Snowden in the Greater Scheme of U.S.-Russian Relations

On Thursday, Aug. 1, 2013, Russia granted temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, permitting him to leave the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport for the first time in nearly six weeks. The Obama administration immediately expressed its disappointment with the Russian decision, and some members of Congress have called for retaliatory measures against Russia. While President Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yury V. Ushakov, has asserted that the issue was not important enough to derail U.S.-Russian relations. Nevertheless, Obama canceled a presidential summit meeting scheduled for September, and there was talk in Washington of boycotting the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

To be sure, the charges against Snowden are serious. He has released official documents revealing the methods used by the National Security Agency (documents, not mere whisperings to reporters that the authorities could deny, and the actual methods, not a few random details picked up by those methods). This was not like the 1970s disclosure of secret CIA operations unknown even to Congress. The existence of these programs has already been known to the public in broad outline since 2006, and it has been known that Congress revised the laws governing them in 2007 and 2008. It appears so far that the Obama administration (unlike the Bush administration) has operated the programs within the confines of current law. (Granted, people may disagree with the law, and Congress may change it again if it so chooses.) While Snowden presents himself as a whistleblower, his evidence relates to the government’s capabilities, not to any specific abuses of those capabilities or other wrongdoing. He and journalist Glenn Greenwald have made assertions that abuses are occurring, or must have occurred, but they have not proved it or described any specific instance of abuse. At times, their descriptions of the technologies involved and of the documents themselves have been inaccurate.

On the other hand, it is not like the United States rolls over and surrenders everyone the Russians want extradited. Take, for instance, Ilyas Akhmadov, former foreign minister of the “Chechen Republic of Ichkeria” (not to be confused with the Islamists of the “Caucasus Emirate,” who have subsequently dominated the Chechen rebel movement). He is wanted in Russia on charges of terrorism, but was granted asylum in the United States in 2004. The Department of Homeland Security opposed the asylum decision, but members of Congress advocated on his behalf. Probably some of the same members who now cannot believe that Russia would deny an extradition request.

Could the Snowden case actually undermine U.S.-Russian relations? Not by itself, but U.S.-Russian relations are in a precarious balance at the moment. It is not impossible that they might deteriorate on their own or that this might serve as a trigger.

On the positive side, there are areas in which the United States and Russia cooperate, much more than in, say, 2008, when relations were virtually frozen. Russia finally entered the World Trade Organization in 2012, with U.S. support, and the two countries have agreed to normalize trade relations for the first time in nearly a century. Russia allows the United States to use its territory and air space—and not to object to the use of Central Asian territory—to move personnel and equipment in and out of Afghanistan, making the U.S. military less dependant on precarious Pakistani routes. The two countries signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty and have subsequently cooperated in implementation and verification measures. The two countries have increased cooperation in counterterrorism activities since the Boston Marathon bombing, and they cooperate in combating heroin traffic.

In other areas, however, things are not going so well. Russia, over the objections of the United States, continues financial and trade relations with Iran and supports the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Moscow objects loudly to U.S. plans for ballistic-missile defense, which the Russians insist is directed at neutralizing their deterrent force. On North Korea, where the two sides’ strategic interests come closer together, they have differed significantly over tactics. The low point came with Russia’s invasion of its neighbor Georgia in 2008.

I suspect, however, that the real problem in U.S.-Russian relations lies at a deeper level, separate from any list of discrete issues. The two countries are simply out of sync in their basic attitudes toward each other. The mismatch may have prevented the true breakthrough in relations that could have occurred at the end of the cold war.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, both sides realized that a fundamental change had occurred in their mutual relationship. Both said to themselves, “The cold war is over, now we can be friends,” but it meant different things to them. For the Russians, to put it in crude terms, despite their pitiable condition at the moment, the basic opportunity was, “We and the Americans are no longer enemies; now we can rule the world together.” The image of mutual relations was something akin to a resurrection of the 19th-century Concert of Europe, in which the great powers of the day held conferences and decided the big issues of the moment both for themselves and for lesser powers. I suspect the Russians originally thought that the G-7 was where those decisions were made, but they were determined to find the proper place and to become full-fledged members. The Russians do not put it this way, but they seem to have something like this in mind when they describe what it means for Russia to be “treated as an equal,” an equal, that is, to the American superpower. An earlier hint of this attitude came in the 1970s, when Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko stated that détente meant that no important issue in the world could be resolved without the participation of the Soviet Union, or in opposition to it.

The U.S. attitude toward Russia and the changed world of the 1990s was different. Again, few Americans would put it this way, but the attitude was, “We and the Russians are no longer enemies; now we don’t have to pay any attention to them whatsoever.” Oh, occasionally an American leader will declare that U.S.-Russian relations are important and then produce a lengthy list of things that we need them to do for us. Yet there rarely seems to be a list of things we could do for them (the WTO was a noteworthy exception, although it took 20 years) or a list of what the two of us could do together (and those are constructed around U.S. goals and objectives). Needless to say, the Russians do not find this amusing.

