Putin and Biden will be in charge of the "reset"
The first meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and new US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held in Geneva on Friday merely ticked off the problems piled up in bilateral relations. The two sides stated that the links between Russia and the United States were "overloaded" and needed to be "reset", an operation that will be carried out by a permanent bilateral commission co-chaired by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and US Vice President Joseph Biden.
Mrs Clinton had prepared a souvenir for her meeting with Mr Lavrov: a red button with the word "reset" in two languages. In Russian, however, the word "reset" was misspelt so that it became "overloading", a fact that the Russian Minister pointed out to Secretary Clinton. Mrs Clinton assured Mr Lavrov that she would see to it that Russian-US relations would never be "overloaded", whereupon the two diplomats pressed the button. It is hard to believe that the US State Department has no linguists left who would know enough Russian not to confuse "reloading" with "overloading". Apparently, the mistake was made accidentally-on-purpose. This was Secretary Clinton's way to point out that many problems had piled up in the relations between Russia and the United States and that they require some imaginative moves to resolve.
"The problems accumulated in the relations between Russia and the United States can only be solved at the level of state leaders", says Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Centre.
Personal meetings between Russian and US Presidents, the first of which will take place at the G20 summit in London in April, cannot solve the problem. "The Presidents cannot be in constant contact," Alexander Rahr, an expert with the German Foreign Policy Council, said. "To establish truly strategic bilateral relations Russia and the United States must look for new forms, or go back to some sadly forgotten old ones."
He was referring to reviving a permanent commission headed by the Russian Prime Minister and US Vice President. "In the 1990s the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission enabled Russia and the United States to deal with bilateral problems as they arose because the powers of co-chairmen permitted it," Mr Rahr recalled. The idea of recreating such a commission under the chairmanship of Vladimir Putin and Joseph Biden "is sure to be discussed at the meeting between Minister Lavrov and Secretary Clinton," says the German analyst. However, the Ministers are not authorised to make an official announcement of such decisions. The Putin-Biden commission will be established after the April meeting in London between Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama. That information is confirmed by a source in the Russian diplomatic circles. "Considering the crisis, the Russian and US Presidents have too many things to do at home," our interlocutor, who chose to remain anonymous, said. Both Mr Medvedev and Mr Obama will gladly delegate foreign policy to the more experienced Mr Putin and Mr Biden.
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HILLARY CLINTON INVITES IRANIANS TO A BIG PALAVER
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton does not rule out that Iran may attend the forthcoming international conference on Afghanistan. "We propose a ‘big tent meeting' in which all the parties that have interests in Afghanistan can take part," Secretary Clinton said in Brussels on Friday. The Shiite Iran, which shares a border with Afghanistan and is under constant threat of expansion of Sunni Islamic extremists, is certainly among such parties. Mrs Clinton's invitation to the "big tent" may provide Teheran with a convenient pretext to resume direct dialogue with the United States, which Barack Obama advocates. The common enemy represented by the Taliban may reconcile Washington and Teheran.
Kirill Zubkov