I liked this line from Shevtsova's MT article:
Nevertheless, Obama might try to pull off something in Moscow that no other U.S. president has succeeded in doing: reaching an agreement with the Kremlin on issues of common interest and at the same time offering a different world vision to Russian society.Indeed, I won't be the only disappointed party if we don't get the second half of this deal....
What President Obama offers President Medvedev first has to get past the US Congress. You know, the folks who have let the Jackson-Vanik amendment remain in force for almost twenty years past the end ofthe State it applied to...
The chances of anything visionary in US-Russian relations, apart from abject Russian submission to the will of the USG, being ratified by Congress, is somewhere between miniscule and non-existent.
I'm not so pessimistic, rkka -- not everybody in Congress works for Fox News, in fact quite a lot of support for Obama's policies can be found there. After all, the congress who left the Jackson-Vanik amendement in force was not Obama's congress... Obama got the bail-out plan through; I don't think it will be that hard to get a Russian policy plan through either. His speech to the Muslim world, which was remarkably different from Bush's old-guard rhetorics, does suggest a genuine desire to change things. If he manages to do the same in Moscow, I wouldn't think it impossible that a real improvement in relations could ensue. Difficult, but not impossible. Let's wait and see.
What I don't know -- as the author of that Moscow Times oped piece said -- is whether Obama will go with "Realpolitik" (let's agree on cooperation on common interests and forget about human rights and other stuff) or with the "traditional American idealism" (or naïveté -- at least for mass consumption). Considering his recent rhetorics, it seems he'll go with Realpolitik (and also I don't think he intends to disagree with State Secretary Clinton's current policies towards Russia -- you know, the famously funny "peregruzka" button that should have been "perezagruzka"...).
"I'm not so pessimistic, rkka -- not everybody in Congress works for Fox News, in fact quite a lot of support for Obama's policies can be found there."
A good test was the Congressional response to Russia's response to Georgia's bombardment of Russian peacekeepers in S. Ossetia this past August. Voices of outrage and unequivocal condemnation of Russia were frequent. Voices pointing out that Georgia had massively escalated the conflict and had killed Russian soldiers prior to the Russian action were extremely rare. I noticed one, Congressman Dana Rohrbacker (R-California). That's about the size of the constituency Russia has in Congress.