Jackson Vanik will pass – bipartisan support of congress and interest groups gives momentum

2nc at: russia evil

1. Their interpretation of Russia is overly simplistic – Russia is self interested – which means if we avoid antagonizing them we can cooperate, but if we actively harm their national security they’re forced to fight us over their sphere, that’s Bandow and Cohen.

Russia just wants to be a equal – treating them well causes balance

MATTHEWS 2007 (Owen, Newsweek International, July 23, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19761840/site/newsweek/page/0/)

Moscow also began a root-and-branch rethink of Russia's relationship to the United States. "Putin's illusions about America were shattered," says political scientist Vyacheslav Nikonov, a regular Kremlin adviser, recalling the policy review following the color revolutions. "No matter how much Russia supported the U.S., [Washington] still retained the same, essentially hostile, attitude." Since then, fears of Western encirclement have only increased as NATO makes overtures to Georgia and Ukraine and plans to station antimissile batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin's response to these threats has been radical: he wants no less than "to change the rules of the world," says Sergei Karaganov, a foreign-policy adviser to the Kremlin. "The world should be ready to deal with a strong Russia." In practice, Putin means not only to restore Russia's lost might, but also to make Russia the principal counterbalance to U.S. power on the world stage. In a 2005 speech, Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century," and fondly recalled the old "bipolar" world where two superpowers checked each other's ambitions. Luckily for Putin, the fortunes of the world economy are behind him. Sky-high energy prices have boosted Russia's economy by 40 percent in five years. A large chunk of the cash has gone into rebuilding the beleaguered Russian Army. Putin has pledged the military $189 billion over five years, commissioning a new generation of ICBMs specifically designed to evade a U.S. missile defense shield and ordering up six new carrier battle groups, which—if they are actually built according to plan—will make the Russian Navy even mightier than its Soviet predecessor within 20 years. More worrying for Washington, Putin has taken advantage of the surge in anti-Americanism that followed the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Like his Soviet predecessors, Putin has made friends with many of the world's malcontents, selling arms and missile systems to Venezuela, Syria and Iran, and offering nuclear reactors to Burma and Saudi Arabia. Before his visit to Kennebunkport last month, Putin hosted Bush-baiting Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in Moscow, where they signed a $3 billion arms deal. In February Putin toured the Middle East, scorning American efforts to democratize the region and making a play for the loyalty of U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Jordan. "Putin is a Soviet politician with a Soviet mind-set," says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a leading sociologist at Russia's Academy of Sciences. "Like the Soviets, he sees the world in terms of opposing camps. His plan is to march around the world with an anti-American flag in his hands." Does all this mean that Putin wants to start a new cold war? Not necessarily. Rather, says former deputy prime minister Irina Khakamada, Putin desperately wants to be treated as Bush's equal. "When I spoke to Putin about relations with the U.S., his eyes lit up," recalls Khakamada. "It's a very personal thing for him. He wants to prove that America should not treat us like simpletons." Equality, to Putin, means no more patronizing lectures from the West on Russia's history—or its dismal human-rights record. Russia, he believes, has nothing to be ashamed of. As he told a group of visiting teachers last month, foreigners "must not be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt on us—after all, we did not use nuclear weapons against a civilian population [like the United States in Nagasaki]." Equality means the right to squash Russia's enemies as fiercely as America has attacked its own—witness the recent liquidation by Russian assassins of former Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev who had been hiding out in Qatar. But above all, equality means respecting the Kremlin's voice. "It's about drawing a line in the sand," says a senior Western diplomat in Moscow not authorized to speak on the record. "It's about saying, 'We're back, you can't push us around anymore'." At base, then, the new Putin wants respect—and to stake out a Russian sphere of influence in which the West won't interfere, even if Moscow bullies its neighbors (as it did with Georgia last November over a spying row) or fixes their elections (as in Ukraine in 2004). For the time being, there's precious little the United States can do to check Russia's new imperial mood, since it needs Putin's continued support on the U.N. Security Council for sanctions on Iran.
Even if Russia opposes us – they won’t fight if we don’t interfere in their sphere

ELAND 2008 [Ivan, Nov, Sr. Fellow, Independent Inst., former Defense Analyst for Congressional Budget Office, The Independent Institute, http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2363]

But the bear is now coming out of a long hibernation a bit rejuvenated. Using increased petroleum revenues from the oil price spike, the Russians will hike defense spending 26 percent next year to about $50 billion—the highest level since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet as the oil price declines from this historic high, Russia will have fewer revenues to increase defense spending and rebuild its military. Even the $50 billion a year has to be put in perspective. The United States is spending about $700 billion per year on defense and starting from a much higher plain of capability. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military fell apart and was equivalent to that of a developing country. Even the traditionally hawkish U.S. military and defense leaders and analysts are not worried about Russia’s plans to buy modern arms, improve military living standards to attract better senior enlisted personnel, enhance training, and cut back the size of the bloated forces and officer corps. For example, Eugene B. Rumer of the U.S. National Defense University was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that Russian actions are “not a sign, really, of the Russian military being reborn, but more of a Russia being able to flex what relatively little muscle it has on the global scale, and to show that it actually matters.”[1]In addition, the Russian military is very corrupt—with an estimated 40 percent of the money for some weapons and pay for personnel being stolen or wasted. This makes the amount of real defense spending far below the nominal $50 billion per year. U.S. analysts say, however, that increased military spending would allow Russia to have more influence over nations in its near abroad and Eastern Europe. Of course, throughout history, small countries living in the shadow of larger powers have had to make political, diplomatic, and economic adjustments to suit the larger power. Increased Russian influence in this sphere, however, should not necessarily threaten the security of the faraway United States. It does only because the United States has defined its security as requiring intrusions into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. By expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the United States has guaranteed the security of these allied countries against a nuclear-armed power, in the worst case, by sacrificing its cities in a nuclear war. Providing this kind of guarantee for these non-strategic countries is not in the U.S. vital interest. Denying Russia the sphere of influence in nearby areas traditionally enjoyed by great powers (for example, the U.S. uses the Monroe Doctrine to police the Western Hemisphere) will only lead to unnecessary U.S.-Russian tension and possibly even cataclysmic war.
Moscow’s not inherently anti-west

Trenin 10 (Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, senior research fellow at the NATO,

Defense College in Rome and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow, “Russia’s Policy in the Middle East,” 2010) http://carnegieendowment.org/files/trenin_middle_east.pdf

Unlike the Soviet Union, and despite its own multi-polar rhetoric, Russia does not see itself locked in a conflict with the United States over regional dominance. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Moscow materially assisted the United States in defeating the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Since then, Moscow has concluded Status of Forces Agreements with NATO that regulate Western military transit across the Russian territory to Afghanistan. Russia calls for closer cooperation with the United States on the Afghan drugs issue: the quantity of smuggled drugs and the number of drug addicts in Russia have been growing exponentially since the fall of the Taliban. Moscow also would want the United States to recognize Russia’s primacy in Central Asia, and establish formal relations between NATO and the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. With the United States reluctant to extend such recognition, Moscow has joined Beijing in calling for the termination of U.S. military presence in Central Asia. Russia welcomed Uzbekistan’s 2005 decision to close the U.S. bases, and financially rewarded Kyrgyzstan in 2009 for a similar move.

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