Russia moves up on next president's agenda

By Susan Cornwell - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two weeks ago, it seemed the most pressing foreign policy problem for the next occupant of the White House would be extricating the United States from Iraq, or deciding how many troops to move to Afghanistan.

Now a resurgent Russia, its tanks and troops humiliating U.S. ally Georgia, has propelled itself to the top of the next American president's agenda.

"It's not the relationship we would have wanted to inherit," Stephen Biegun, a foreign policy adviser to Republican candidate John McCain, said of ties with Russia.

"It's going to be in pretty bad shape for the next president of the United States," said Biegun, who was executive director of the National Security Council in President George W. Bush's first term.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's advisers expect him to inherit a weaker negotiating position with the Russians if he wins the November election.

"American leverage is much weaker after the invasion," said Michael McFaul, Obama's adviser on Russia and a political science professor at Stanford University.

Since the conflict in Georgia erupted on August 7-8, McCain and Obama have offered similar ideas on how Washington should respond, but their positions before the crisis offer clues about the strategy each would pursue in the Oval Office.

For supporters of the 71-year-old Republican, the invasion of Georgia is a vindication of McCain's years of warnings about the deterioration of democracy in Russia and Moscow's attempts to bully its neighbors.

For Obama's campaign, events in Georgia have produced a different kind of "I-told-you-so:" Look what can happen elsewhere while the United States is tied down with an unnecessary war in Iraq. The Illinois senator opposed that war from the start.

"There is a reason why they (the Bush administration) were not focused on Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia's separatist regions), because they were focused on Iraq," McFaul said.

ENERGIZED

While Bush said in 2001 that he had looked into Russian leader Vladimir Putin's eyes and got a "sense of his soul," McCain quipped in October that "When I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, I saw three letters: a K, a G and a B."

McCain a former Vietnam war prisoner of war and four-term Arizona senator who touts his national security credentials, appeared energized by the crisis. He wrote an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal headlined "We are all Georgians" and announced he would send two fellow senators, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, to the former Soviet republic.

In the wake of the Georgia violence, the Bush administration is considering something McCain has long urged: ousting authoritarian Russia from the Group of Eight nations. The other seven members are all western-style democracies.

Obama, 47, is part of a younger generation with a different Cold War experience. He was just one year old during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and far too young to serve in Vietnam.