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"The Russians Moved Because They Know You Are Weak"The last two weeks have been a disaster for U.S. foreign policy.

By Daniel BenjaminPosted Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2008, at 2:24 PM ET

An apartment complex damaged during fighting in Gori, GeorgiaThrough the first days of the crisis in the Caucasus, all eyes have been on the suffering of the Georgians and barbarism of the Russians. Both are indisputable. But now it is also time to recognize that the events of the last two weeks have been a disaster for U.S. foreign policy.

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Russia's invasion of its neighbor is a clear demonstration that the United States-led effort to integrate post-Soviet Russia into the West has failed. Whether the process can be restarted remains to be seen, but in light of the events since Aug. 8, doing so soon would be indecent.

Some will say that failure was inevitable. Great empires, the argument goes, cannot suffer historic calamities, as the Soviet Union did, and then quietly settle into the second rank of world powers without further spasms of misbehavior. But three successive U.S. administrations clearly maintained it was possible.

Others will also argue that failure was due to a chronic inability to recognize that America's post-Cold War aims and Russian integration were irreconcilable. Specifically, the Russians could never live with a post-Soviet settlement that saw most of their satellite nations and many of the USSR's former republics enter NATO and the European Union, and no amount of engagement with Russia was going to make this pill digestible.

This is debatable but not provable. What is indisputably true is that both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations worked to give the Russians a place at the table. The first President Bush pledged no more NATO enlargement after a reunified Germany took its place in the alliance and went to great lengths to avoid any post-Cold War triumphalism. Clinton may have caused damage by reneging on the assurance of no further NATO enlargement, but he more than made up for it with the NATO-Russia Founding Act; the denuclearization of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus; the creation of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, which created a forum for ongoing close government cooperation; the invitation to join the G-7; and vast amounts of time in close consultation with Boris Yeltsin.

Helping Russia in the 1990s was no easy task given the country's internal chaos. There was also estrangement as the Kosovo crisis unfolded in 1999. But that was nothing compared with the anger that Moscow developed over its treatment at the hands of the current Bush administration, which has long seemed to be sending the message that Russian interests were simply of no importance in Washington. To be fair, Russia wasn't being singled out. The treatment of Russia was a piece of U.S. foreign policy that appeared to be based on the notion that we would reap better outcomes by pursuing what might be called the diplomacy of no diplomacy.

With Russia, the story had its own distinctive twist, in which the administration's remarkable inability ever to follow through on anything was in high relief. There were numerous contacts at the highest levels—Bush and Putin have met at least 25 times—but the results were quite obviously nugatory. (What other conclusion can one draw from the television images of Bush chummily securing "assurances" from Putin at the Beijing Olympics, only to have the Russian prime minister then show up to direct the forces in Vladikavkaz?) The relationship commenced with a blizzard of promises of ambitious common effort, beginning with Bush's June 2001 first meeting with Putin. There would be joint work on missile defense, energy, and economic cooperation, and that would just be the start.

But as U.S. diplomats sought to put flesh on Bush's words and build a better United States-Russia relationship, they found a White House that could not be moved to do even the smallest things. A case in point, they thought, was making good on the promise to exempt Russia from the Cold War Jackson-Vanik legislation.

Jackson-Vanik requires the government to certify to Congress that Russia is allowing people to emigrate freely; in return, Russia enjoys "most favored nation" trade status. The issue had been all but a dead letter for years, since Moscow had long since stopped regulating emigration, but the Cold War relic still irritated the Kremlin. With no domestic opposition to removing the annoyance of annual certification, all that was needed, State Department and NSC officials determined in 2002, was four phone calls to congressional leaders to make it happen. But they found that getting the president to schedule the calls was impossible, no matter how hard they tried. Now, 17 years after the death of the Soviet Union—and 12 years after a wave of 750,000 Russian Jews moved to Israel—Jackson-Vanik lives, and, extraordinarily, U.S. officials talk about it as something that will be left in place to punish the Russians.

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Daniel Benjamin is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He served as director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff in 1998-99 and is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror and The Next Attack.

Photograph of damaged apartment complex by Chris Hondros/Getty Images.

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