Statements made today by the mouth of American officials are increasingly giving the impression that Washington has acute political schizophrenia. In the White House, it seems as if there are two administrations at once, fiercely hating each other.
The President declares his desire to “get along with Russia” - his closest associates demand “Russia to punish”. The national security adviser talks about the imminent and “very important” meeting between the White House’s host and Vladimir Putin - the State Department is doing everything to prevent this meeting from taking place. Trump has been saying all the time about the need to “discuss Syria and Ukraine with Moscow” - the US ambassador to the UN (now former) Nikki Haley denies the very possibility of dialogue: for her, “lie, deception and uncontrollable behavior” are “the norm of Russian culture”.
The beginning of this week did not bring any changes in the “clinical picture”. At first, the “leader of the free world” announced to all mankind through his Twitter that negotiations with Moscow and Beijing would soon begin to limit the arms race. And then State Secretary Mike Pompeo at the NATO summit in Brussels actually presented Moscow with an ultimatum: either Russia will cease its “systematic violation” of the Treaty on Medium and Short-Range Missiles (DDSMD), or in 60 days the United States will take retaliatory actions. Unless, of course, Russia will not go to the negotiations.
This sounds particularly strange in the light of the October statement by Donald Trump about the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the INF Treaty for purely pragmatic reasons - Washington needs to develop this type of weapon to ensure its national security.
So who to believe? Which statement to listen to? And how to respond to this stream of mutually exclusive accusations, threats and invitations to dialogue?
It is easiest to follow the US liberal media (observing, by contrast, certain diplomatic etiquette) to declare the 45th President of the United States mentally unbalanced or (at best) completely confused. You can listen to Bob Woodworth, the author of Fear: Trump in the White House, or Michael Wolfe, the author of Fire and Fury, who paint a bleak picture of chaos and paranoia prevailing in the White House. Since Washington’s actions are unpredictable, it is necessary to prepare for the worst and, too, proceed from pragmatic considerations - develop promising types of weapons, responding to all signals from overseas with icy silence.
A similar conclusion is often made by those Russian experts who see the entire history of relations between Moscow and Washington as a sequence of cycles of fruitless hopes and bitter disappointments.
Meanwhile, not only both superpowers, but the whole world is in need of a dialogue between Moscow and Washington. It would be very useful - and one cannot but agree with Trump - to involve Beijing in such a dialogue. Perhaps other capitals.
All the military-technical arguments for and against maintaining the INF Treaty have long been expressed not once. From a geopolitical point of view, the treaty of 1987 is hopelessly outdated - the borders, technologies and the strategic balance of forces in the world have changed. Worse, the entire global security infrastructure, built in the 1970s and 1980s, has become outdated. Like any other infrastructure, without constant updating, it will wipe and fray.
We should not think that Washington does not understand this. But there are three factors that must be taken into account when assessing at first glance contradictory signals from the other side of the Atlantic.
The first factor in all colors is described by famous American expert on Russia Stephen Cohen (not to be confused with Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen and the frequent guest of Russian TV channels Ariel Cohen) in his book with the alarming title “War with Russia?”. A brief version of Cohen’s alarmist work is set out in his article, published this week by The Nation.
The author argues that because of bloated hysteria around the “Russian cause,” the American establishment and the Washington bureaucracy do not allow the US president to take up his direct responsibilities - preventing a military conflict with Russia. It turns out that two administrations in the White House are really working (sometimes they are represented by the same people) - sensible, inclined to dialogue and paranoid, obsessed with Russophobia.
The second factor is the foreign policy tactics of Donald Trump himself. He tends to maximize the stakes in the game before compromising. This was clearly seen from the pressure on Pyongyang, the trade war with Beijing, the blackmailing of Canada and Mexico before re-signing the customs agreement.
The third factor is more fundamental. Not a single White House owner can abandon the tacit doctrine of US strategic invulnerability.
The technical unattainability of this goal did not prevent the United States from developing a Strategic Defense Initiative and building a global missile defense system. Here, as the leader of the Second International, Bernstein: the movement is everything, the goal is nothing.
Under Obama, the doctrine underwent notable changes. In Washington, talking about a nuclear-free world. It is clear that in the absence of nuclear deterrence forces in Russia and China, America becomes almost invulnerable because of its overwhelming advantage in conventional weapons, especially in the World Ocean.
This idea was not forgotten today. One of the leaders of the US democratic opposition, Senator Elizabeth Warren, in her programmatic article published in Foreign Affairs, reaffirmed the commitment of American liberals to the thesis of the complete elimination of nuclear weapons in the world. Soon, this simple idea may become (if it has not already become) the subject of a two-party consensus.
Like Trump, Warren points to rising US military spending, which in 2018 amounted to more than $ 700 billion. Part of this money and the president and his opponents would like to spend on other needs. At the same time, disarmament with the right approach will play into the hands of the most militarily strong power. Double benefit!
All the delights of the arms race, people who found the Soviet Union at a conscious age, remember well. It’s impossible to draw yourself into a new spiral of building up Russia's military potentials.
But at the same time, it should be remembered that the disarmament race is also a dangerous factor of pressure on our country, especially since our partners have already let down the theoretical basis for such a race.
The dialogue with the current White House administration will undoubtedly continue. We only need to take into account that it will be the more productive, the more Trump will squeeze his enemies inside the United States and the more clearly we will understand the strategy and tactics of Washington when negotiating global security issues.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.