Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Shedding light on the cyclical nature of US-Russia relations
http://www.russia-direct.org/
Anti-Americanism seems to have reached a record-high in Russia after a period in which many Russians had favorable views of America. From a historical perspective, such ebbs and flows in Russian perceptions of America have been the norm, not the exception.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov try to find a way to begin reversing a yearlong spike in U.S.-Russia tensions stemming from the crisis in Ukraine. Photo: AP
A man in a white kimono knocking down his opponent with a firm kick is a typical illustration for a number of t-shirts sold in central Moscow or elsewhere in Russian souvenir stores. The former judo wrestler resembles Russian President Vladimir Putin, the second one looks like his American counterpart Barack Obama. Another t-shirt sold in the hall of the Kapitoliy mall in southeast Moscow portrays a formidable bear furiously tearing apart the U.S. flag.
Several years ago, before the Ukrainian crisis and, particularly, the accession of Crimeato Russia, such cartoons on t-shirts were hardly likely to be commonplace in Moscow. In April 2011, only 8 percent of Russians viewed Obama negatively, according to a poll on U.S.-Russia relations conducted by Russia’s Public Opinion Foundation (FOM). Today, with the increasing intensity of the U.S.-Russia confrontation – a confrontation that some experts are calling “Cold War II” – nearly 40 percent of Russians have a negative opinion on Obama, and such t-shirts are trendy in Moscow.
A marked shift in Russian public opinion
At first glance, this anti-American sentiment seems to be everywhere in Russia. One cannot resist the temptation to make such conclusions, given the Nov.16 FOM poll. Its figures look indeed very persuasive (at least as presented by some Russian and foreign media): 37 percent of the poll’s respondents view the U.S. in a very negative way against 18 percent in February last year, before the start of the Ukrainian crisis.
As Russia’s influential daily Kommersant highlights, Russian sociologists haven’t seen so many Russians having such negative sentiments about the U.S. since 2001. Seventy-eight percent of respondents are sure that the U.S. plays a rather negative role in the world in comparison with 53 percent in February in 2013, while only 7 percent believe that the U.S. role is “rather positive.”
However, although these polls reflect real trends in Russia’s public opinion, they seem to oversimplify the situation without taking into account historical aspects in the ups and downs of U.S.-Russia relations. Media usually relegate positive aspects of the poll to the end of their reports while presenting it in headlines rather in a dangerously sensationalistic way for bilateral relations.
For example, a great deal of attention is focused on those 37 percent of respondents who have an unfavorable attitude to the U.S. and those 78 percent that believe that Washington plays a negative role, not to those 62 percent who says that both U.S. and Russia need to improve their bilateral relations. Likewise, media don’t pay due attention to the 50 percent of respondents who believe that the Kremlin should “aim at improving its relations with the U.S.”
Other polls conducted by Russian agencies appear to support the general trend of the FOM survey findings. For instance, Russia’s Levada Center poll, published after Crimea’s accession to Russia, said the number of Russians who viewed the U.S. unfavorably jumped from 44 to 61 percent during the period January to March. Moreover, in November 2014, these unfavorability figures reached 74 percent. These figures significantly exceed the 37 percent offered by the FOM poll.
The results of the FOM poll are not surprising for Robert Legvold, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Political Science and the Harriman Institute of Columbia University.
“Despite the seriously negative attitudes of most Russians toward the U.S., at the same time they cannot believe that it is in their country's interest to have tensions and conflict with the United States,” he told Russia Direct. “Therefore it makes sense that they would support an improvement in the situation.”
“In times of seriously deteriorated relations it is easy for the media to fall back on the old stereotypes, particularly when this is encouraged by the way national leaders, major politicians, and significant public figures frame the relationship,” he adds.
David Foglesong, professor of History at Rutgers and expert in U.S.-Russia relations, argues that journalists “have hyped the recent deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations, particularly by comparing it to the Cold War.” According to him, such comparisons are reckless and “inappropriate,” primarily because the Kremlin doesn’t claim “to offer the world a model of political and economic development that rivals American liberal capitalism.”
Andrei Tsygankov, a professor of International Relations and Political Science at San Francisco State University, agrees that “media on both sides follow the state line with vigor” and are “hyping up the U.S.-Russia disagreements.” While the American media spreads stereotypes of a “revisionist” Russia, their Russian counterparts describe the U.S. “as the epitome of all geopolitical and cultural problems in the world,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ivan Kurilla, a former Kennan Institute fellow and professor at Volgograd State University, argues that, “The media just reflect upon the poll figures they see.”
“I cannot say this is a dramatization because the anti-Americanism in Russia is high indeed,” he said.
Gregory Feifer, a former NPR correspondent in Moscow and the author of the bookRussians: People behind The Power, argues this indicates that Russians still have a love-hate relationship with the U.S., which is partly determined by domestic goings-on. Although the Russian authorities exploit popular feelings such as envy toward the West, Russians also tend to take their cue from the Kremlin in a mutually reinforcing cycle, Feifer believes.
“When Putin calls Washington a threat to global stability, many profess to agree whether they really believe it or not,” he said. "The Public Opinion Foundation poll, if accurate, appears to reinforce that view.”
Young Russians holding an action against dollar purchase operations in 2006. Photo: RIA Novosti
The cyclical nature of U.S.-Russia relations
The rise of anti-Americanism in Russia (as well as anti-Russian sentiment in the U.S.) is a cyclical trend that had been commonplace throughout the history of U.S.-Russia relations in the late twentieth century. For example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, most Russians saw the U.S. as friendly, with the share of those who had a negative attitude miniscule.
