MOSCOW. Nov 7 (Interfax) - With U.S. President Barack Obama's reelection, Russia and the U.S. have stimuli to continue the reset policy, says Mikhail Margelov, the head of the Russian Federation Council international affairs committee.
"I agree with experts believing that the U.S. foreign policy under reelected President Barack Obama will be based on the 'stimulus-response' principle, that is, it will be actually unpredictable either as concerns stimuli or the adequacy of the responses, including in relations with Russia. However, even in this case, there are stimuli for continuing the reset - these are the accumulating global problems, which neither the U.S. nor Russia can solve on their own," Margelov told Interfax on Wednesday.
The record shows that an incumbent president usually has an advantage in U.S. elections, and therefore, even though the past presidential race was very close, experts still believed that Obama would win, he said.
"This is exactly what happened, although Mitt Romney conducted his campaign basically well. But it was easier for him than for Obama, because the incumbent president had to make excuses for the real state of affairs, while his rival assumed a convenient position of total disagreement and discontentment," Margelov said.
It looks like most U.S. voters believed that Obama would strike a balance between economic justice and economic development in his second term, if this is possible at all, he said.
As for foreign policy, it is usually hard to stretch vague pre-election plans not only strategically, but also for a single presidential term, Margelov said. "Foreign policy today has lost firm theoretical grounds, and it can no longer be pursued either in line with real political recipes or liberal principles. Obama has created, to put it mildly, quite a complicated foreign political situation, which includes the consequences of the Arab Spring, which has spread to a significant area in Africa and the Middle East, and also Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, as well as relations with Europe and China," he said.
Unlike Romney, Obama does not view Russia as a geopolitical foe, Margelov said. At the same time, Obama will find it difficult to determine the further agenda for the reset and decide what should follow the New START treaty, NATO's non-expansion eastward, the coordination of positions on Afghanistan and so on, he said.
"After all, besides the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, all of the previous term's achievements to this end have been exhausted, and further reset steps would stumble on the missile defense problem, but the flexibility promised by Obama does not mean that the U.S. would wind this system down," Margelov said.
Obama himself consolidated this system in a legal document, i.e. the NATO Strategic Concept adopted in Lisbon in 2010, Margelov said. "The allies would view a decision to drop the missile defense as dropping the alliance defense indivisibility principle. You don't have to belong to the same party in the U.S. to follow the same foreign political course. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are equally interested in their country's leadership. This is what the call of history is for them," he said.
This similarity is visible "not on the transcendental but on a very tangible level," Margelov said. "Unlike his opponent, Obama did not use tough rhetoric, but he personally presented a program to the Pentagon under the unambiguous title 'Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense'. It is another matter that there is no clarity in Obama's electoral platform as to how the U.S. would follow the path of leadership in the current extremely complicated international situation," he said.