Next stop: Moscow

Just as Obama’s Cairo speech laid out the president’s views of the Middle East, so pundits here are hoping this visit will lay out the U.S. view of Russia. Many are still smarting from a 1990s in which Russia felt it was ignored, and a Bush era during which it felt outright dismissed.

Despite lingering suspicions of U.S. motives, the view of Obama is overwhelmingly positive. Even Nikonov, an analyst whose loyalty to the Kremlin is matched by mistrust of Washington, had kind words. “Obama looks like he is trying to improve America’s relations and image across the globe, so he might be interested in engaging,” he said.

Yet beyond arms control and Afghanistan, common points of interest are few and the potential for friction great.

I asked Nikonov, who happens to be the grandson of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, if he thought Russia and the U.S. could reach a common view of the world. “I don’t think so,” he said. “America still has a very unipolar view of the world. It sees America as No. 1 and leading. That’s not the Russian view of thinking of the globe.”

The globe may be a large thing to look at. Russia’s concerns fall to its immediate neighborhood.

When Obama arrives on Monday, Russia will have just wrapped up major war games in the North Caucasus, near the border with Georgia, which are seen as a signal to both Tbilisi and Washington, and a direct response to NATO war games held in Georgia in May.

Russian officials have indicated that they will not lift their opposition to NATO and EU membership for Ukraine and Georgia, two ex-Soviet countries that have become the main sites of a U.S.-Russian tug-of-war for influence.

“NATO is a problem. It’s currently seen as, factually and practically, an anti-Russian organization,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin analyst and adviser.

The view is widely held here that the U.S. helped orchestrate the so-called “color revolutions” that ushered Western-leaning governments into power in both Kiev and Tbilisi. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin went so far as to blame the U.S. for Russia’s war with Georgia last August, telling CNN in a subsequent interview that “the suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of U.S. president.”

Indeed, U.S. bashing is a popular exercise in Moscow, where it serves as a particularly useful rhetorical device as the country plunges into its first recession in a decade.

Moscow has used the crisis to push for more influence in the region. It has begun touting the ruble as a regional reserve currency, urging neighbors to forgo the dollar. Its move to give up on 16 years of tough negotiations to join the World Trade Organization in favor of a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan is another example.

The question then becomes: Is the Obama administration content to see that happen?

Several Russian intellectuals have taken to the op-ed pages of global newspapers in recent weeks, calling for Obama to take a stand on diminishing human rights and freedoms inside the country.

The family of Pavel Klebnikov, the American editor of Russian Forbes who was gunned down in Moscow in 2004, has asked Obama to urge Medvedev and Putin to bring the killers to justice.

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