Some notes about Biden's speech

Biden's speech was overall very promising, and except for some minor quibbles regarding Russia, I was pretty happy with it.

But going forward with the missile defense system is a mistake and Obama said he thought it was a fatuous deterrent. In his speech, however, Biden indicated that we'll go on as planned with the shield, adding the caveat "only if the technology proves cost-effective." Well, it probably won't prove cost-effective so who knows what that means. And who knows what the recent decision in Krygyzstan to ban the use of their base at Manas will mean. And that's pretty much my sentiment about his remarks about the future of U.S. and European relations with Moscow. It's not possible to get anything definitive out of it. Of course we can assume that the Obama administration will be more open to dialogue than its predecessor, but on the whole there was nothing substantive enough in Biden's speech to really forecast what is going to happen in the next few years. Certainly, Moscow's response is a good indication. According to the NYT summary of the speech, Konstantin Kosachev, a representative in the Duma, said that he was pleased with Biden's remarks about inclusion.

Relatedly, there was one phrase of the speech which bothered me. It really doesn't have anything to do with Biden because it's such a heavily ingrained part of our general rhetoric. It was this: "We will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence."

The uncompromising and somewhat damning aspect to that statement is counterproductive in a way. Russia reasserting control over former Soviet republics is not a good thing, certainly, but in a way it's inevitable. And what this type of moralizing does is just make us seem like hypocrites. I don't know how many times I've read in the Russian press comments about the hypocrisy of the United States, who asserted massive amounts of influence in our back yard, and the Europeans, who, you know, had a few colonies and what have you. I get that the intent is to somehow try to convince the Russians that this kind of extroverted projection of control is ultimately not worth it, either in terms of security or economy.

And what the hell, right? Russian leaders should certainly learned something from their experiences in Afghanistan. But as we've seen with our own foreign policies decisions, we don't learn either. What we need to do is re-frame our criticism toward the Kremlin in such a way that highlights our own mistakes and problems with the idea of a "sphere of influence" and emphasizing the overlap of experience between us. This is the only way to effectively critique their foreign policy without wounding Russian pride. The opposing position to this, of course, is that any admission of culpability will provoke a Russian response along the lines of them thinking we're weak. But that concern is trumped by the possibility of really transforming our relationship by assertively underlining what we have in common.

There's a hell of a lot we don't have in common, naturally. They're not a democracy and they do not have a solid legal foundation. We need to stop pretending that they do and try to work with them in spite of this. But, we need a different approach if we are to avoid a regressive path back to a 20th century relationship with Russia.