Joe Biden has got it all figured out. In a round-table discussion last week with a handful of reporters and columnists, the U.S. vice president suggested that the Obama administration's nuclear arms reduction treaty, New START, and its broader aim of "resetting" relations with Russia could be a means of strengthening Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the expense of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. "The centerpiece of where Medvedev is, is this reset," Biden said. "And [START] is the crown jewel inside that reset because it wasn't Putin pushing this -- it was Medvedev."
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Well, good luck with that. Two big problems with this approach present themselves. First, if the past 20 years has shown us anything, it's that issuing Washington brownie points to a Russian politician is a great way of ensuring that person's ultimate marginalization and irrelevance. If you're Medvedev, getting yourself publicly identified as the man pushing a pro-Western agenda is going to be a huge hindrance, not a help. Does Biden think that Russians don't read the papers?
Second, Biden's remarks assume that Medvedev and Putin are participants in a power struggle, each maneuvering at the expense of the other. I can see why the vice president might think that Russia's leaders are engaged in full-fledged rivalry; so many people seem to be taking that as a given these days. But I just don't think it's true.
The notion of antagonism within Russia's leadership tandem has become a staple of the media coverage of late. "Russian politics is in the midst of a tug-of-war between Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the long lead-up to the 2012 presidential election," wrote Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun recently. "Medvedev may edge out Putin as Russia's top leader," ran the headline in Newsweek. That story hyped the idea, without citing much in the way of specifics, that "the Russian elite has lined up behind the new president, Dmitry Medvedev, rather than the old one, Vladimir Putin." I should note, though, that even some Russian media have been getting into the act. "Aides Noting 'Growth of Confrontation' Between Medvedev and Putin," was the title of one story earlier this month in the weekly Argumenty Nedeli.
The claims in these stories build on a handful of recent Kremlinological plot twists. The most notable is the recent fall from grace of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was targeted by Medvedev-friendly news media before being removed from office on Sept. 28. The removal or appointment of regional leaders is the prerogative of the Russian president, so it's understandable why the move was seen by many analysts as a demonstration of Medvedev's power over a figure long regarded as virtually unassailable within his own fiefdom. Russia may be the world's biggest country, but economic and political power are still disproportionately concentrated in its capital, so controlling Moscow is undoubtedly a requirement if you want to win a power struggle. Putin, by contrast, evidently didn't see Luzhkov as much of a challenge and accordingly didn't go to the trouble to clip his wings.
For believers in the theory of a full-blown rivalry within the ruling duumvirate, this was merely the culmination of a series of similar incidents. A few days before sacking Luzhkov, Medvedev killed the sale of the S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran, underlining his insistence that Russia should go along with U.N. sanctions imposed on Tehran. That now-dead deal is said to have enjoyed the backing of some of Putin's most powerful friends in the Russian military-industrial complex. As Biden's remarks suggest, Medvedev's performance at this weekend's NATO summit, where he agreed to consider cooperating with the transatlantic alliance over missile defense, is bound to inspire comparisons with Putin's stance on the issue. One need only recall Putin's contentious performance at the previous NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008.
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