It remains the Obama administration’s foreign policy objective “to end Russian occupation” of parts of Georgian territory, although there is no progress in pursuing this objective, a senior White House adviser on Russia said on June 10.
Michael McFaul, the U.S. President’s special assistant and senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council, has strongly rejected a notion that Washington was abandoning Georgia, at the expense of hitting a reset button with Russia.
Speaking at Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics McFaul laid out key principles of the Obama administration’s reset policy with Russia saying that from the very start of his presidential tenure Obama’s “principle observation” was that the dangerous drift in the U.S.-Russia relations, which started even before “Russian invasion of Georgia” in August, 2008, was not in the Washington’s nation interests.
He said that most of the central challenges of the U.S. national interests were not at all at odds with those of the Russian Federation, including on issues like Afghanistan, nonproliferation, reducing nuclear arsenal.
McFaul said that an important part of the Obama administration’s Russia policy was “to deliberately avoid linkage between issue areas that have nothing to do with each other” – for example, he said, it was not a precondition to negotiate START treaty for release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoned former Yukos oil tycoon.
As another example he brought Georgia’s case and said: “We are deliberately not pushing for the end of the occupation of Georgia to resubmit 123 agreement” – a peaceful nuclear treaty with Russia.
When President Obama resubmitted the treaty to the Congress on May 10 he wrote in the message to lawmakers that “the situation in Georgia need no longer be considered an obstacle to proceeding with the proposed Agreement.” Remarks were criticized by Obama’s former presidential challenger, senator John McCain, saying that such stance was fueling sentiments that Washington “is selling” Georgia “out to Moscow as the price of our ‘hitting the reset button’.”
But as McFaul said the Administration’s strategy “does not mean that we are ignoring Georgia… We are doing these things in parallel, but we are not linking them.”
At the same time, he said, the Administration was not “allowing our Russian colleagues to link things that they want to link.”
“So we are not ending our assistance to Georgia [and] throwing Georgians under the bus in the name of UN Security Council resolution – that was a proposition put to us a long time ago and we said: ‘we’re not gonna play that game’,” McFaul said.
After speaking about the issues on which he thought progress had been achieved with Russia as part of reset policy, McFaul then listed areas where no progress was observed.
“On the top of my list are Georgia and democracy [in Russia],” McFaul said.
“Is it a foreign policy objective of the Obama administration to help end Russia’s occupation of Georgia in a peaceful manner and restore Georgia territorial integrity? Absolutely yes; that’s the objective we have. We have other goals with Georgia as well: we have a goal of enhancing stability in Georgia and in the region; we have a goal of enhancing democracy and we have a goal of enhancing economic growth in Georgia and we are doing all those things simultaneously.”
“Have we made progress on that central objective? My answer is ‘no’; we have not; that’s the truth. So we have the goal, we have the strategy that we are pursuing and we’ll pursue that when President Medvedev is here [this month]. And have we made real progress in restoring Georgia’s sovereignty? My answer is ‘no’.” he said.
Also on June 10, the U.S. Department of State spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, told a news briefing in Washington that Georgia and in particular situation in its breakaway regions remained a source of disagreement between the U.S. and Russia.
“We still do not see eye-to-eye on all aspects of that,” Crowley said. “We’ve certainly not forgotten what happened in the crisis between Georgia and Russia. We continue to make clear to Russia that the situation needs to change. And we continue to support Georgia in terms of its territorial integrity and its rights in the region.”
He also said that Washington was “actively engaged” with Russia on these issues.
“Regional security issues are an inherent part of our ongoing dialogue with Russia,” Crowley said.