Shake up at the State Department’s Russia desk

David at A Step At a Time has excerpted a recent Stratfor piece looking at shifts in US policy towards Russia and linking them to Condoleezza Rice’s appointment of Secretary of State.  This passage in particular caught my eye, looking at staffing changes in the State Department which are affecting everyone from top to bottom, including at the Russia desk:

As we stated when Rice was appointed in January, the State Department is now "staffed by a team that helped knock the Soviet Union off its superpower perch. Russia can look forward to four years of a State Department with the resources and the will to ratchet back Moscow’s influence throughout the Baltics, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia and even its western Slavic flank. The confrontation over Ukraine was just the beginning."

Personnel changes have not been limited to the top tier. Vershbow’s replacement as ambassador — William Burns — fits the mold set by Rice and her top team. He served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow as minister-counselor for political affairs during the 1980s, a position and time that would tend to shape one’s political views. He is now coming back to Moscow after several years of knocking Israeli and Palestinian heads together.

In the case of Russia, however, the transformation is much deeper than "just" a fresh ambassador, secretary of state and top management team. The rank and file of the entire Russia desk at the State Department is being overhauled. Considering that most State Department personnel swap out positions every two to three years to avoid the dangers of going native, a certain amount of turnover is expected, but the top-to-bottom housecleaning in the case of the Russia team appears to be far more thorough than any scheduled rotation.

[Sorry - I don't have a direct link to the full text of the Stratfor article.  A longer excerpt can be found at A Step out of Time.]

Rice and George Bush have clearly decided that the old way of dealing with Russia – essentially  uncritical support for Putin – wasn’t working.  More than that, they’ve decided that the blame lay not just in poor policy direction from the top, but in a Russia desk chock full of people who presumably weren’t able to differentiate between their love for Russia and the need for strong, critical policies towards its government.

A shake-up of this magnitude hopefully means that this more direct policy approach won’t necessarily die in 2009, when the next US President is sworn in.  If you approve of the current Bush administration’s approach towards Russia – which I do – then a shake-up of this magnitude is great news. 

Tagged as: US-Russia relations