When Crisis Engenders Détente

Barack Obama didn’t hide it. His decision Wednesday to abandon the American anti-missile shield project in Eastern Europe, dear to the Bush Administration, is not only a strategic change of direction.

By opting for other technologies, – considered “less costly,” by his own admission – the commander in chief acted with double lucidity. Financial lucidity, imposed first by the crisis and also without a doubt by other subsequent cuts in the Pentagon’s budget. And geopolitical lucidity, as this deployment announced in Poland and in the Czech Republic symbolize the imposed unilateralism of his predecessor and put salt in all the wounds: those [wounds] of the European Union (more or less Atlanticist), those [wounds] of NATO (constrained to blindly follow Washington) and especially those [wounds] of relations with Russia, the other nuclear power.

The question now is whether or not this lucidity is going to be followed by results in another country hit by the world financial earthquake, a country that would be well advised to return to a less aggressive position: Vladimir Putin’s and Dmitry Medvedev’s Russia, where Barack Obama’s message can make a considerable difference.

If they accept a green light for the normalization of relations, which have become stormier since the August 2008 war in Georgia and the occupation of the separatist republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Russian leadership can seize the opportunity of this new deal and revive future dialogue with two of their country’s incontrovertible entities. First, the Atlantic Alliance, whose general secretary, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, must today announce “concrete overtures” towards Moscow during a highly anticipated speech in Brussels. Second, the EU is held in a vice-like grip in the matter of energy between its dependence towards Moscow and the anxiety of its member countries who are more dependent upon deliveries from Gazprom.

The economic crisis, while provoking terrible social convulsions, encourages a kind of détente. It reduces to nothing some costly dreams of power, imposes more cooperation, and forces concessions.

The White House has understood this. But the Kremlin?