Until April 1993, the number of Russians viewing the U.S. unfavorably ranged from 6 to 8 percent, according to a Levada Center poll. However, after two Chechen wars and the U.S.-NATO military campaign in Yugoslavia, the U.S.-Russia relations saw another slight decline, which was reflected in the polls. In May, 1999 the number of Russians having negative opinions about the U.S. reached 54 percent.
In the 2000s, when Vladimir Putin first came to presidential office, Moscow-Washington relations were comparably in good shape. Thus started a new cycle in bilateral relations, which went through ups and downs. In particular, it saw Russians’ affinity to the U.S. increase as a result of the “reset” policy (60 percent of Russians saw the U.S. favorably in May 2010) and ended with the highest spike of anti-Americanism after the Ukraine crisis in 2014.
Foglesong clarifies that Russia’s current increasing anti-Americanism “does not merely reflect a cyclical decline in American-Russian relations.” According to him, “It stems in large part from a series of actions by the U.S.” such as NATO’s expansion, the bombing of Serbia, the Iraqi invasion, and the support for Georgia in the 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict as well as encouragement of the ouster of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev.
“I believe that series of actions has made a deep and lasting impression on many Russians,” he said.
Kurilla argues that, from a historical point of view, anti-American sentiment in Russia is “just one of the recurrent periods of hostility that were always replaced by periods of rapprochement, and from this point of view, the situation is not as catastrophic as some journalists paint it.”
Legvold argues that even though, historically, there have been shifting views of the U.S. over many years, “the depth of animosity toward the U. S. both in the media and among the public is deeper than any time I remember in years.”
Likewise, Ivan Tsvetkov, an associate professor at the School of International Relations of St. Petersburg State University, believes that Russians become quickly tired with negative emotions as time passes. He points out that their attitude to the U.S. ranges between neutral and favorable in normal times, so the current spike in anti-Americanism in Russia is an obvious anomaly. But it may continue to exist “until the factors that caused it are eliminated.”
“The current anti-Americanism resulted rather from purposeful state propaganda than the spontaneous reaction of people to the events,” Tsvetkov said. “Anti-Americanism is beneficial and necessary to the Kremlin to justify its foreign and domestic policy, its ideological justification.”
Feifer points to his professional experience in Moscow to explain the cyclical character of U.S.-Russia relations.
“When I spoke to Muscovites during Barack Obama’s first trip to Russia as president in 2009, I was surprised to hear a great majority say they admired him and believed his presidency would help restore relations with the United States,” he said. “That wasn’t very long after the war with Georgia, when many were saying very nasty things about America and its leaders.”
The roots of Anti-Americanism in Russia
Experts agree that the major reasons of anti-Americanism in Russia are state propaganda and Putin’s drive and tenacity to mobilize people as the result of an inferiority complex and the feeling of wounded pride. Some pundits, including Kurilla and Tsygankov, mention the political competition and lobbying pressure on the U.S. President from his Republican opponents as well as exaggerated expectations about the U.S.-Russia relationship that didn’t come true.
Kurilla, in particular, points to the failure of the U.S. to suggest a comprehensive strategy of Russia’s integration into the Western system and to Russia’s policy toward Ukraine that resembles “the standards of the 19th, not the 21st century”
Other experts point to indirect reasons. A value-based approach used by the U.S. media to lambast Russia’s leaders for their growing authoritarianism and policy toward Ukraine might have a backlash and could result in the rise of negative attitudes to America, according to Victoria Zhuravleva, Professor of American History and International Relations, Director of the American Studies Program at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH).
“American cartoonists, journalists, and politicians often represent a value-based approach to the image of Russia,” she said. “Russia, in turn, uses this American approach to foster anti-American sentiments through the state-controlled mass media in order to shape the image of a hostile American “Other” and to maintain the ‘besieged fortress’ mentality.”
Saudi women still assigned male 'guardians'
Caryle Murphy
Editor's note: This story is part of a Special Report produced by The GroundTruth Project called "Laws of Men: Legal systems that fail women." It is produced with support from the Ford Foundation.
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Sara's husband walked out 15 years ago, but never bothered to officially divorce her. He never sent money, although Sara cares for their daughter and her disabled mother-in-law.
The Saudi government's social welfare department would not assist her financially, because she was still legally married and therefore remained her husband's legal responsibility.
"I feel neglected, like an old shoe," said Sara, who resides in a slum area of Jeddah and makes a meager living by reselling air-conditioning units she purchases on installments. "No one cares about me. They are not serious about my issue. I'm not important."
Sara's predicament is all too familiar to Saudi women who live under their country's guardianship system, which requires all females to be legally controlled their entire lives by a male guardian. Because its implementation depends on a guardian's personality, this system creates conditions for widespread abuse. And women victimized by male guardians usually find little relief or protection from courts in a country with a legal system dominated by religiously conservative male judges.
Sara, who is from Saudi Arabia's Bedouin community and says she is between 58 and 60 years old, finally decided to divorce her husband in 2009. Unlike men, who get divorce papers from the courts within days of requesting them, women face many obstacles, including foot-dragging by judges who don't like independent-minded women.
In a phone interview, Sara, who asked that her full name not be used, said it took four years to get her divorce because judges kept demanding that her guardian — the husband who had abandoned her — appear in court. She said her husband never showed up and the court never sent out marshals to look for him.
