He was doing so well there for a while. And then it all fell apart, almost as if he’d never done this sort of thing before.

Writing on PJM back in March ^[1], I issued a warning to the Republican Party: You have a golden opportunity to seize back the political initiative by focusing on foreign policy, and there is no better place to start than with neo-Soviet Russia. You can invoke the legacy of Ronald Reagan and become the voice of morality and democracy once again, and you can use that as a foundation to rebuild your power base.

Republicans did not take my advice, but it seemed over last weekend that President Obama was listening closely. Traveling to Moscow for his first summit with the Kremlin, he took a series of steps which could have stolen the thunder from the GOP  with a direct attack on the KGB-dominated regime of Vladimir Putin. These moves could be seen as beginning a process of depriving the Republicans of their bread-and-butter national security issues. Obama began the attack with an Associated Press interview ^[2] a few days before he was due to arrive in Moscow. In it, Obama sounded as if he were trying to step directly into Reagan’s shoes. He praised Russia’s figurehead “president” Dmitri Medvedev and castigated Putin in brutal fashion, saying: “I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new, and to the extent that we can provide him and the Russian people a clear sense that the U.S. is not seeking an antagonistic relationship but wants cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation, fighting terrorism, energy issues, that we’ll end up having a stronger partner overall in this process.” Seemingly, Obama was seeking to drive a wedge between the figurehead and the real ruler.  It was a thrilling moment for all those of us hoping to see democracy revived in Russia.

Obama’s Russia advisor Michael McFaul ^[3], a tough critic of the Putin regime with ties to the conservative Hoover Institute, implied that the “divide and conquer” strategy could go further still: Obama would in turn try to split Medvedev from Putin and then to split the people of Russia from Medevev, with a direct appeal that could include reaching out to human rights groups and opposition political figures. This was not just talk. Days later, it was announced that Obama had given an interview ^[4] to firebrand opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta (increasingly gaining recognition ^[5] and reputation in the West) and would meet with opposition political leaders Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov. Kasparov crowed ^[6] with delight, and Putin was surely stunned by the intensity and multi-front nature of the attack he suddenly faced, while state-sponsored propaganda outlet Russia Today immediately launched a smear attack ^[7] on him. Nemtsov, the author of a series of white papers ^[8] which my blog La Russophobe translated into English which Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute recently praised ^[9], is a former Kremlin insider and now an arch foe of the Putin regime who is building a considerable reputation ^[10] in the West.

Obama was blunt in speaking to Novaya Gazeta, a paper Putin reviles but which Medvedev has praised. He stated: “I agree with President Medvedev when he said that ‘freedom is better than the absence of freedom.’ I see no reason why strengthening democracy, human rights and the rule of law cannot be included as part of our ‘reset’ in relations. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

These are words that Republicans, as heirs to Reagan, should not have allowed Obama to say first. Before even arriving in Moscow, Obama had seemed to set a genuinely new foreign policy tone that offered the possibility of reestablishing American moral leadership. Where George Bush met with and honored ^[11] Putin’s homicidal goons in the White House — namely Chechnya war criminal General Vladimir Shamanov, who also led the Russian invasion and annexation of Abkhazia last August — Obama offered defiance of neo-Soviet aggression.

Obama and Medvedev met on Monday and announced a “framework agreement ^[12]” on cutting nuclear weapons. The agreement works overwhelmingly in America’s favor. The Russian economy is experiencing a massive recession bordering on a depression, and nuclear missiles are a far more cost-effective way to wage military confrontation than conventional armies, which in Russia are rife with corruption and abuse and which are preposterously expensive for the crude Russian economy (when they invaded Georgia, many Russian officers were reduced to communicating with each other via personal cell phone). Moving away from nuclear weapons means a massive tactical advantage for the far more powerful and professional U.S. conventional forces, unless of course Obama later supports drawing them down as well.

But then, like Napoleon in Moscow before him, Obama began suddenly retreating for no apparent reason. In predictable fashion, echoing the scatterbrained Jimmy Carter, he was not able to carry the whole thing off coherently. Obama was interviewed on Russian TV on the preceding Thursday, and it turned out when the program aired over the weekend that he had declined to repeat the attack on Putin that he had made to the Associated Press. Speaking with Novaya Gazeta, he refused to comment on the abusive retrial of opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was railroaded into prison several years ago just as he began making noises about running for president as a challenger to Putin.

On Tuesday, things got worse. Obama breakfasted with Putin ^[13] and, while not even able to remember whether Putin was “prime minister” or “president” for the second time during his visit (Obama once said he thought Austrians spoke Austrian), heaped praise on the KGB thug saying: “I’m aware of not only the extraordinary work that you’ve done on behalf of the Russian people in your previous role as prime minister — as president, but in your current role as prime minister.” Speaking anonymously, a “senior administration official” told the New York Times that Obama was retracting his prior statement about Putin’s cold-war mentality, stating: “I would say that he’s very convinced that the prime minister is a man of today and has got his eyes firmly on the future as well.”

