The meeting between Obama and Prime Minister Putin has been accorded almost equal importance to that of Obama with President Medvedev Is Medvedev good cop and Putin bad cop? Putin did not hesitate to deliver a forceful account of Moscow’s perspective on world affairs.

Once again in Russia, there was no room for Obama’s famed charm. Obamamania appears to stop with the borders of the American informal imperium – yet still there was that sense that ‘bizness’ could be done between the weakened hegemon and the recovering Slavic power.

The Limits Of Obamamania

The most interesting meeting (as reported in the Financial Times) may be the cool reception to the American President from the students and graduates of Moscow’s New Economic School, reckoned a liberal establishment by standards, certainly if compared to the adulation he has received elsewhere.

This may say something about the slow growth of a neo-nationalist mood amongst the rising young Russian elite and the development of right-wing Eurasianist ideas that stand in direct opposition to Western liberalism.

The younger generation of bourgeois Muslims and Europeans (at least in Eastern Europe) very much like the liberal and universalising message of the American President but their Russian equivalents do not – and neither, we would guess, would their equivalents in neo-nationalist China.

Nothing could express more clearly the rise of a new multi-polarity, with dissident intellectual minorities (certainly of neo-Rightists in Europe and Islamists in the Muslim world) appearing on both sides, in a replaying of the soft power games of Cold War international affairs.

Obama will certainly have irritated his hosts by meeting with opposition politicians and civil society representatives. The US still seems to find it hard to understand that countries outside its zone of influence tend to resent what they see as interference in their internal affairs.

The negative view of such soft power dialogueis a lesson being learned the hard way in both Russia and Iran bythe US' British out-rider. But the British are disposable, the Americans are not. Such meetings will be tolerated in Moscow through gritted teeth and the British dog just kicked the harder.

Iran & Spheres Of Influence

One interesting area of uncertainty is Russia’s support for the American position on Iran. The Americans are going to have to go back home and do some hard thinking on their priorities.

They have got what they wanted on Afghanistan but only because Russia has long since conceded that West Asia is part of America’s ‘sphere of influence’. The visit will have been educational for the American President.

The US persists in talking in terms of universal values whereas Russia thinks in terms of spheres of influence. Iran is seen by the US as an affront to a variety of universal values whereas Russia sees it as a pawn in the negotiation of boundaries between spheres.

In effect, Russia is saying that you (Obama) can have Iran if you concede the principle of our sphere which means concessions on more immediate interests – Ukraine and the Caucasus and influence in Eurasia.

This is a tough call for the US because increasing Russian influence in Eurasia in exchange for support on Iranian matters does not actually deliver Iran (which decides its own affairs).

It also suggests that an improved chance of control over a vital energy production zone (vital to American interests) might be traded for increased Russian leverage (also based on energy production) over its European allies.

In essence, Russia might get the propaganda victory of withdrawal of the missile shield and the US might see more pressure exerted on Iran but the American withdrawal will unnerve the Eastern Europeans about commitments to the defence from the bear and destabilise the European Union.

This, in turn, might mean a consequent potential weakening of the US’ hold over a major soft power and consumption market. In fact, the US could afford to lose a bit of ground in Eurasia because the EU is scarcely going to fall into Russian hands but the calculations are complex.

Re-Calibrating Interests

One calculation is that a resentful centre-right EU might recreate the Gaullist third way in reaction to Americans trying to run their affairs and Russians squeezing them on input costs. Anglo-Saxon strategy is to integrate the European Union as junior partner not as competitor within the Western alliance.

So, for the next few months, the Russians are likely to appreciate their Iranian bargaining chip. They provide much of the civil nuclear technology required by the regime and they have a veto in the UN. These facts alone suggest stasis.

And we can expect more rumblings from the Israelis about some strike at Iran to show that they will not be taken down so easily over the Peace Process. Even Obama seems tempted to let the Israelis do their grandstanding as counterweight to the obduracy of the Russians and the Iranians themselves.

