US-Russia: The Time for a 'Reset' of Relations Has Passed

It took less than two months for the planned summit between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin to fall through. Scheduled for the beginning of September in Moscow, the official meeting was announced on the sidelines of the June G-8 summit in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, following a long face-to-face between the two presidents. This initial meeting, the first in a year, was already extremely tense.

This spectacular cold wave in relations between the United States and Russia sounds the death knell for the “reset” of dialogue between the two powers. No one knows how long this rift will last and there is every reason to be worried about it. It also signals the United States’ growing exasperation with respect to the Putin regime, specifically with Russia’s determination to support at all costs the tyrant of Damascus, Bashar al-Assad, in order to secure for itself a powerful lever of influence in this strategic region. The asylum accorded by Russia to “the traitor Snowden” is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Barack Obama, regularly accused of spinelessness by his political rivals, could only make his anger known and cancel the meeting — something that has not happened, at least not from the American side, since the end of the Cold War.

Relations between Moscow and Washington had been “reset to zero” at the beginning of the Democratic president’s first term. In March 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, symbolically pressed the “reset” button. Barack Obama drove home the message of detente shortly thereafter, at a meeting with the Russian leader at the time, Dmitry Medvedev. One year later, the two “blocks” convened to discuss a slight reduction of their dangerous stocks of nuclear arms. Other signs of warming were supposed to follow, a trend which broke with President George W. Bush’s forced unilateralism — his war in Iraq, his anti-missile shield in Poland, etc. — as well as the extreme military tension which culminated with the open war waged by Moscow in Georgia, just five years ago.

The angry noises surrounding the cancellation of the meeting do not, however, point to a return to a Cold War situation. The specter of atomic apocalypse is fortunately no longer the order of the day. But the rest of the world has no interest in seeing these two rival giants sink into pointless conflict. On the contrary, global security, the resolution of numerous conflicts, the challenges posed by crises affecting the economy, climate, energy and development necessitate taking the path of cooperation.