Elephants Mated: Summits Over - Yawn

This week’s much ballyhooed Moscow and E-8 Summits failed to push Michael Jackson off of the front pages and about the only thing that seems certain is Jackson will not replace Lenin in the Kremlin mausoleum.

The Moscow and G-8 summits are over and in classis fashion they were like elephants mating - everything happens at a very high level and nothing happens for a very long time. Anything of substance was pushed well over the horizon.  The atmospherics were good as is almost always the case with the proper things said on all sides and statements and gestures of deep sincerity made. And as with all summits, those atmospherics are like the air: insubstantial and ultimately invisible. While there were indications of substantial movement, you would have needed a microscope to see them. But the Obamas got a nice vacation while the kids are out of school and Michel got to show off a $5,000 purse.

The G-8 resolutely avoided resolving anything. China left to go home and kill, wound or prison a few hundred more dissidents, and except for the usual posturing, posing and pictures everything was delayed.  Obama couldn’t resist playing the big shot shoveling billions of borrowed dollars into a harebrained, spurious scheme to unilaterally save humankind.

In Moscow Obama, Medvedev and Putin reached agreement on what an agreement on nuclear arms reduction might look like, but that’s not a strategic matter. The number of strategic warheads and delivery vehicles is a Cold War issue but instead that no one is deterring anyone these days, and the risk of accidental launch is as large or as small whether there are 500 or 5,000 launchers or warheads. Either way, nuclear arms’ strategic significance remains unchanged and when everything is said and done Russia and the U. S. will each have a couple thousand and the ability to deliver them with pinpoint accuracy so you don’t need overkill like in the 1950’s -60s or 70s.

Then Obama took his kids to see the Pope before a family vacation to Africa apparently to show the children their roots.

The week was a public relations flop and not even the main stream U. S. media was able to make anything worthwhile out of it.

What remain says Stratfor is that there are dozens of contentious issues between just the United States and Russia, three appear fundamental including:

• 1. Will Poland become a base from which the United States can contain Russian power, or from the Russian point of view, threaten the former Soviet Union? The U. S. has contended that’s not the purpose but the Russians aren’t falling for it and Obama has been desperate to find a way out on some technical grounds so he doesn’t have to break yet another campaign promise. Obama didn’t agree on the BMD.
• 2. Then there is the question of Iran. This is a strategic matter for the U. S. , made more pressing since the recent Iranian election. Obama blew any U. S. chance there and needs to isolate Iran which it cannot do without Russia. Putin reportedly gave Obama a lesson in tough likely telling him scrap the BMD and we’ll play ball on Iran - otherwise put it where the light don’t shine. Putin just smiled.
• 3. Overlaying everything are former Soviet countries other than Russia, and the expressed U.S. desire to see NATO expand to include Ukraine and Georgia. The ever paranoid Putin sees that as a threat. Obama insists that no such understandings exist, and anyhow such a NATO expansion doesn’t threaten Russia, and that the expansion will continue. The Russians were hoping the Americans would back off on this issue at the summit.

  Before the Moscow confab Russia OK’d U. S. arms shipment through its territory into Afghanistan. This issue became important last winter when Taliban attacks on U.S. supply routes through Pakistan intensified, putting the viability of those routes in question. For months the Russians have accepted the transit of nonlethal materiel through Russia, but not arms now it looks like that will be expand and it can easily be revoked is Putin’s nose is tweaked and Obama knows it and is slowly awakening to the quagmire he’s backed into in Afghanistan with Iran on the South Russia to the north and Pakistan to the East. .

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will waddle into Moscow In September so Putin can yell at her and Obama won’t get blamed and gives Obama more time to watch football and invest a new BCS system..

Perhaps the most important part of the summit was that Obama did not fall into the Kennedy trap like at the 1961 Kennedy-Khrushchev summit being bruited about, Obama clearly had at least one overriding goal in Moscow: to not be weak. JFK was rolled by Nikita encouraging the Cuban Missile crisis misadventure. Albeit Kennedy may have been so stoned on pain meds he couldn’t cope with the raging peasant but that doesn’t matter now..

Obama has tried to play Medvedev and Putin against each other. No matter how obvious and clumsy that might have been, it served a public purpose by making it clear that Obama was not in awe of either Twiddle Dee or Dum. Most still await Obama proving he can deal internationally and come up with something other than his Ramsey Clark/Rodney King-like foreign policy.  

So, the important news from the summit was as follows:

• no one screwed up, and
• U.S.-Russian relations did not get worse-and might actually have improved.
• No far-reaching strategic agreements were attained, but strategic improvements in the future were not excluded.
• Obama played his role without faltering, and there may be some smidgen of tension between the two personalities running Russia.

In the meantime, BMD remains under development in Poland, there is no U.S.-Russian agreement on Iran, and so far as we can confirm at present, no major shift in U.S. policy on Ukraine and Georgia has occurred and Obama is trudging along in Bush’s footsteps..

Overall if you don’t think The Moscow Summit was flat the E-8 was even less so. Ultimately, little progress was made. And the burning issues-particularly Poland and Iran-continue to burn.