During the Yeltsin years Russia was not in a position to do anything about it, and also a certain reservoir of good will persisted. Putin, of course, is not Yeltsin. Putin is willing to state openly that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. Whenever an election year rolls around, he is perfectly willing to demonize the United States in populist-nationalist speeches. Still, he would be willing to improve relations for a share in high-level decision making. He was quick to support the United States in the aftermath of 9/11, and he was willing to join in a global war on terrorism, but he was not able to convince the Americans that the separatist rebels in Chechnya were a key part of the global Islamist conspiracy, and that greatly reduced the value of any such cooperation in his eyes.

As the decade proceeded, mutual irritants multiplied. The United States objected to the growing authoritarianism of the Russian regime. The Russians objected to what they saw as America’s constant intrusions into their domestic affairs, and in that category they included U.S. funding for independent Russian civic organizations. (A 2012 law requires such organizations to register as “foreign agents.”) In late 2012 the United States imposed sanctions on 18 specific Russian officials in connection with the death, in prison, of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for an American-owned company who had sought to expose official tax fraud. In retaliation, Moscow banned 18 American officials from visiting Russia and prohibited all Americans from adopting Russian orphans.

At some point, as all this was going on, both sides seem to have come to the conclusion that the other side is in long-term decline and perhaps gradually becoming less worthy of whatever attention and fuss it had been getting. Washington announced a pivot to Asia (primarily in the belief that it was overly focused on the Middle East, never having been overly focused on post-Soviet Russia). Moscow, too, has begun to turn its attention eastward. Russia hosted an APEC summit in Vladivostok last year, which required substantial funds to refurbish the city; it has increased investment in the development of resources in the Russian Far East; it has begun to pay more attention to relations with China, the world’s most notable rising power and one that rarely raises embarrassing questions about democracy or civil rights. (Of course, there are other issues. China has displaced the United States as Russia’s chief rival for influence in the post-Soviet states of Central Asia.) China probably cannot replace the United States in the near future, but it can be useful and it can also serve as leverage in the U.S.-Russian relationship.

Into this mix walked—or flew—Edward J. Snowden, requesting asylum and offering Putin an opportunity to defend the high ground on a human rights issue vis-à-vis the United States. Adding to the delectability of the occasion was the United States, saying, yes, he gave you evidence of our espionage against you (although we’re more interested in spying on others these days), but give him back anyway as a favor to us, your friends. Still, Putin would have preferred to deal with the issue in the same way that China did, neither giving him shelter nor giving him back, just neutralizing the issue by sending him off somewhere else to be someone else’s problem. He took advantage of the occasion, though, to rub salt in the wounds by making Snowden a public offer, one that was designed to appear magnanimous to the Americans, but one that he assumed would not be accepted.

If he wants to go somewhere and they accept him, please, be my guest. If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: he must cease his work aimed at inflicting damage to our American partners, as strange as it may sound from my lips. Because he sees himself as a human-rights activist and a freedom fighter for people’s rights, apparently he is not intending to cease this work. So he must choose for himself a country to go to, and where to move. When that will happen, I unfortunately don’t know.

Washington, however, put Putin in a bind by structuring the situation to prevent Snowden’s being able to travel anywhere but to the United States. He was stripped of his passport and offered, instead, U.S. travel documents valid only for returning home. The message was reinforced with a maneuver that forced the Bolivian president’s plane to land in Austria to make sure that he was not sneaking Snowden out of the country. (In addition to reinforcing the message of Snowden’s limited options, the maneuver showed that European countries seemingly upset about Snowden’s revelations, such as France, were still fully willing to cooperate with Washington. Ironically, it also showed that, despite Snowden’s claims, the U.S. Intelligence Community does not, in fact, know everything that is going on and the location of everyone it finds interesting.)

Putin’s remaining options, therefore, were sending Snowden back to America or granting him asylum. Sending him back—in Putin’s view, submitting to sanctimonious bullying—would be his least preferred option, distasteful in the extreme. Granting asylum would mean angering the U.S. government for a while, but in time other issues would eventually bring the two sides back together again—well, enough to do whatever really needed to be done, at any rate. In a perverse sense, the fact that each side still needs the other for some things seems to leave them freer to tweak each other with impunity. Further arms control agreements or an accommodation on missile defense will less likely, but they were not coming in the short term anyhow. It might preclude the further development of a truly close relationship between Russia and the United States, but Putin may well have come to the conclusion that that is not going to happen anyway, at least, not in the form that he has had in mind. Besides, he has other options in the east that he can use as leverage.