President Barack Obama’s scheduled trip this fall might be cancelled now that Russia has decided to grant leaker/defector Edward Snowden temporary asylum. On issue after issue, it seems we are now paying a heavy price for 20 years, starting under President Bill Clinton and exacerbated under President George W. Bush, of failing to establish a relationship with Russia that was based on mutual interests and gains – from NATO enlargement under President Clinton to missile defense under President Bush, we have, from their perspective, repeatedly stuck a needle in Russia’s eye. While Russia is responsible for its own behavior, we should not be surprised when at some point Moscow pushes back and asserts their interests as they define them, not as we think they should. So, we should have no illusions of surprise when a Russia slowly getting back on its feet makes life difficult for us – and symbolic protestations from Washington will accomplish nothing. It is worth noting that, if the entire thing were reversed and we had the Russian version of Snowden, we would likely be doing the same thing they are. If Obama wants a reason not to meet with Putin, he should focus instead on the illegitimate imprisonment of Pussy Riot and others, and the state driven harassment of gay people. Obviously, the wise move for Russia would have been to hand Mr. Snowden over to the United States to face a fair judicial process – something average Russians do not have access to. For a person who claims to be an advocate for rights and freedom, Mr. Snowden is surely in for a big surprise the longer he stays in Russia. Still, if President Obama wants to start rebuilding a relationship that achieves vital goals commensurate to our national interests – including nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, complementing the pivot to Asia, and putting pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear goals, he’d better get on that plane and get busy. One might ask, where are today’s Kennans? Everything in life can’t be tactical.
Sean Kay, Ph.D. is Director of the Arneson Institute for Practical Politics and Public Affairs, and also Robson Professor of Politics and International Studies Chair at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is the author of Global Security in the Twenty-First Century: The Quest for Power and the Search for Peace.
Suzanne Schroeder 
Andrew Stern 
Shuami 
Tom Quiggin 
Overall, a good analysis, and fairly objective. BUT one comment for Americans writing about Russia: you have no idea how offensive the Pussy Riot “performance” was to many people. It was a highly symbolic violation, and the US media has largely misread why there is so little sympathy for these women. Think of the reaction to Quran desecration, it’s about the act, but it’s also about history, humiliation, occupation, and at least a hundred other resentments. Understanding why Pussy Riot’s actions were so painful to Russian people would be a first step towards towards acquiring a more accurate knowledge of contemporary Russia
Suzanne, to a point I agree with you that the western media hasn’t quite understood the difference between what we perceive as free speech in the US and hate speech in Russia. With that being said, at the end of the day there are two women who will have spent several years in prison for a “performance” that lasted all of 30 seconds, didn’t physically harm anyone, and was intended as a way to lash out at the support the Russian Orthodox church provided to Putin during his last election. You may correctly believe that this was indeed a “symbolic violation” of Russian cultural sensitivities but please don’t be so naive as to discount it as another of the many obvious ploys by Mr. Putin’s United Russia party to persecute systematically the minority subsets of Russian society opposed to its agenda, including the LGBT, religious, and political communities. You don’t have to look any further than the recent ruling fining Russia’s first and only LGBT film festival for $400,000 because they didn’t register under Russia’s “foreign agent” law. I’m sorry, but Mr. Kay was not out of line in characterizing the Pussy Riot band members imprisonment as anything other than “illegitimate.” If Pussy Riot had instead gone into a mosque and sang about the resident imam’s support of Islamists in Chechnya do you think the Kremlin would have arrested them? Of course not.
“On issue after issue, it seems we are now paying a heavy price… of failing to establish a relationship with Russia that was based on mutual interests and gains”
And it looks like the US is prime to repeating the same mistake on China.
Methinks the Obama Administration is actively looking for an excuse to cancel the summit. There is little commonality on issues such as Syria, Iran, Israel and Egypt. Russian goals on energy in Europe run contrary to American interests etc etc etc.
It is hard to find something that could be produced by such a summit in terms of a new security treaty or trade agreement. At best, the summit would produce a “we agree to disagree” sort of outcome. Putin has a bit to gain but nothing to lose from such a summit. Obama has a lot to lose but little to gain.
Mr Snowden may have simply provided the excuse.