Tillerson has secret plan for dealing with Russia - media

Tillerson has secret plan for dealing with Russia - media

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has taken it upon himself to guide the Trump administration’s thinking on dealing with Russia.

Tillerson has crafted a three-point framework for future US-Russia relations that takes a narrow view of what can be achieved between the former Cold War adversaries, but seeks a constructive working relationship with Putin on a limited set of issues, BuzzFeed News writes.

"Right now, US-Russia relations are in the gutter. We want to make sure it doesn’t flush into the sewer," a senior State Department official familiar with the framework said.

The first pillar of the framework, a US official said, is to convey to Moscow that aggressive actions against the United States are a losing proposition that will be counterproductive for both sides.

The second pillar is to engage on issues that are of strategic interest to the United States, including the long-running civil war in Syria, North Korea's rapidly developing nuclear weapons program, and cybersecurity and cyberespionage, a US official said. Tillerson wants to reverse Moscow’s recent boost in trade with North Korea following some modest success in getting China to ban imports of coal from the rogue nation. He is seeking better coordination with Russia in Syria against ISIS, although it is unclear how that might be achieved.

The third pillar of Tillerson’s framework emphasizes the importance of "strategic stability" with Russia, an ambiguous umbrella term that encompasses a range of long-term mutual geopolitical goals.

“It's a mixture of pushing back and also engaging on issues where there might be convergence,”a former US ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer said, after reviewing a framework summary.

Pifer said the framework is similar to a four-point strategy for dealing with Russia that the Obama administration created in 2015. A key difference from the Obama-era strategy is that the Tillerson framework does not expressly commit to building up the "resilience" of Russian neighbors. Obama’s strategy pledged to make Eastern and Central European countries more “resilient against Russian tactics” through various democracy-building programs and the development of NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force.

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