Russian vs U.S. Diplomats & How We Have Dealt with Moscow: Views from an Expert
James Schumaker is a retired Foreign Service officer with extensive professional experience in the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He was trained in Russian while serving in the U.S. Army and served three years at the White House as a Russian translator and communications specialist. He has had repeated tours in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Jim served as deputy chief of mission in Kabul when I was senior country officer for Afghanistan in the late 1980s. We in Washington valued his insightful reporting and analyses. I share here his excellent recent comments to my latest article in POLITICO and another in The Atlantic.
Russian Diplomats Are Eating America's Lunch
POLITICO Magazine 4/16/2014
When Jim Bruno and I were working in Afghan affairs back in the late 1980s, Soviet diplomats were always known for their professionalism, and so now are the Russian diplomats who are dealing with Ukraine. It is also true that if Russian ambassadors were matched up with ours, there is no doubt that in terms of overall quality the Russians would come out winners. They are not saddled with a political spoils system that loads incompetent political hacks and bundlers into ambassadorial positions, so it really is no contest in any administration -- Republican or Democratic. When you get to the career level, however, the contest is much more even. We must also remember that in both systems foreign policy direction comes from the top down and is highly centralized. If the policy from the top is fatally flawed, no amount of professionalism is going to save it. This is the dilemma that Russian diplomats now face. Their leader, Vladimir Putin, may be tactically gifted, but his long range strategy in his relationship with the West, and specifically, Ukraine, is based on delusion and doomed to failure. And, in dealing with American diplomats on Ukraine, the Russians are not up against our second team. Our diplomats in that arena are second to none. The Obama administration has much to answer for in its endless efforts to reward incompetent supporters with political postings, but at least, I hope, the White House will have the good sense not to send bumbling hoteliers or overmatched soap opera queens to our most important posts, especially Moscow.
How America Lost Vladimir Putin
The Atlantic, 4/19/2014
This is an excellent recounting of the disastrous train wreck our policy toward Russia has been for the last fourteen years, particularly during the Bush years, when Russia was repeatedly slighted, discounted, and generally dissed in ways that were deeply damaging to the relationship. I do believe, however, that the article begins from a false premise: that Putin was ours to lose. This was never the case. It's always possible that wiser U.S. policies, particularly during the Bush Administration, might have improved matters on the margins, but I think the odds were always against a good relationship with Russia once the Kremlin became dominated by former KGB officers with a xenophobic world view. Let's suppose that NATO had not accepted new members from Eastern Europe, that the Bush administration had paid more heed to Russian views on Iraq and Iran, that rhetorical support had not been given to the color revolutions, that Kosovo had not been allowed to declare independence, and that Georgia had not been given false signals of U.S. support in 2008. What kind of world would we see now? We would see a world in which Putin would be seeking to extend Russia's sway over the Eastern European countries that were still outside of NATO. We would see a Ukraine bludgeoned into the Russian-dominated Customs Union and a more overt Russian role in dominating the country. And we would see the same crackdown on human rights in Russia, the same creation of an oligarchic state based on intimidation and corruption, and the same KGB tactic of using the United States as the image of the enemy in order to rally the Russian people. Putin was going to try all of these strategies, and anyone working in Russia as I did during the early 2000s could see the writing on the wall. It was all just a matter of tactical timing. Our failure was not in being nicer to Putin. It was in failing to take him seriously, and failing to react more decisively to his early geopolitical moves. It is not too late to avert a new Cold War, but our past policy mistakes have pushed us rapidly down a path to a new period of confrontation.