Tag Archives: dagestan

Russia, United States

Pre-Sochi required reading list: McFaul’s foibles and Putin’s Olympics

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If you read nothing else before the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, you could do much worse than these two brilliant pieces in Foreign Policy and Politico Magazine that explain in majestic scale the state of Russia today and the nature of US-Russian relations in the 2010s, even as journalists started arriving in Sochi earlier this week and reporting the (sometimes humorous) problems with infrastructure. USflagRussia Flag Icon

The first is a profile of Michael McFaul (pictured below), the US ambassador to Russia, who announced earlier this week that he will step down following the Winter Games in Sochi, after just two years as the US envoy to Moscow.  Just the second non-career diplomat in US history to hold the post, Michael Weiss writes in Foreign Policy about both McFaul’s successes and failures, but especially McFaul’s failures, evident from the first sentence:

The Kremlin, for instance, will be sad to see the nicest, most eager-to-please man to ever inhabit Spaso House quit the joint after only two years of floundering and squirming under the Kremlin’s systematic, Vienna Convention-violating sadism.

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McFaul (pictured above with Obama), a  professor of political science at Stanford University, previously served as US president Barack Obama’s special assistant and senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs.  The ‘reset’ concept with Russia at the beginning of the Obama administration was McFaul’s brainchild — though the US secretary of state at the time Hillary Clinton, memorably presented her Russian counterpart with a reset button inscribed with the word peregruzka (‘overload’) instead of perezagruzka (‘reset’).  But it’s important to remember that McFaul was also instrumental in the successful negotiations to enact deeper nuclear non-proliferation through the New START treaty with Russia enacted in May 2010.

Weiss’s piece makes clear just how difficult it was for McFaul to adjust between ‘advocate’ mode and ‘diplomat’ mode, and most of the major ‘gaffes’ of McFaul’s tenure relate to the gap between advocate and diplomat — over-reliance on social media; meeting with a wide group of the Kremlin’s political opponents for his first official meeting; dissembling over the Magnitsky Act (which ties US-Russian trade to human rights abuses) and encouraging Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization; or even the time he tweeted about ‘Yoburg’ (which translates to ‘Fuckville’ in Russian) instead of ‘Yeakaterinburg.’

McFaul had a style that was hard to account for or justify, as when he admitted, by way of an apology, that he was “not a professional diplomat.” This, too, had the merit of being true; but what, it prompted many to wonder, was he doing in the most difficult diplomatic posting on the planet advertising as much?

Though John Beyrle, the career diplomat who served as ambassador between 2008 and 2011, would not have made those same mistakes, he also wouldn’t have tweeted a message of support (‘I’m watching.’) to opposition figure Alexei Navalny last summer during a politically-motivated trial on trumped-up charges.  Part of the charge against McFaul is that he didn’t follow the rulebook of international diplomacy, but that runs both ways — one man’s diplomatic faux pas is another man’s bravery.  If, a decade from now, we look back at the August 2013 confrontation with Syria as the start of a successful model for US-Russian cooperation, the Obama-McFaul reputation on Russian relations will look drastically better  (of course, that depends mostly on the cooperation of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in dismounting his chemical weapons program and the ability of the OPCW and UN personnel to evacuate them from a country in the midst of a civil war).

Ultimately, though, the McFaul tenure coincides with what seems today like a stark deterioration in bilateral relations, even from the headier days of 2009 and 2010.  Here’s the devastating kicker:

Unfortunately, he’s leaving with the Russian media portraying America as a country that tortures orphans to death, brainwashes children into becoming homosexuals, supports al Qaeda terrorists in the Middle East, eggs on neo-Nazis to overthrow the government of Ukraine, and otherwise behaves as both a bumbling colossus and a serially defrauded and discombobulated mug in world affairs.