As for Europe (or rather what passes for Europe but is an increasingly ramshackle bureaucracy with little relationship to the wider population), EU-Russian relations are pretty frosty and not helped by circulating Presidencies (first the Czech Republic and now Sweden in 2009)

History will tend to dictate how Russia is regarded by each new EU Presidency in turn. The Europeans are, of course, most interested in institutional reform, the financial crisis and the religion of climate change but energy supply from the East is never going to be far behind these first order anxieties.

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An unseemly little spat broke out between Russia and the US in advance of the Obama-Medvedev Summit tomorrow, although neither Putin nor Medvedev are likely to allow the Americans to cause a split within the Russian ruling order.

The Russians have been getting frustrated that there is no sign of movement from the US on the missile shield but the immediate irritation lay in the usually sure-footed Obama suggesting in public that he could deal with Medvedev but that Putin was still stuck in old cold war thinking.

Putin was irritated and struck back but, their points having been made, both sides still seem keen to make progress. The rather clumsy attempt to flatter Medvedev at the expense of Putin seemed to be a strategy rather than an incident.

A subsequent interview with Novaya Gazeta praised Medvedev further for his promises to boost freedom and the rule of law but the PR was carefully calibrated. A signal was merely being sent that US friendship and liberal values were closely associated.

The Agenda

Regardless of this flummery, the Summit is primarily about a ‘framework agreement’ for cuts in nuclear weaponry which may or may not be linked to the missile defence shield.

Other issues include Russian assistance to the American war effort in Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and restrictions on NATO expansion through new pan-European security arrangements that are being proposed by Russia but that are unlikely to find many friends in the European Union.

Both Start 1 (1991) and Sort (the successful compromise successor to the failed Start II and Start III talks of 2002) expire on December 5th. Both sides have an incentive to move forward. The US wants a strategic realignment to end the Cold War once and for all. 

US power needs recalibrating for global multi-polarity. The Russians want to cut costs and re-allocate resources to a more focused Eurasian strategy. Success will be a nuclear arsenal of around 1,500, perhaps enough for both countries to keep a wary eye on China.

The issue of wider nuclear proliferation is much more difficult, even though the aims are the same on both sides.

US demands are bound up with its recent aggressive drive to push its values ever deeper into territory that the Russians would prefer to see autonomous, especially Iran, where it is of strategic importance in an Eurasian context.

Boundary Drawing

A great deal of these talks are about boundary drawing. Russia wants its limited sphere of influence recognised. It does not want to re-acquire Eastern Europe but it equally does not want the vengeful small states of the European Union developing an armed spike that is directed (as it sees it) at its heart.

What may seem defensive to the West (the missile shield) could be seen as the infrastructure for something far more offensive in any re-invention of a strategy of deterrence under some federalized European super-state. This is not an idle fear.

The European Union is currently ramshackle, filled with discontent and confusion, yet it is quite possible that the Lisbon Treaty will be a step on the way to an integrated vision of a European Union with its own security elite obsessing about the same matters that obsess the policy wonks in Washington.

And, though this seems unlikely now, recent electoral trends suggest the possibility of a resurgence of right-wing sentiments that could easily de-stabilise its liberal bias towards peace.

The EU will probably never have enough legitimacy to create a mass conscript army or pay for a volunteer and both the UK and France must be getting desperate by now to offload part of their massively expensive commitments to nuclear weaponry on others. 

In this situation, it is a reasonable fear that a European-wide nuclear deterrent targeted East could be on the agenda. We think this very unlikely for sound domestic political reasons within the EU but Eurasianists have history on their side in not trusting Continental Europeans not to take a punt on war.

Effects on the UK

The issue of the UK’s nuclear capability in this context is very much alive. The British and French are clinging on to a criminal absurdity. 95% of the global arsenal is held by the US and Russia. Neither the UK nor France can hope to match any increase in weaponry by China.

