Every good story needs a villain and in Vladimir Putin,
candidates in the 2016 White House race have found the perfect foil.
The Russian
President -- with his expansionist worldview, Cold War-style mindset, KGB
roots, tough-guy stunts and implacable anti-Americanism -- makes the
quintessential campaign trail scoundrel.
Putin's walk-on
role in the 2016 campaign was on display at the CNN Republican presidential
debates on Wednesday, perhaps inevitably, since echoes of the Cold War were
everywhere. The back-to-back showdowns were hosted by the Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library, which honors a man who helped hasten the end of the
Soviet Union by famously saying in Berlin, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this
wall!"
Candidates,
Republicans in particular, seem eager to drop his name and take a stance that
makes them look strong, President Barack Obama look weak and that does not
require much policy detail. But their harsh talk could end up further straining
the U.S.-Russia relationship and handing the next president an even bigger
foreign policy challenge.
Putin's name
came up 18 times Wednesday night, recalling previous eras when Soviet bashing
was a staple of U.S. presidential campaigns.
Florida Sen.
Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who touted his
foreign policy credentials throughout the debate and says Putin is nothing more
than a "gangster," warned that the Russian leader was trying to
reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union and wanted to "destroy
NATO."
And the breakout
star of the debate, Carly Fiorina, took the Putin cold shoulder a step farther.
The former
Hewlett-Packard CEO picked a fight with Russia to portray herself as a
potential commander in chief.
"Having met
Vladimir Putin, I wouldn't talk to him at all. We've talked way too much to
him," she said.
"What I
would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin
rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular,
aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states," she continued.
"I'd probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin
would get the message."
Talk is one thing ...
If elected president, Fiorina would feel
under pressure to live up to her threat to shun him, but not every vow made on
the campaign trail ends up translating into administration policy.
And while
ignoring Putin might make a strong statement at the start of a presidency,
Russia's global influence, its position on the U.N. Security Council and its
capacity to thwart U.S. foreign priorities would likely eventually force a
President Fiorina to conduct a dialogue with the Russian leader.
Front-runner Donald Trump, meanwhile, sees the Putin problem as
less of a geopolitical conundrum and more of a character issue, vowing that the
Russian leader will change his tune once a strong personality is back in the
Oval Office.
"I will get
along with him," said Trump, with typical self-confidence.
But Trump's certainty appears to fly in the face of events.
Putin has shown no affection for billionaire businessmen who disagree with him.
Several in his country have been thrown in jail during his tenure. Others have
fled abroad. Oligarchs close to Putin, on the other hand, benefit from the
spoils of Russia's energy riches.
One of Trump's
rivals, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, used the image of a Machiavellian Putin to
cast doubt on Trump's qualifications to be president.
"Do we want
someone with that kind of character, that kind of careless language, to be
negotiating with Putin?" Paul asked.
In the debate
for second-tier candidates, Sen. Lindsey Graham played the Reagan card.
"Do you
think Putin would be in the Ukraine or Syria today if Ronald Reagan were
president?" he asked. "No. This is what happens when you have a weak,
unqualified commander in chief."
Graham's point,
however, ignored the fact that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union when Reagan
was in office, and that Moscow maintained a port in Tartus, Syria, for much of
the Cold War.
Putin seems unlikely to blink
While Republican candidates play to the
gallery of grassroots hawks nostalgic for the Reagan era, it's unclear just how
effective their strategy of tougher talk and further isolation of the Russian
leader would be.
The recent history
of both Republican and Democratic administrations suggests Russia may believe
threatening U.S. oratory is rarely backed up by action, and that Washington has
no desire to raise military tensions with Moscow. That could change under a new
U.S. administration, but it seems unlikely.
Republicans tend
to skip over the fact that Russian troops invaded Georgia in 2008 under the
watch of Republican President George W. Bush, who offered a less robust
response than the sanctions imposed by Obama over Moscow's annexation of Crimea
and incursions into Ukraine.
And Putin -- who
has proven himself to be a ruthless operator atop a Russian state apparatus and
who, experts say, often makes national security calculations based on a desire
to thwart Washington -- is unlikely to be fazed by GOP threats.
After all, Putin
puts muscle behind his tough-guy persona.
The State Department
says the Russian government presides over harsh restrictions on freedom of
expression, harassing and imprisoning dissidents, crushing media freedoms,
suppressing gay rights and rigging elections and hassling NGOs. Russian
security services are accused of murdering Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in
London by radioactive poisoning in 2006.
But while
Republicans might be guilty of cheap talk on Russia, the Obama administration's
record has hardly been stellar. Indeed, one of the reasons why Putin is such a
useful adversary for GOP candidates is that his rule underscores the struggles
of the current White House.
Obama, with
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton as secretary of state,
pursued a mixed "reset" strategy with Moscow starting in 2009.
It did initially
yield some results -- including a nuclear arms reduction treaty, an agreement
for Moscow to join international sanctions on Iran that lead to the recent
nuclear deal with Tehran and talks opening a transit route for U.S. supplies
into Afghanistan. But the progress came while Putin was behind the scenes as
prime minister and Dmitry Medvedev served as president.
With Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, relations quickly
dipped into the worst freeze since the Cold War, with the annexation of Crimea
leading to U.S. sanctions and Russia being kicked out of the G8 club of wealthy
nations.
Russian planes
and ships are now testing the frontiers of NATO states, experts say espionage
by Moscow is at Cold War levels and the Kremlin is sending troops and equipment
to Syria, apparently seeking to shore up Middle Eastern ally President Bashar
al-Assad, whom the United States has said must leave power.
Russian hackers
have been accused of infiltrating Pentagon email systems and Moscow has granted
refuge to Edward Snowden, the fugitive intelligence contractor blamed for one
of the most stunning breaches of U.S. intelligence data.
Even Clinton --
perhaps wary of the failure of the "reset" on her own foreign policy
reputation -- has taken to bashing Putin. She's compared him to Adolf Hitler
and complained earlier this year that Europe was being too "wimpy"
toward the Russian leader, according to London Mayor Boris Johnson.
'Echo chamber on the American side'
Some foreign policy professionals are
becoming increasingly worried about the impact of the campaign debate on
already fractious U.S.-Russia ties.
"The
biggest problem we have is that there is only one side to this
conversation," said Matthew Rojansky, a Russian scholar at the Wilson
Center. "It is an echo chamber on the American side. It is not a serious
foreign policy discussion."
Anti-Russian
rhetoric on the campaign trail also risks handing Putin a propaganda coup --
and making the situation for the next president that much more fraught --
because it risks exacerbating anti-U.S. prejudice in Russia that the former KGB
agent has stoked to shore up his own regime during tough economic times.
"The
problem is that anything that is said that is hostile towards Russia on the
campaign trail is viewed as confirmation of what Putin has said all along and
that Russians believe ... that America wants to destroy Russia," said
Rojansky. "That is what justifies the whole Putin system today."
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