GUARDIANS AND COURTS
The guardian system rests on the cultural presumption that females are inferior and cannot make important decisions on their own. "Perpetual Minors," a 2008 report by New York-based Human Rights Watch, documents how guardianship deprives women of personal independence throughout their lives. Saudi women, it said, must have a male guardian's consent to attend university, get married, travel abroad, hold certain jobs and even to have some types of surgery.
A woman's first guardian is her father, and when she marries, her husband. If widowed or divorced, a male relative must step in. Sometimes the duty even falls to her own son, which many young females find insulting.
"A 13-year-old boy as the guardian of an old woman? Really, it's very humiliating," said a twenty-something college student in Jeddah.
In practice, if a woman's guardian is a reasonable, loving person, she has few problems. He will give his permission easily to let her do what she wants. But if a woman has a domineering or physically abusive guardian, her life can be hellish.
"That's the problem, it all depends on luck," said Rasha Al Duwaisi, a supporter of women's rights in Riyadh.
There are abuses aplenty, according to Saudi media reports, interviews with human rights activists, journalists and women who've suffered from inhumane guardians.
Some fathers refuse to let their daughters marry because they want to continue taking their paychecks or because the suitors are not from the same tribe as their family. Others refuse to let their daughters go to university. Some husbands won't allow their wives and daughters to take rewarding jobs because they might have contact with men in the course of their work. Fathers have married off daughters as young as 10 to older men in order to settle a debt. Women have reported being beaten or locked in their rooms for weeks by fathers, husbands or brothers as punishment for complaining about not being able to marry, work or get a higher education.
Such behavior rarely gets punished because the guardian system is underpinned by a legal system that is a bastion of male ultraconservativism. Saudi judges have wide discretion to rule according to their personal interpretations of Sharia, or Islamic law, because Saudi Arabia has no written legal code. And as guardians of female relatives themselves, the judges usually display the same cultural belief in female inferiority as most Saudi men.
"Because there are no laws supporting women, the culture and customs overcome everything and when things go to court it's in the hands of the judge, who also is biased against women," said Al Duwaisi.
There are no female judges in the kingdom and until last year, female lawyers were denied licenses to practice, so they could not appear in court.
Most judges require women to wear full-face veils in court, and according to "Perpetual Minors," do not accept women's testimony in criminal cases. Some judges refuse to let women speak in their courtrooms because they say a feminine voice is a temptation to sin.
Until last year — when the government ordered judges to recognize a woman's national identity card — a woman was required to bring along a male relative to confirm her identity in court. In some cases of domestic abuse, judges demand that a woman appear with her guardian, even though he may be the abuser. And some young women who have gone to court to get permission to marry after their fathers refused to allow it have wound up in jail on a charge of "disobedience."
Trying to convince a judge that a guardian is abusive "is a very lengthy and culturally difficult situation for a woman," said Maram Al Hargani, who was among the first female lawyers granted licenses last year. A woman must show specifically how she was harmed, and even then judges do not usually revoke guardianship unless the man is doing something wrong according to religious laws, such as drinking alcohol, Al Hargani added.
The system makes many women feel less than human.
"I am like a horse," said a 35-year-old woman whose father and brothers had refused to let her marry. "They don't treat me as a human being. They treat me as if I belong to them and they should decide what to do with this 'thing.'"
CUSTOM, NOT ISLAM
The guardian system as it is practiced in Saudi Arabia is not ordained or mandated by Islamic law. Rather, Saudi women are kept under the thumb of men by a skein of Saudi tribal traditions and customs that have been given an Islamic gloss.
This is "absolutely not" how Islam meant women to be treated, Sara said. "This is not Islam. It's different from the real concept of Islam."
But many Saudi women think otherwise and are content with the guardian system.
"This comes under the term brainwashed," said Al Duwaisi. "Whether it's education, religion, the culture, the family...they are brainwashed into believing that they are inferior, they are less and they do need a male."
Islamic law for example, states that a woman can marry whomever she wants, provided he is a moral and devout Muslim. "[F]orcing a woman to marry someone she does not want and preventing her from wedding that whom she chooses … is not permissible" under Islamic law, the kingdom's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al Asheikh, reminded Saudi men in 2005.
Sharia also stipulates that a woman's salary is her own money and should not be taken by anyone, even her husband.
"If you want to implement the true guardianship that Islam actually has instructed," said Sofana Dahlan, "women should not spend a penny from her money because her guardian is supposed to be taking care of her from A to Z. But that's not happening."
Dahlan is a lawyer with a master's degree in Islamic law from a program jointly run by Cairo University and the renowned Al Azhar University. She lives in Jeddah, where a successful career and supportive family have given her a life that is a world away from that of Sara's. Yet she too is subject to restraints imposed by the guardian system. When she returned from Cairo with her law degrees, they were not recognized by the state because she did not have a male chaperone with her in Egypt during her studies, she said in a recent interview.
Dahlan, 37, felt the burden of the guardian system most keenly after giving birth to her second daughter in 2010. She was in the hospital holding the infant in her arms when her eldest daughter wanted to know what her new sister would be when she grew up. It was one of those moments, Dahlan recalled, "when all your life goes through your head. And I started thinking, what is she going to do?"
As a Saudi woman, she knew her daughters would have to have male guardians and that there would be limitations on whatever career paths they chose.
"For a minute I was choking," Dahlan said. "And on top of all that, my daughters are going to grow up seeing a suppressed wife. And I just decided, you know, that this is not gonna happen."