Extraordinary work, Mr. President? Were you referring to the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, Stanislav Markelov, and a host of other opposition figures stretching back ^[14] to Galina Starovoitova and Putin’s first days in the Kremlin? Or were you referring to the obliteration of independent TV networks, opposition parties in parliament, and elected governors? Or did you mean the Russian economy’s implosion, with double-digit unemployment and inflation and three-quarters of the stock market’s value gone?

Maybe it was just because he was up past his bedtime. The New York Times ^[15] reported: “Mr. Obama has seemed tired here, several times fumbling the pronunciation of Mr. Medvedev’s name and Mr. Putin’s title. Beginning a speech here, he mistakenly said he first met his wife in school instead of at the law firm where they actually met. And he misstated his younger daughter’s age.” Ouch.

Obama had a chance to redeem himself with a speech to the New Economic School ^[16], a college funded by Westerners to teach Russians something real about business policy.  But the speech positively dripped with equivocation and weakness. Here’s how he chose to warn Russia not to invade Georgia for a second time this summer, as many worry Putin plans to do:

State sovereignty must be a cornerstone of international order. Just as all states should have the right to choose their leaders, states must have the right to borders that are secure, and to their own foreign policies. That is true for Russia, just as it is true for the United States. Any system that cedes those rights will lead to anarchy. That’s why we must apply this principle to all nations — and that includes nations like Georgia and Ukraine. America will never impose a security arrangement on another country. For any country to become a member of an organization like NATO, for example, a majority of its people must choose to; they must undertake reforms; they must be able to contribute to the Alliance’s mission. And let me be clear: NATO should be seeking collaboration with Russia, not confrontation.

An extraordinary amount of doubletalk, surmounted by the ominous use of the term “collaboration.” Not simply cooperation but collaboration, Mr. President? Are we going to collaborate with Russian if it moves soldiers back into Georgia, or into Ukraine, or launches another brutal cyber war against them or against Estonia? If Georgia has the “right to borders that are secure,” then doesn’t that mean Abkhazia and Ossetia must be returned from Russian annexation? Obama’s equivocation makes it very difficult to say.

Obama’s effort to address the Russian people directly via broadcast of the NES speech also came a cropper ^[17]. Neither of the two main government-operated national networks carried the speech ^[18], which was relegated instead to the Russian version of CNN, seen by precious few ordinary Russians. Obama’s press conference with Medvedev was also buried.

In the days before Obama arrived in Moscow, two more democracy activists lost their lives ^[19] as the result of physical attacks retaliating for their work, attacks that obviously originate in the Kremlin. On top of that, the Kremlin announced it was halting its investigation ^[20] into the killing of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov. Obama thus had a second chance to redeem himself when he sat down to lunch on Tuesday ^[21] with Kasparov and Nemtsov, but he flubbed that one too. It’s to his credit, of course, that he met with them at all, much less on the same day as he met with Putin himself, and the symbolism was important. But surely he could have offered at least ^[22] a public and unqualified statement of support for the notion of protecting their physical safety from the Kremlin’s relentless attacks. Instead, the meeting was perfunctory and discrete; Obama allowed each member of a rather large group of important dissidents to speak for just five minutes ^[23] each and made no public statement after the meeting ended.  The dissidents were happy enough, however, since they’d been totally ignored throughout the Bush administration while other right-wing extremists, like the lunatic Pat Buchanan and the feral Ron Paul, have openly advocated actual collaboration with Putin’s Russia (one wonders if Obama intended to ape them with his own remark to that effect).

Lev Gudkov of the Levada polling company summed it up ^[24], saying that all freedom-loving Russians wanted Obama to speak up about the current state of repression: “I’m not talking about pressuring Russia or promoting ideas. That wouldn’t be productive, and it’s not really possible. But to call a spade a spade, I think, would be useful, because the lack of standards has created this cynical atmosphere in Russia.” That didn’t happen. It looked like it might, but it never actually did. What is bad news for Russian democracy and American interests, however, is ironically good news for Republicans. As a result of Obama’s failures, it appears that the GOP still has time to get their act together, outflank him on Russia, and still seize the leadership position.

Obama has been hopelessly weak on the missile defense shield for Eastern Europe, and he has now mumbled his way through a summit meeting.

The ball is once again in the Republicans’ court, and they should not count on having any more such opportunities. So far, nothing has been heard from key Republican figures. It is time for the Republican leadership to show us what they are made of — or to step aside in favor of some new party that may be willing to do so.