President Obama’s top diplomat to the United Nations urged President-elect Trump on Tuesday not to repeat Obama’s attempt to “reset” relations with Russia.
“Similarly flawed is the argument that the United States should put recent transgressions aside and announce another reset with Russia,” Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said in her last major speech before leaving office. “Yes, the Obama administration tried this approach in our first term. But 2017 is not 2009.”
Power cited three factors — the Russian invasion of Ukraine, attacks on Syrian civilians, and the cyberattacks conducted against the Democratic Party in 2016 — as reasons why Trump should not try to repeat the reset that Obama pursued. But she defended Obama’s reset attempt, by saying it allowed the U.S. and Russia to work together “on issues such as counterterrorism, arms control and the war in Afghanistan.”
She argued that more recent Russia activity is a threat to the international order that the United States has managed since World War II.
“Russia’s actions are not standing up a new world order,” she told the Atlantic Council. “They are tearing down the one that exists and this is what we are fighting against. Having defeated the forces of fascism and communism we now confront the forces of authoritarianism and nihilism.”
Power cited a variety of examples: Putin’s refusal to admit to deploying Russian forces into Ukraine in advance of the annexation of Crimea; the Russian ambassador’s argument that the U.N. secretary general was using “fake news” to criticize Russian military support for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad; and Russian denials of responsibility for bombing a humanitarian convoy in September.
“Because the strikes were carried out in a region where only the Assad regime and its Russian allies were flying, the attack was widely reported as likely being carried out by the regime or Russian forces,” she said.
By turns, Power recalled, the Russians claimed the convoy was destroyed in a fire, then suggested that anti-Assad rebels had done the damage, before finally claiming that an American drone “was detected” over the convoy before the attack. “Two days, three stories, all false,” Power said. “Yet Russia’s willingness to lie turned reporting on the attack in an ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ story.”
Still, Power endorsed Trump’s reported desire to have a summit with Putin early in his presidency, although she urged him to maintain the suite of sanctions imposed by Obama in response to the cyberattacks and the destabilization of Ukraine.
“High-level contacts are going to happen, should happen … but not from a position of weakness or forgetting history,” she said.