Then and there, Dahlan decided to become a different role model for her daughters as a "successful social entrepreneur and independent, hands-on single mother." She now heads two companies, one of which, Tashkeil, incubates creative entrepreneurs. And 13 years after first applying for it, she got her license to practice law in 2013.
Because she is divorced, her father is again her guardian. Fortunately for Dahlan, he has always been open-minded and supportive of his daughter's decisions.
Still, she said, "I find it ridiculous that despite being 37 years old and an independent businesswoman, every time I travel I have to get official permission from my father."
MOTHERS WITHOUT LEGAL CUSTODY
Al Duwaisi, who is divorced and works in a private company, has also been lucky to have reasonable male guardians.
"When I separated from my husband, I had to go back to my family's place, which is the custom," said Al Duwaisi. Later, she broached the idea of moving into her own apartment. Her father initially refused but eventually approved.
"It's very unusual for a woman to live on her own. There's no laws against it. But if my dad decided he wanted me home, he could go to court and force me back to his house," Al Duwaisi said. "That's how things are in Saudi. It's the culture and somehow the police will enforce it."
Because Al Duwaisi and her ex-husband had an amicable parting of ways, she did not face the traumas many Saudi women do over custody of their children.
According to "Perpetual Minors," under the Saudi interpretation of Sharia, in divorce "the law automatically transfers legal and physical custody to fathers when boys are nine and girls are seven." When a woman does succeed in getting physical custody of her child, the father always retains legal custody, the report said. He also has the right to make "virtually every decision" for the child.
Judges, however, can overrule these Sharia recommendations, Al Duwaisi noted. "For example, if the mother is not wearing right kind of abaya [robe], he will consider her a bad influence and give [physical] custody to the father," she said. Judges' cultural and religious bias towards men means fathers almost always get custody, she added.
Similarly, it's very hard for a woman to get a divorce if her husband opposes it.
"If I were the one who asked for the divorce and he didn't want it, I would have to pay the dowry back and then get the divorce. And that usually takes a lot of time in court," said Al Duwaisi. "But if he wanted to divorce me, despite what I think of it, then he just goes directly [to court] and just finishes it in the same day."
In her case, she said, she was never officially notified by the court of her divorce.
"The funny thing is I didn't go to court to get the divorce papers. I wasn't even there. My dad went and that's it. There's no way the court would know if I knew that I was getting divorced."
SMALL IMPROVEMENTS, BUT AN ENDURING SYSTEM
King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who came to power in 2005, has addressed some of the inequities women face in the legal system. Allowing female lawyers into the courts and ordering judges to accept national ID cards as proof of women's identities were among his reforms. He has also authorized programs to educate judges in modern legal procedures.
In addition, there has been an influx of younger judges who tend to be a bit more fair to women, said attorney Al Hargani.
The Saudi Supreme Judicial Council ruled recently that divorced women awarded physical custody of their children can obtain documents and conduct government business for their children, such as enrolling them in school — something they previously could not do. They still, however, cannot take their children outside the kingdom without the permission of the father, who technically remains the children's legal guardian. And women who cannot afford to hire lawyers still lack a place to get low-cost or free legal advice.
Most significantly, the guardian system is unlikely to be scrapped anytime soon because it is so ingrained in the Saudi mentality. "At the end of the day, I feel our problem here is about the culture," said Dahlan. "Even if we change laws and regulations, but without changing the mindsets of people, women will continue to be mistreated."
Since her divorce, Sara has been able to collect 850 rials (U.S. $227) per month in social welfare payments. She tried to register her daughter to also could receive assistance, but officials refused to accept her because her father is receiving a state pension.
Sara is thinking of going to court again to cancel his guardianship of their daughter so she can be eligible for a state allowance, though she realizes it won't be an easy or speedy process.
"But I will do it," she said. "I have no choice."
China Voice: U.S. should clean up its own human rights issues
As Human Rights Day approaches, high-profile cases of violations within American borders and by its agencies abroad are being scrutinized, especially as it pertains to be a defender of civil liberties globally.
United Nations human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein on Nov. 25 urged the U.S. to examine race-related issues in its law enforcement and justice systems following a controversial ruling on the shooting of an unarmed black teenager.
On Nov. 24, a grand jury did not indict caucasian Darren Wilson, a former police officer, who shot dead Michael Brown in August in Ferguson, Missouri. The decision led to protests and rioting in the small town and more than 170 U.S. cities followed suit, dividing the nation.
Cases of unfair and biased policing of minorities in the U.S. are not new, further fueling the nationwide protests.
Besides its deeply-rooted racism, the surveillance scandal -- which targeted its own citizens as well as leaders of other countries -- and attacks on foreign soil in its anti-terror campaigns -- resulting in heavy civilian casualties -- have also drawn international concern.
A congressional report detailing measures of torture allegedly used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on al-Qaida detainees during interrogation, expected to be released soon, has also added fuel to the hot disputes.
America is neither a suitable role model nor a qualified judge on human rights issues in other countries, as it pertains to be.
Yet, despite this, people rarely hear the U.S. talking about its own problems, preferring to be vocal on the issues it sees in other countries, including China.
As a developing country, China is in the process of ensuring its citizens have access to the constitutional and social rights to ensure development. Part of this developmental process is the acknowledgement and understanding of its own human rights issues.
A white paper on human rights released by the Chinese central government in May 2014 highlighted enhanced social fairness, justice and freedom of speech, along with raised living standards, improved social security system and further strengthened democracy and legal system.
