‘Engage Moscow in Facing the Elephant’
In a reasonable world offering five recommendations to President Trump as he readies himself for his first meeting with President Putin should not be difficult. But at the moment this is anything but a reasonable world and, therefore, the greater challenge is how one gets from here to there.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s way of framing the U.S.-Russia challenge and his reported initial plan for dealing with it make sense. He and his allies, including Fiona Hill in the White House, with apparent agreement from the Russia side, start from the notion that the two countries are in a very deep hole and need to stop digging, the stakes are too high, and rather than look back, it would be better to focus on what can be done to improve matters.
His putative three-part plan is sound, depending on its ultimate content: first, to address immediate, narrow issues where success could ease the way forward, such as resolving frictions surrounding consular facilities or strengthening the 1972 and 1989 U.S.-Soviet agreements preventing “dangerous incidents” by limiting the currently high-risk naval and air activity on the European coast — the low-hanging fruit.
The second part rightly focuses on making progress—even if modest—on the hard issues: Ukraine, Syria, the fight against IS, INF treaty violations, North Korea and Russia’s interference in U.S. elections. Progress will, in all instances, require compromises on both sides: in the Ukrainian case, reaching a deal other than Minsk II that—while not achieving the unattainable, i.e., a political settlement—secures peace in the east and movement toward the normalization of Russian-Ukrainian relations; in Syria, a genuinely reformed Syrian government and teeth in a cease-fire; for the INF, finding a path back to compliance; for IS, coordination beyond military de-confliction arrangements.
For the third part, strategic stability talks, neither I nor the administration can do better than the agenda that Steven Pifer lays out in his June 16 essay.
Were the administration capable of pursuing this three-part agenda—that is, able to generate the internal coherence and sense of purpose required to advance it—there would still remain the elephant in the room: