The offices of the Trump Department of Justice may be mostly empty, but that hasn’t kept Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has drafting that most important document—a new plan on Russia.
The former Texas oilman, who worked extensively with Kremlin officials as CEO of Exxon Mobil, has crafted a three-point framework for future US-Russia relations that takes a narrow view of what can be achieved between the former Cold War adversaries, but seeks a constructive working relationship with Putin on a limited set of issues.
The three points include working with Russia on Syria, where Russia just issued this helpful notice.
Long-running tensions between the United States and Russia erupted publicly on Monday as Moscow condemned the American military’s downing of a Syrian warplane and threatened to target aircraft flown by the United States and its allies west of the Euphrates.
And just to increase the Cuban Missile Crisis level of potential escalating screw ups, Russia also announced that they were cutting direct communications in the area.
The Russians also said they had suspended their use of a hotline that the American and Russian militaries used to avoid collisions of their aircraft in Syrian airspace.
That’s just one of the three pillars in Tillerson’s new “framework.” Considering that another one is that if Russia does something we don’t like, we’ll strike back, it’s not exactly a design that guards against overreaction. But the plan does have one place where Tillerson wants to share, and incredibly that place is cybersecurity.
The third pillar of Tillerson’s plan introduces a phrase that’s likely to show up again in Trump’s policy.
The third pillar of Tillerson’s framework emphasizes the importance of "strategic stability" with Russia, an ambiguous umbrella term that encompasses a range of long-term mutual geopolitical goals.
“Strategic stability” apparently includes reduced support for bolstering Russia’s neighbors. That’s a major break with the four-point strategy endorsed by President Obama in 2015.
Obama’s strategy, drafted by his White House senior director for Russia, Celeste Wallander, pledged to make Eastern and Central European countries more “resilient against Russian tactics” through various democracy-building programs and the development of NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, which first deployed in June 2015 for a NATO exercise in Poland.
Instead, Tillerson has put forward a budget in which assistance to nations around Russia is cut by two-thirds.
Tillerson also wants to work with Russia on cybersecurity and cyber warfare, to determine “what’s fair game and what is not.” Which seems like an incredible position considering Russia’s involvement in the election.
… the second tenet, aimed at cybersecurity and cyberespionage, seems particularly odd given not only the investigations surrounding President Donald Trump and his former campaign but also the conclusion reached by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia intentionally meddled in last year’s election in order to ascend Trump’s candidacy.
Overall it seems like Tillerson’s plan consists of:
- Asking Russia to play nice in Syria, which won’t happen.
- Asking Russia to cut ties with North Korea, which won’t happen.
- Informing Russia that the United States will respond when an ally is attacked … unless that ally happens to be in Russia’s sphere of influence.
- Asking Russia to limit the use of a weapon that’s just been spectacularly successful for them.
Incredibly, the most reassuring point about Tillerson’s Russia plan may be this.
The difficulty, [Steven Pifer, a former US ambassador to Ukraine] said, is knowing whether Trump will adhere to it or pursue a more ambitious grand bargain with Russia that shows deference to Moscow’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. “We’re talking about a Tillerson document,” he said. “If we’ve learned anything over the last four months, it’s that the president could throw it out at any moment.”