The report noted that development across the country was unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable, and that greater efforts were needed to bring higher standards to human rights protection.
In response to the uproar following the Furguson case, the U.S. Federal Justice Department launched a civil rights investigation and President Barack Obama pledged more police funding to ensure officers were equipped with uniform-mounted cameras.
However, many protesters believe these moves to be mere lip service, as they fail to fully address what is a widespread problem.
The U.S. calls for patience from its citizens, runs counter to what it demands from other nations.
China is open to dialogues and exchanges with other countries over its human rights issues and welcomes friendly advice and suggestions. However, should a country adopt double standards, being "loose" domestically and "strict" abroad, its contrasting principles could be taken as a disregard for human rights.
What the U.S. appears to be doing is defending its own national interests and wielding human rights issues as a political tool.
The Untied Nations General Assembly declared Dec. 10 to be Human Rights Day in 1950, the day on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted.
The day continues to be commemorated as, globally, the worldwide human rights mission is far from complete.
In light of this, perhaps the U.S. government should clean up its own backyard first and respect the rights of other countries to resolve their issues by themselves.
Russia Must Sit Up and Take Notice of India
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/
Under the present circumstances, one would think that President Vladimir Putin's upcoming visit to India this weekend should lead to a quantum leap in Russian-Indian relations. In Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has a new dynamic leader who is busy reviewing and revising Delhi's economic and foreign policy. This raises challenges for India's traditional partners, but also offers them new opportunities.
Russia, for its part, has entered a long period of adversity and conflict with the United States, and its relations with other Western countries, above all with the European Union member states, have deteriorated to an unexpected degree.
If this opportunity is missed, the drift in the Russian-Indian relationship will continue.
This level of conflict has not been seen since the end of the Cold War and relations with the West show no sign of warming up as long as the situation in Ukraine remains unresolved, so it is imperative that Russia begins to develop previously neglected relationships where it can.
Russia's pivot to Asia, so far, has turned out to be a pivot to just China, on conditions significantly less favorable than what Russia could have hoped to get even a year ago, thanks to the country's increasing international isolation.
Yet it appears that Putin's visit to India this week will not lead to a breakthrough. Friendly words will be exchanged, goodwill demonstrated, and a certain number of agreements signed, but the potentially key relationship will remain adrift.
Essentially, Russia will continue to supply the Indian Armed Forces with various weapons systems and will commit to building nuclear power plants in the country.
No new ground will be broken. The relationship, which was dubbed a strategic partnership many years ago, will continue to be marked by under-achievements.
But things could be very different. India can become a key partner to Russia in a variety of fields. One is science, technology and education. In the run-up to the 2012 APEC summit in Vladivostok, Russia, built a sprawling new complex on Russky Island that it used to accommodate foreign leaders and their parties and then turned it over to the Far Eastern Federal University.
Two years on, the school — which some hoped would be a hub of international intellectual exchanges — is still what it used to be before APEC. A close partnership with leading Indian universities could give it the requisite lifting power. This is merely an example of what should be possible if the idea is to upgrade Russia's educational and scientific facilities through international collaboration.
The time has also come for India and Russia to expand their cooperation in the field of national defense to cover all stages of weapons research, development, testing and production.
When such cooperation with NATO countries, such as France and Italy, has ground to a halt — and is unlikely to be resumed — and the historically close integration of the Russian and Ukrainian defense industries is a thing of the past, India can become an important outside partner for Russia's defense industrial complex.
The traditional supplier-client relationship that has existed between Moscow and Delhi for about 50 years has been overhauled by India's own development, and Russia should begin to pay attention and draw conclusions from that.
As China begins to implement its twin Silk Road strategies, Russia and India need to come up with their own visions of economic integration across Eurasia writ large, including closer links with China as well as other countries, from Southeast Asia to Central Asia, Iran and Turkey.
India's forthcoming membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an opportunity that can be used to give a new impetus to this organization and provide a better balance within the SCO.
If, on the other hand, this opportunity is missed, the drift in the relationship will continue, to the din of repeated cliches about traditional Russian-Indian friendship.
To achieve any of this, and much more, Russians need to change their basic attitude toward India. It is no longer the developing country of the 1960s feeling its way around in the world and in need of Moscow's support, but a major emerging economy and a great power in Asia, with increasingly global reach.
The friendly, but somewhat unequal, relationship of the Soviet era needs to be replaced by a more serious, more businesslike and yet very friendly partnership relationship.
Russia has countered its recent political quasi-isolation in the West with scorn, asserting that it has many friends elsewhere.
These friends, however, require a real first-class treatment. Russia has done a great deal to cement and expand its ties with China, to the mutual benefit of both countries, but this is not enough.
A sustained effort is needed elsewhere, if Russia's opening to non-Western countries is not to stay rhetorical. India is the right place to start this new effort.
It is too late for Putin to inaugurate a new approach to India this time, but if nothing is done soon following his visit to materially upgrade the relationship, its stagnation will become qualitative, not just quantitative.
Hillary Clinton's history as first lady: Powerful, but not always deft
By Amy Chozick & Peter Baker
As a young lawyer for the Watergate committee in the 1970s, Hillary Rodham caught a ride home one night with her boss, Bernard Nussbaum. Sitting in the car before going inside, she told him she wanted to introduce him to her boyfriend. "Bernie," she said, "he's going to be president of the United States."Mr Nussbaum, stressed by the pressure of that tumultuous period, blew up at her audacious naivete. "Hillary, that's the most idiotic" thing, he screamed. She screamed back. "You don't know a goddamn thing you're talking about!" she said, and then called him a curse word. "God, she started bawling me out," he recalled. "She walks out and slammed the door on me, and she storms into the building."
