World Economic Forum/CreativeCommons
I mentioned yesterday that Dmitri Medvedev's reaction to Barack Obama's election was stupid: how he can think a sensible policy is to threaten America by stationing missiles near the Polish border, I have no idea. Obviously the Russians want the US to abandon missile defence, or at least to site it somewhere other than eastern Europe; they want American support for Georgia to be reduced and for NATO expansion to be slowed or halted. But this isn't the way to achieve any of that. Can't Medvedev see that his move is strongly reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis in the early sixties? Obama makes many Americans think of Kennedy, and has encouraged the comparison by his staged speech in Berlin earlier this year - and now Medvedev has cemented the parallel. By doing so, he makes it politically impossible for Obama to be as moderate as he might have hoped to be: he's considered dangerously doveish by enough Americans already, and dare not be seen as less willing to stand up to Russia than Kennedy was. Medvedev, therefore, has trapped Obama in just the position Moscow would like Washington to abandon. A masterstoke of silliness.
How much shrewder it would have been to welcome Obama's election fulsomely, to look forward to a breathrough in bilateral relations and to express hope of early change from the rigid positions of the past - perhaps mentioning Iraq and missile defence specifically - in this way not only inviting and permitting Obama to back off, but actually making it difficult for him to maintain current positions without seeming to go back on his own promise of change in American foreign policy. I think Medvedev needs new advisers.
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