Has Obama's Test Already Started?

In the waning days of the U.S. Presidential campaign, Joe Biden ominously predicted Obama would be tested early in his term. Has it already started?

Less than twenty-four hours after Barack Obama was elected, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced plans to deploy Iskander missiles within striking distance of Poland.

To be fair, what prompted the move was heartburn in Moscow over a U.S. proposed missile defense system to be placed in Poland. The White House says the system is to counter an Iranian missile capability, and the Kremlin says it reduces Russia's nuclear deterrent capability.

The conflict has been brewing between Washington and Moscow for almost a year, and wasn't prompted by Obama's election.

What does seem to be driven by the election, or at least coincident with it, is a resurgent willingness in Moscow to rattle it's saber any time world events don't go it's (read that Vladmir Putin's) way.

Take, for example, the recent show of power by the Russian navy, steaming around the world to Venezuela, and violating the long respected Marshall Doctrine in the process. Russia doesn't need oil from Hugo Chavez, and they can ill afford a client state headed by a madman in this hemisphere.

So, why the cruise?

The opportunity to beard the U.S. in it's own back yard, and get a good read on both of the men who might lead it the next four years must have been irresistible.

Take note that Russia is rejecting out of hand current overtures made by Condoleeza Wright to resolve the issue, preferring instead to settle the problem when Obama takes office.

And finally, today, Putin sounded threats that Russia might reduce oil production to shore up the falling price of crude. This would be an unprecedented action. Moscow has traditionally backed away from OPEC involvement or OPEC style maneuvering in the world crude market.

So, why the waiting game, and why the threat?

Emboldened by Obama's hesitancy to denounce Russia's invasion of Georgia, judging that to signal inexperience or weakness, could Putin be thinking back to the glory years of Nikita Khrushchev? If he is, was it Obama that reminded him?

During the campaign, as Putin was making he-man news in his karate gi, Obama chose the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit as an illustration on why talking to our enemies early in his administration, without preconditions, would be a good idea.

Khrushchev, the fabled hardliner who pushed a young John Kennedy to remove NATO missiles from Turkey during the Cuban Missile Crisis, may well be the history chapter Obama needs to brush up on.

Kennedy is fondly remembered by pop culture history, but that summit was a foreign policy disaster from every contemporary or serious historic perspective. Khrushchev abused and berated the young President endlessly, and ended the meetings by telling Kennedy "We will bury you!".

Kennedy, who told his aides that Khrushchev had "just beat the hell out of me", left worried, knowing that the Russian thought he, and by extension, the U.S., was weak.

That perceived weakness came back to haunt him less than a year later, when Kennedy quietly traded away the missiles in Turkey to buy Khrushchev and the Russian nukes out of Cuba.

It is widely believed that in an effort to regain some prestige, Kennedy later decided to force the issue by committing to direct conflict in Vietnam, and we all know what a brilliant foreign policy move that was.

Actually, when a dispassionate study of the Kennedy presidency is made, it is hard to find anything he did right in the foreign arena. Rather than backing the Russians down, he bought them off. The Bay of Pigs was bad, but Vietnam was worse. One could argue he spent his remaining days in office after that crucial summit trying to impress Khrushchev.

And here we are, forty years later, in another game of chicken with Moscow, defending a fledgling democracy from the Russian bear, each side using missiles as bargaining chips, and a young, untested Democrat president set to mount the world stage and talk the problem away over a Mocha Latte.

Deja Vu? In spades.

I, for one, don't believe that Georgia's admission into NATO is in our interest, and it is the subject of another essay whether the Bush Doctrine promotes an expansion of freedom, or is simply an excuse to go and build an empire of influence.

I don't even think it debatable that Bush's lack of attention to the old Eastern Bloc, and to our relations with Russia, has forced this conflict. Neither do I think that the issue at hand.

What is at hand is how to defuse and normalize relations with Russia, without wasting the little political capital we have left with them. What Reagan started, Bush 41, Bill Clinton and Bush 43 have squandered. Russia's path into democracy has been ugly, and they now seem to be retracing their steps.

I believe we are looking at the beginning of the new old Soviet Union, with Putin at the helm. The hardliners are coming back into power, and the Brezhnev Doctrine won't be far behind.

It might behoove our President-Elect to tear a page from Sarah Palin's playbook, and spend an afternoon talking with Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger might have misjudged Gorbachev. He surely wouldn't have known what to make of Boris Yeltsin, but he knew exactly what Khrushchev was made of, and Putin is cast in the very same mold.