The second piece you should read is Leon Aron’s piece in Politico Magazine explaining how the Winter Games initially came to Sochi (partly a rare English-language speech from Putin to the International Olympic Committee in 2007):

But it mostly explains why, at a price tag of between $50 billion and $55 billion, they’re the most staggeringly expensive Olympics ever (more than even Beijing’s 2008 Summer Games and more than all previous Winter Games in Olympic history):  Continue reading Pre-Sochi required reading list: McFaul’s foibles and Putin’s Olympics →

Russia, United States

Boston bombing suspects could cause uptick in anti-Chechen feeling in the US

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UPDATE:  Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s president, has come out with a statement disclaiming Chechen culpability, but in a way that blames American ‘attitudes and beliefs,’ and I doubt it will do much to lift American hearts and minds in favor of Chechnya:

Tragic events have taken place in Boston. A terrorist attack killed people. We have already expressed our condolences to the people of the city and to the American people. Today, the media reports, one Tsarnaev was killed as [police] tried to arrest him. It would be appropriate if he was detained and investigated, and the circumstances and the extent of his guilt determined. Apparently, the security services needed to calm down the society by any means necessary.

Any attempt to draw a connection between Chechnya and Tsarnaevs — if they are guilty — is futile. They were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America. The whole world must struggle against terrorism — that we know better than anyone else. We hope for the recovery of all the victims, and we mourn with the Americans.

 * * * * *

It’s a small Caucasian republic in Russia with barely over one million people, but Chechnya attracted attention worldwide in the 1990s when it fought two wars against Russia to become a separate republic.

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Now, with word that the two bombing suspects are/were Chechen (or perhaps from neighboring Dagestan, it’s unclear to me), Chechnya is likely to come to the forefront as a topic of U.S. foreign relations, even as one of the suspects has been killed overnight and a wide manhunt continues for the second suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

We still have more questions than answers at this point, and there’s no evidence, as far as I can tell, that this is some concerted plot concocted in Grozny or Makhachkala, so I’m wary to make any sweeping statements.

But Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution worries that it will destroy the chances of the U.S. Congress passing a comprehensive immigration bill later this year, and while I think that’s a valid concern, I worry more that this will cause  huge anti-Chechen sentiment in the United States, emboldening Russian president Vladimir Putin to effect a crackdown on the North Caucasus, which still features some amount of insurgent activity since Russian troops asserted control over Chechnya in 2000.

Predominantly Islamic, Chechnya largely held off the assertion of Russian political and military control following the First Chechen War from 1994 to 1996, and the Russian military’s failure was one of the reasons (aside from Russia’s economy) that former Russian president Boris Yeltsin became very unpopular in early 1996 months ahead of his reelection.  Yeltsin, and Putin thereafter, from 1999 to 2000 in the Second Chechen War, definitively brought Chechnya under federal control.  Ramzan Kadyrov, the current Chechen leader since 2007, is the son of a former-rebel-turned-Kremlin-ally, and his iron rule has restored some amount of political and economic stability to Grozny, though his tenure’s been marked by a number of accusations of human rights violations.

If anything, neighboring Dagestan has become the more recent problem as a seat of instability and violence, and the struggle in the two regions has transformed from a largely post-Soviet nationalist struggle into one that’s much more religious in nature over the past decade.

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under the Bush administration, John Bolton, is already claiming they are hired killers in a grander conspiracy.

As Politico notes, U.S. presidents haven’t exactly been profiles in courage on the Chechen issue in the past:

For years before the Boston Marathon suspects were identified, American presidents have avoided talking about Chechnya — it’s been a prerequisite demanded by Russia’s leaders for maintaining strong relationships.

President Barack Obama and his administration have been quiet on the continued tensions between Vladmir Putin’s government and the area that is its federal subject. That follows the pattern of his predecessors: Bill Clinton pushed Boris Yeltsin to find a peaceful settlement to what began in 1994 as a war to gain independence from Russia, as did George W. Bush.

Since taking office, Obama hasn’t said the word “Chechnya” publicly. The Treasury and State Departments have, though, taken action.

Reports of Russian military abuses abound from its Chechen campaigns from the 1990s and 2000s, many documented by the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.  Pro-Chechen groups have conducted a number of terrorist activities against citizens in Russia, many of them harrowing — the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, the 2003 Stavropol train bombing, the 2004 Moscow metro bombing, the 2004 Beslan school siege — but never outside Russia.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on current Chechen rebel activity, but I fear that Putin could use the Boston bombing — if indeed the link to Chechnya is confirmed — as a pretense for another campaign against Chechen and Dagestani rebels.

Photo credit to BBC News.