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Trump facing hard job for better Russia ties: Analyst

Friday, 20 January 2017 11:31 AM [ Last Update: Friday, 20 January 2017 11:33 AM ]

This combination of file photos shows US President Barack Obama (L) speaking at the White House in Washington, DC on December 16, 2016 and Vladimir Putin speaking in Moscow on December 23, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

The Russian Foreign Ministry has slammed what it described as a master-slave approach by outgoing US President Barack Obama’s administration towards Moscow. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday that President Obama had promised respectful cooperation with Russia in 2009 but his government adopted "ridiculous and shameful attitude" toward Moscow.

James Jatras, a former US Senate foreign policy analyst from Washington, says American authorities have thought they were entitled to giving orders and the Russians must follow, because they had no real understanding of mutual respect.

“They (outgoing US authorities) seem to think the only possible relationship with Russia is the one we (Americans) had under [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin in the 1990s, where we gave orders and then they followed,” Jatras told Press TV on Thursday night.

Criticizing the US foreign policy when it came to relations with Russia, he said, “Ridicule and shame are really the appropriate terms to apply to the Obama administration.”

America and Russia have had differences on a host of regional and international issues such as crises in Ukraine, Syria and Yemen as well as cap on their nuclear capabilities.

The US president did not bother himself to rethink that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin opposed American policy in Syria not because he just wanted to oppose the United States “but because Russia did not want to see a terrorist state created in Syria,” the analyst argued.

He said “mutual self-respect and self-interest” are the key to mending ties between the United States and Russia.

US President-elect Donald Trump who has called for better relations between the Kremlin and the White House is taking office.

Jatras said if Trump really wants to get along with the Russian government, “he will be a much stronger president than Barack Obama has been.”

Trump has a hard job of facing down opponents of better ties with Russia in both the Republican and the Democratic parties, but the process depends on his success in “creating jobs and making America great again,” he added.

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