The British are in a worse state than France because they have placed themselves in the hands of a volatile trading system that gives and withdraws the funds for power projection with mad abandon.

The British Government is now almost desperate to find some way of deferring its costly commitment to a weapon it can never use and which might even be said to be the only reason why any sovereign state might attack the country in the first place.

Strategically, the UK is little more than an airfield for the US and a weakening source of auxiliaries for imperial boundary wars. And yet, the British State persists in the fantasy of great Power status largely on the basis of owning its weaponry of exceptional horror. This situation is obviously absurd.

Even with recovery, the UK’s economic base will have been much weakened and history is against it – its trajectory is that of Amsterdam and Venice as a trading nation left high and dry as global patterns of trade move on.

If the UK is to retain influence, it will be because it trades what it has to trade. Its nuclear capability can be traded either into Europe or as a bargaining chip in any successful de-nuclearisation of Eurasia and the Middle East that might help retain its ‘moral’ influence, especially within the Gulf.

Political Punting on Trident

The pressure is now on to get the UK out of the nuclear game (at least for a while). The US-Russian summit is important because, if successful, it enables the saving of face by a British administration whose raison d’etre was created as New Labour out of the old Atlanticist Labour Right.

The Labour Right was defined in part by its commitment to maintaining Britain’s role in the world as America’s best friend and trading partner. The kite is now being flown that the Trident nuclear deterrent might no longer be the sacred cow of Labour Atlanticism.

If this is so, then it is almost certain that an announcement will be held back for the Party Conference in September. This would help pacify the Left which naively still thinks that it, rather than the economic crisis, halted identity cards and Post Office partial privatisation.

Brown may also have understood the need for some sort of defence review before the next General Election, We still have to be wary of newspaper reports once again talking up what may prove to be a ‘damp squib’ but Brown must now be considering what is necessary to win an Election.

The Trident system will demand around £25bn of public funds for its renewal. This no longer seems a feasible priority for a country that is likely to see massive welfare spending cuts within a year or two. Getting out the Left-liberal vote while the Tories are under pressure from UKIP sounds sensible.

We expect a ‘fudge’ – an attempt to keep options open, retain some form of nuclear deterrent and hope that the country will be able to return to this absurd project at some stage in the future - much like the policies on identity cards and the partial privatization of the Post Office.

Geo-Strategies

The US, meanwhile, is actively promoting strategies that will have the European Union become an active participant in its global policing, taking responsibility for the Eurasian front as much as Australia does the Pacific one and Japan is being encouraged to undertake the East Asian one.

The preferred vehicle is NATO rather than the European Union itself, but it is probable that, over time, the US and the European security elite (really a committee of powers) will come to arrangements that must shift Russian concerns from Washington to Brussels.

Once this is understood, not only the determined resistance to the missile defence shield but much else in Russian policy falls into place – certainly, energy policy and the struggle to limit Western influence in the turbulent band of countries from Turkey through to Iran.

But also the determined effort to resist the extension of NATO into the Caucasus and to the very edge of Russia’s own western border and the interest in building some form of entente with the US over the heads of the Europeans, one that will keep any future populist tendencies on the Continent in check.

Other than trade, nuclear disarmament and support for the US agenda outside Eurasia, the Russians have little to offer the Americans in return other than the concession that Afghanistan and Pakistan should be accepted as well within the Western sphere of influence.

The settlement of the Islamist problem in West Asia could be helpful in holding back Islamism within the Russian sphere of influence and in the Chinese West. On the other hand, a settlement in West Asia might merely re-direct Islamist energies northwards into SCO territory.

Letting the Americans use Russian territory to prosecute their war is an easy concession to make – it keeps America and Britain pre-occupied with an expensive bush war at no cost to Moscow. If anyone is going to be distracted by an impossible peacekeeping mission, let it be America .....

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