Security opposed the asylum decision, but members of Congress advocated on his behalf. Probably some of the same members who now cannot believe that Russia would deny an extradition request.

Could the Snowden case actually undermine U.S.-Russian relations? Not by itself, but U.S.-Russian relations are in a precarious balance at the moment. It is not impossible that they might deteriorate on their own or that this might serve as a trigger.

On the positive side, there are areas in which the United States and Russia cooperate, much more than in, say, 2008, when relations were virtually frozen. Russia finally entered the World Trade Organization in 2012, with U.S. support, and the two countries have agreed to normalize trade relations for the first time in nearly a century. Russia allows the United States to use its territory and air spaceand not to object to the use of Central Asian territoryto move personnel and equipment in and out of Afghanistan, making the U.S. military less dependant on precarious Pakistani routes. The two countries signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty and have subsequently cooperated in implementation and verification measures. The two countries have increased cooperation in counterterrorism activities since the Boston Marathon bombing, and they cooperate in combating heroin traffic.

In other areas, however, things are not going so well. Russia, over the objections of the United States, continues financial and trade relations with Iran and supports the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Moscow objects loudly to U.S. plans for ballistic-missile defense, which the Russians insist is directed at neutralizing their deterrent force. On North Korea, where the two sides strategic interests come closer together, they have differed significantly over tactics. The low point came with Russias invasion of its neighbor Georgia in 2008.

I suspect, however, that the real problem in U.S.-Russian relations lies at a deeper level, separate from any list of discrete issues. The two countries are simply out of sync in their basic attitudes toward each other. The mismatch may have prevented the true breakthrough in relations that could have occurred at the end of the cold war.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, both sides realized that a fundamental change had occurred in their mutual relationship. Both said to themselves, The cold war is over, now we can be friends, but it meant different things to them. For the Russians, to put it in crude terms, despite their pitiable condition at the moment, the basic opportunity was, We and the Americans are no longer enemies; now we can rule the world together. The image of mutual relations was something akin to a resurrection of the 19th-century Concert of Europe, in which the great powers of the day held conferences and decided the big issues of the moment both for themselves and for lesser powers. I suspect the Russians originally thought that the G-7 was where those decisions were made, but they were determined to find the proper place and to become full-fledged members. The Russians do not put it this way, but they seem to have something like this in mind when they describe what it means for Russia to be treated as an equal, an equal, that is, to the American superpower. An earlier hint of this attitude came in the 1970s, when Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko stated that dtente meant that no important issue in the world could be resolved without the participation of the Soviet Union, or in opposition to it.

The U.S. attitude toward Russia and the changed world of the 1990s was different. Again, few Americans would put it this way, but the attitude was, We and the Russians are no longer enemies; now we dont have to pay any attention to them whatsoever. Oh, occasionally an American leader will declare that U.S.-Russian relations are important and then produce a lengthy list of things that we need them to do for us. Yet there rarely seems to be a list of things we could do for them (the WTO was a noteworthy exception, although it took 20 years) or a list of what the two of us could do together (and those are constructed around U.S. goals and objectives). Needless to say, the Russians do not find this amusing.

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Snowden in the Greater Scheme of U.S.-Russian Relations