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Roundup: Expulsions Could Further Chill U.S.-Russian Relations
The mutual mass expulsion of Russian and U.S. diplomats on spy charges Thursday and Friday could further damage the already chilly relations between Washington and Moscow, experts say.
The Bush administration on Thursday expelled four Russian diplomats accused of direct involvement with a former FBI agent spying for Moscow and told Moscow it expected an additional 46 to leave in the coming months.
The following day, Russia, complaining the Bush administration is trying to return to a Cold War mentality, declared four U.S. diplomats in Moscow "persona non grata" and ordered them to leave in the next few days. Meanwhile, it demanded 46 others to leave by summer.
The expulsions, the largest in scale since the end of the Cold War, mark the most serious spy row between the two countries in recent history. However, both sides now seem to try to put a brake on the tit-for-tat expulsion game and bring their relations back to normality.
President George W. Bush said Thursday he was confident the United States could have good relations with the Russia despite of the expulsion. "I am confident that we can have good relations with the Russians. We've got some areas where we can work together. We made the right decision," he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell also told his Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov Thursday that Washington still intended to have a cooperative and productive relationship with Moscow. "We have important interests in maintaining cooperative and productive relations with Russia, and we intend to continue working to advance those interests," he said on another occasion.
Russia, on its part, described what it did was just an " adequate" response to the U.S. move. "The Russian counterintelligence service is well aware of the activities of U.S. intelligence officers working in Russia under diplomatic or other cover," Interfax cited a Russian special services source as saying Friday.
The mutual expulsions came against a backdrop of the tense relations between the nations in recent years on a host of issues, including Chechnya and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
"U.S.-Russian relations are certainly not at their best at the moment, and when relations deteriorate, you tend to get these tit- for-tat retaliations," said Ariel Cohen, a research fellow at the Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution noted that the Bush team reflected a "remarkable Cold War mind-set highlighted by what happened Wednesday night." The Republicans seem to view the world as "one of threats instead of looking at the opportunities that globalization is bringing about," he said.
The Bush approach is not unexpected. Charles Kupchan of the Brookings Institution said he was worried that Bush's national security team were all ex-Cold War warriors and there was a risk they were going to turn the clock back.
The expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats, Bush administration officials said, was a sign of the blunter and tougher foreign policy they intended to pursue over the course of the next four years. This is by no means a good signal for a better U.S.-Russian relationship.
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