It turned out she was right and he was wrong. Ms Rodham, who later married that ambitious boyfriend, Bill Clinton, believed even then that life would take her to the White House and now may seek to return not as a spouse and partner, but on her own terms.In recent months, as Mrs Clinton has prepared for a likely 2016 presidential campaign, she has often framed those White House years as a period when, like many working mothers, she juggled the demands of raising a young daughter and having a career. She talks about championing women's rights globally, supporting her husband during years of robust economic growth, and finding inspiration in Eleanor Roosevelt to stay resolute in the midst of personal attacks. What Mrs Clinton leaves out about her time as first lady is her messy, sometimes explosive and often politically clumsy dealings with congressional Republicans and White House aides. Now, the release of roughly 6,000 pages of extraordinarily candid interviews with more than 60 veterans of the Clinton administration paints a more nuanced portrait of a first lady who was at once formidable and not always politically deft. Her triumphs and setbacks are laid bare in the oral histories of Mr Clinton's presidency, released last month by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The center has conducted oral histories of every presidency going back to Jimmy Carter's, interviewing key players and then sealing them for years to come. But more than any other, this set of interviews bears on the future as much as the past. These were formative years for Mrs Clinton, a time of daring and hubris, a time when she evolved from that headstrong young lawyer so impressed with the man she would marry into a political figure in her own right. She emerged from battles over health care and Whitewater a more seasoned yet profoundly scarred and cautious politician with a better grasp of how Washington works, but far more wary of ambitious projects that may be unpopular. Now carefully controlled at 67, then she was fiery and unpredictable, lobbing sarcastic jabs in private meetings and congressional hearings. Now criticized as a centrist and challenged from the left, Mrs Clinton then was considered the liberal whispering in her husband's ear to resist the North American Free Trade Agreement and a welfare overhaul. "She's much more politically astute now than she was in early 1993," said Alan Blinder, who was a White House economist. "I think she learned. She's really smart. She learns, and she knows she made mistakes." An independent force No president ever had a partner quite like Hillary Rodham Clinton. She attended campaign strategy meetings in Little Rock, Ark., and later became the first (and so far only) first lady with an office in the West Wing. She would bring his meandering meetings to a close. She plotted out his defense against scandal. "The thing he lacks is discipline, both in his personal life and his intellectual or decision-making life, unless he's rescued by somebody," observed Alice M Rivlin, who served as White House budget director. "I think for a good part of his career, he was probably rescued by Hillary by her being a more decisive, more disciplined kind of person who kept things moving." She was an independent force within the White House, single-handedly pushing health care onto the agenda and intimidating into silence those who thought she might be mishandling it. She was prone to bouts of anger and nursed deep resentment toward Washington. She endured a terribly complicated relationship with her philandering husband. And yet she was the one who often channeled his energies, steered him toward success and saved him from himself. "She may have been critical from time to time with temper tantrums and things like that," said Mr Nussbaum, who went on to become Mr Clinton's first White House counsel. "But she was very strong, and he needed her desperately. He would not have been president, I don't think, without her." Mrs Clinton created her own team in the White House that came to be called Hillaryland, and "they were a little island unto themselves," as Betty Currie, the president's secretary, put it. She inspired more loyalty from them than the president did from his own team, said Roger Altman, who was deputy treasury secretary, probably because she was not as purely political. "She wears her heart on her sleeve much more than he does," he said. But the Clintons were fiercely protective of each other, acting at times as if it were just them against the world. "I remember one time in one of these meetings where she was blowing up about his staff and how we were all incompetent and he was having to be the mechanic and drive the car and do everything — that we weren't capable of anything, why did he have to do it all himself," said Joan N. Baggett, an assistant for political affairs. Mr Clinton had a similar temper when it came to the arrows hurled at her, and aides learned early on never to question her judgment in front of him. "He really reacts violently when people criticize Hillary," said Mickey Kantor, the 1992 campaign chairman and later commerce secretary. "I mean he really gets angry — you can just see it. He literally gets red in the face." He depended on her more than any other figure in his world. It blinded him to trouble, some advisers concluded, most notably about her ill-fated drive to remake the health care system. But he rarely overruled her, at least not in ways that staff members could detect. "I can't think of any issue of any importance at all where they were in disagreement and she didn't win out," recalled Abner Mikva, who served as White House counsel. Finding a balance Despite her boast to Mr Nussbaum, Mrs Clinton was unsentimental in her calculations about whether her husband was ready to run for president. As governor of Arkansas, Mr Clinton evaluated a candidacy in 1988, when he would turn 42, and thought it might be in his interest even if he lost. Mrs Clinton disagreed. "You run to win or you don't at all," Mr Kantor remembered her saying a couple of years later. Her assessment was that 1988 was not his year. "I think she felt he wasn't ready," said Frank Greer, a media strategist. There may have been other reasons, too. Mr Clinton complained to his friend Peter Edelman that Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, who was mounting his own campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1988, was "spreading rumors that he was having extramarital affairs." Others had also heard reports. After meeting Mr Clinton, Ms Rivlin gushed about him to their mutual friend, Donna Shalala. Ms Shalala agreed that Mr Clinton was "terrific," but added that "he's never going to be president of the United States." Ms Rivlin asked why not. "He's got a woman problem," Ms Rivlin remembered her answering. By 1992, Mrs Clinton was convinced that he was ready, and she confronted the "woman problem" directly in strategy sessions. "We had one meeting that was solely on this subject at which Hillary was present," said Stanley B. Greenberg, their pollster. "It was an uncomfortable meeting, I can assure you, raising the issue," he added. "I remember Hillary saying that, 'Obviously, if I could say no to this question, we would say no, and therefore there is an issue.' She spoke about this as much as he did." But if Mr Clinton's dalliances were a challenge, some of his aides worried that so was his wife. Some questioned whether he would look emasculated to have such a strong spouse. "They pigeonholed her," said Susan Thomases, a close friend of Mrs Clinton's who worked on the campaign. "She was so strong a personality that there were people who felt that when they were together her strong personality made him seem weaker." Mrs Clinton struggled with that, trying to find a balance. But she was integral to nearly every decision — from her husband's ideological positioning down to his campaign song. "Every time we suggest something, Hillary vetoes it, and we just can't get a song," Mr Clinton's longtime consigliere, Bruce R. Lindsey, complained at one point, according to Al From, founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Finally, Mr From suggested Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop," and that passed muster. More important, Mr From pushed for Mr Clinton to run to the middle, and ultimately she signed off on that too. She approached Mr From at a party. "I thought about it and you're right, and we're going to be a different kind of Democrat by the convention," he remembered her saying. Once in the White House, Mrs Clinton was a different kind of first lady. Put in charge of revamping health care, she recruited a bright and supremely confident adviser in Ira C Magaziner and assembled a bold if elaborate plan. She impressed Capitol Hill. "Hillary never turns her head when she's talking to someone," noticed former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, then the No. 2 Republican. "She is absolutely riveted. She doesn't look around, like, 'Oh, hi there, Tilly. How are you?' or divert her attention from the person she's talking to. That's a gift." Charles Robb, then a Democratic senator from Virginia, was among those who underestimated her. "I have to confess that I didn't see the special qualities that she had," he remembered. But "when she came over to give her first brief to a number of senators on health care, it was a tour de force. And I thought to myself, 'How did you get so attracted to this Bill Clinton guy that you missed Hillary Rodham Clinton?' " But the health care effort and its expansion of government involvement in the private sector proved politically toxic and generated deep internal division within the White House. Mr Magaziner was seen as dismissive and few were willing to confront the president's wife. "There were a lot of people who were intimidated," said Leon E. Panetta, the chief of staff. Ms Shalala, who had been named secretary of health and human services, was one of the few who tried. "I told Hillary that this thing is just headed for disaster, and she told me I was just jealous that I wasn't in charge and that was why I was complaining," Mr Edelman, who served as Ms Shalala's assistant secretary, remembered Ms Shalala telling him. Some of the White House economists were dubious and privately called Mrs Clinton's health care team "the Bolsheviks." In return, according to Ms Rivlin, the economists were "sometimes treated like the enemy." Their suggested changes were ignored. "We could have beaten Ira alone," said Mr Blinder. "But we couldn't beat Hillary." Indeed, the conflict left the president in a bind. "You can't fire your wife," Mr Kantor observed. In the end, the Clintons were stunned by the collapse of the effort in Congress, a defeat that helped lead to the Republican takeover in 1994. "They may be an irresistible force," said William A. Galston, a domestic policy adviser, "but they met an immovable object." Shifting gears After the health care debacle, Mrs Clinton "retreated for a while and licked her wounds," as Mr Galston put it. She was seen in the West Wing less and less, while traveling abroad more and more. She asserted her influence in less visible ways. She persuaded her husband to make Madeleine Albright the first woman to serve as secretary of state. She put the brutal treatment of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan on the administration's agenda. She overcame State Department resistance to make a trip to Beijing, where she forcefully argued that women's rights were human rights. She exulted so much afterward that she telephoned Samuel Berger, the deputy national security adviser, catching him at a Baltimore Orioles game, to thank him for making the trip possible. But scandal was stalking the Clinton White House. She had resisted releasing files on the couple's investment in a failed Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater and berated aides who pressed her to do so. "She just let everybody have it," Mr Panetta recalled. But she and her husband acceded to aides who, over Mr Nussbaum's objections, pushed to allow the appointment of an independent counsel. It was a decision she would regret. "When is it going to end, Bernie?" Mr Nussbaum remembered her asking years later. That was before the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, began investigating whether Mr Clinton lied under oath about an affair with a former intern named Monica Lewinsky. Mr Clinton denied the affair for months, and Mrs Clinton publicly said she believed him. But not all of their confidants were so sure. Ms Shalala recalled a meeting with Mrs Clinton with friends from California buzzing around. "Hillary said, 'Thanks for supporting the president,' " Ms Shalala said. "I don't know whether she knew or not, but that was the moment in which I thought, there's something here."
