Will Anyone Ask McFaul About the Reset Before He Becomes Ambassador?

Apparently, the Senate is on the cusp of confirming Michael McFaul, whom President Obama has nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Russia. Never mind that this marks a departure from tradition. (In recent decades, American ambassadors in Moscow have been career foreign-service officers; McFaul is a political appointee.) The future ambassador has the background one would expect of America’s top diplomat in the former Soviet Union. He studied Russian and international relations at Stanford, he was a Rhodes Scholar, and he was the leading voice on Russia policy at the National Security Council. He was publicly lambasted by Vladimir Zhirinovsky (which is always a good thing) and advised President Boris Yeltsin on his 1996 campaign (which suggests he knows a thing or two about domestic politics in post-Soviet Russia).

But all that is mostly beside the point. What truly matters is what kind of job Mr. McFaul will do once he’s ensconced at Spaso House. His record at the NSC is not encouraging. 

As special assistant to the president, Mr. McFaul spearheaded the so-called reset in relations between the United States and Russia. We can quibble about how, exactly, the reset has furthered U.S. interests. The only thing that is really important here is Iran. Russia does not matter that much to the United States: We don’t buy a lot from the Russians; we don’t sell a lot to them; we no longer fear Russia’s nuclear missiles; we don’t even have a vociferous, ethnic-Russian constituency in the United States that might lobby for this or that initiative or law (like, say, the Armenian diaspora). The one big thing that Russia has to offer us is its influence in Tehran. The Kremlin, in keeping with Soviet tradition, prefers sleeping with the bottom-feeders of the world, which means it’s happy selling arms to Syria, conducting joint military exercises with Venezuela and building a nuclear reactor at Bushehr, in Iran. And this means the Russians have leverage, which means that, presumably, they could do something to halt Iran’s march toward a nuclear arsenal. 

So, America’s No. 1 job when it comes to Russia boils down to: Getting the Russians to act against Mr. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs — diplomatically or otherwise. (Voting for sanctions at the United Nations, which almost no one believes will prevent the Iranians from acquiring an atom bomb, doesn’t count.) So, evaluating America’s policy vis-a-vis Russia entails asking just two questions: What is Russia doing to stop Iran? And to what extent can we attribute that to the reset? 

There’s little evidence that Russia is doing much. (Iran appears to be charging ahead with its nuclear-weapons program, indicating that whatever Russia is doing isn’t helping.) And that means there’s little, if any, evidence that the reset was worth its price tag: alienating allies in central Europe, allowing Russia to expand its influence in the post-Soviet space and ignoring the Russian state’s ongoing consolidation of power.

This is what Mr. McFaul should have to answer for when the Senate takes up his nomination.