Ms Shalala was personally offended. "It was that it was an intern," she said. "I just couldn't tolerate that." After Mr Clinton later admitted that he had not told the truth, Ms Shalala chastised him during a private cabinet meeting, a scolding that later made the newspapers. "No one at the White House seemed mad at me," she said. "Hillary certainly wasn't." Ms Thomases said Mrs Clinton was furious with her husband but never contemplated a split. "She would have hit him with a frying pan if one had been handed to her, but I don't think she ever in her mind imagined leaving him or divorcing him," she said. Instead, Mrs Clinton went up to Capitol Hill to rally Democrats against impeachment. "She was absolutely great," recalled Lawrence Stein, the White House lobbyist. "They loved her. She called it a coup." Without her public support, Democrats might have abandoned the president, leading to pressure to resign or even a conviction in the Senate. Once again, Mrs Clinton had rescued him. And the Starr crisis transformed Mrs Clinton's public standing. With her poll numbers now sky high, she set her eyes on a Senate seat from New York, an idea that seemed so improbable that the White House press secretary, Joe Lockhart, denied it publicly until one day she sidled up to him, noted that he was from New York and started grilling him about voting patterns. For both Clintons, the Senate race in 2000 became a way to purge the toxins of the scandal. Mr Gore, now the vice president, wanted nothing to do with Mr Clinton as he mounted his own White House bid. So the departing president focused his energy on his wife's campaign. "Given the fact that the vice president wasn't interested in his political counsel, if he had not had Hillary running, it could have been a very difficult time for him," Mr Lockhart said. And it began a new Clinton political career that, a decade and a half later, now seems aimed once again at the White House. Imagine what Mr Nussbaum would have thought of that in the 1970s
Unrest Over Race Is Testing Obama’s Legacy
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and MICHAEL D. SHEARDECAs crowds of people staged “die-ins” across the country last week to protest the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, young African-American activists were in the Oval Office lodging grievances with President Obama.
He of all people — the first black president of the United States — was in a position to testify to the sense of injustice that African-Americans feel in dealing with the police every day, the activists told him. During the unrest that began with a teenager’s shooting in Ferguson, Mo., they hoped for a strong response. Why was he holding back?
Mr. Obama told the group that change is “hard and incremental,” a participant said, while reminding them that he had once been mistaken for a waiter and parking valet. When they said their voices were not being heard, Mr. Obama replied, “You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States.”
For Rasheen Aldridge Jr., 20, a community organizer from St. Louis who attended the meeting, it was not enough. “It hurt that he didn’t seem to want to go out there and acknowledge that he understands our pain,” Mr. Aldridge said in an interview. “It would be a great mark on his presidential legacy if he would come out and touch an issue that everyone is scared to touch.”
But Mr. Obama has not been the kind of champion for racial justice that many African-Americans say this moment demands. In the days since grand juries in Missouri and Staten Island decided not to bring charges against white police officers who had killed unarmed black men, the president has not stood behind the protesters or linked arms with civil rights leaders. Although those closest to Mr. Obama insist that he feels a new urgency to capitalize on the attention to racial divisions, few dispute that he is personally conflicted and constrained by the position he holds.
“We are really on a precipice of either going in the right direction or entrenching a very perilous racial divide in this country, so I think he’s trying to harness that and tread very carefully,” said Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “This is a phenomenal opportunity for him to create a lasting legacy in an area that has plagued African-Americans in particular for decades.”
For his six years in the White House, aides say, Mr. Obama has been hyperconscious that he is the president of everyone and has sought to avoid defining himself or his agenda on the basis of race. Although he did address the 2012 shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in personal terms, Mr. Obama rose to national prominence with a 2004 Democratic National Convention speech in which he cast himself as the product of a broad American experience, a place where “there is not a black America and a white America.”
The son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya has struggled with questions about his own racial identity — described in his book “Dreams From My Father” — but Mr. Obama is by nature cool and cerebral and rarely shows emotion in public.
Yet in an interview with Black Entertainment Television that aired Monday night, Mr. Obama suggested that critics who say he has not been sufficiently outspoken in response to the deaths in Ferguson and Staten Island have their facts wrong or are expecting something he cannot deliver as president.
“I’m being pretty explicit about my concern, and being pretty explicit about the fact that this is a systemic problem, that black folks and Latinos and others are not just making this up,” Mr. Obama said, referring to his response to the killings in Ferguson and on Staten Island, where Eric Garner, 43, died after a police officer restrained him with a chokehold. People may be frustrated that he has not taken sides in the cases, Mr. Obama said, but “that I cannot do, institutionally.” He hinted that in private, his reactions have been stronger.
“I’ll leave it to people to speculate on what I’m saying to myself or Michelle when we’re alone at night,” the president said.
White House advisers say addressing the nation’s racial conflicts is now an imperative for the president’s final years in office. “What’s different about right now is that the president of the United States is committing that he intends to make progress on this issue,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, said in an interview last week. “We have an opportunity now, with the American people — not just in Ferguson or in New York, but across the country.”
Mr. Obama has stepped up some of his rhetoric. In a huddle with Ms. Jarrett and Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. in the Oval Office last month, the president ripped up the beginning of a speech he was about to give on immigration and added a pledge to advocates for change that “your president will be right there with you.”
His administration has also pushed for sentencing guidelines that are more fair to African-Americans, reached out to young black men with the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative and created a task force to address tensions between black Americans and law enforcement agents. A number of civil rights leaders, however, say the president has not done enough.
“People appreciate the fact that he heightened the public awareness of this by making statements and making sure that the attorney general has been present,” said Tanya Clay House, the director of public policy for theLawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. But, she said, “there’s a desire to push the administration further.”
At this point, Mr. Obama’s response to Ferguson, Staten Island and the unrest across the country has diminished his image with important groups, according to new polling figures. Half the respondents in a Pew Research Center survey conducted Wednesday to Sunday disapproved of the president’s handling of race relations, compared with 40 percent who approved — a reversal from August, when 48 percent approved and 42 percent disapproved. While the majority of African-Americans still said the president had handled race relations well, support among them had dropped 16 points since polling in the summer.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)