ADMINISTRATION

The Last Dance

President Bush and Vladimir Putin try to nail down some type of a legacy.

by Will Englund

Sat. Apr. 12, 2008


President Bush had barely settled into the White House when FBI agent Robert Hanssen was unmasked as a Russian spy of 22 years’ standing. The new chief executive, who had forcefully criticized Russian conduct in Chechnya during the 2000 campaign, decided to send a tough message to Moscow: Fifty Russian diplomats were expelled over the worst breach in American counterespionage in more than a generation.

That was seven years and a lot of ups and downs ago. The early clarity got smudged. After Bush met Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time (and peered into the ex-KGB man’s soul) in June 2001, just four months after Hanssen’s arrest, he decided that the U.S. and Russia could get along quite well, actually.

In 2002, the two even declared the Cold War over, which must have come as news to Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and Bush’s father, among others, given that the Soviet Union had met its demise 11 years earlier—Hanssen or no Hanssen. But Bush and Putin apparently sensed some continuing uncertainty, because they felt the need to reiterate their declaration last weekend in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where Bush had flown to see how much of a legacy the two leaders could nail down as both prepare to leave office.

Much to Moscow’s irritation, Russia has hardly been a major preoccupation for the Bush administration, and as a result it’s harder for the president to make much bilateral headway now. He and Putin have in fact been able to get along on some fronts over the years, cooperating on nuclear arms and Afghanistan, and even, to some extent, Iran.

But the proposed missile defense system, the “color” revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, NATO expansion, and Kosovo have driven deep wedges between Washington and Moscow, as have Russia’s sales of conventional arms to Iran. Russia’s retreat from democracy and its cavalier attitude toward political murder also pose difficulties. Moscow’s protracted war against Chechen separatists won it few friends, although American officials generally kept quiet. Iraq, from the Russian point of view, was the biggest obstacle of all. Last year, in Munich, Putin brought up the Third Reich in talking about American foreign policy.

But nothing in Russia is truly irrevocable. Earlier this week, the members of a Russian doomsday cult that believed credit cards to be the devil’s tools crawled out of the underground dugout where they had been living for the past five months, near the city of Penza. The dirt ceiling had started to cave in and, according to Reuters, they took this as a sign that the world wasn’t coming to an end this spring after all. No drama. Theirs was another page in a rich Russian tradition—that of staking out extreme positions and then backing off with a shrug just before catastrophe (most of the time). Maybe Sochi, which was a Russian idea, was Putin’s shrug.

The sky didn’t fall, in any case. The two presidents signed a “strategic framework declaration,” though Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a foreign-policy think tank in Washington, calls it a “Brezhnevite” document—unenforceable, unverifiable, and unexceptional.

Bush could have waited until Russia’s new president, Dmitri Medvedev, takes office in May. But Simes argues that Bush had to placate Putin to ensure that he stayed within bounds at the NATO meeting in Bucharest that preceded Sochi. On top of that, adds Vyacheslav Nikonov, president of the Polity Foundation, a political research and consulting organization in Moscow, Bush also had to prove to irritated Europeans that he could talk to the Russians even while pushing ahead with a missile defense system and with eventual NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, both of which the Russians vehemently oppose.

The administration puts the talks in a more positive light. Stephen Hadley, the president’s national security adviser, said on the way back from Sochi that even though the Russians still resist the missile defense system, they’re now willing to talk about it. “We have been trying to engage the alliance and Russia in missile defense now for about 15 years, and it has finally all come together,” he said. Putin made a point of emphasizing Russia’s opposition to the plan in the final press conference, but, Simes notes, the two sides at least showed they can manage serious disagreements.

Daniel Fried, the acting undersecretary of State for political affairs, agrees, after a fashion, with Nikonov. “Missile defense was in danger of becoming a wedge issue in U.S.-European relations,” he says. By securing NATO’s endorsement of missile defense in Bucharest and then meeting Putin in Sochi, Bush has assured that “the next administration will not inherit this as a wedge issue. It has been NATO-ized, and has a degree of Russian cooperation. Is it a Russian commitment? No. But there’s obvious progress.”

Putin had a couple of good days. He showcased the continuity of Russian leadership with the presence of Medvedev. He demonstrated to Russia and its neighbors that the American president would come and talk to him. And he enlisted Bush’s help in providing some branding for Sochi, where the Winter Olympics will be held in 2014. At a moment when protests are disrupting Olympic torch ceremonies on the road to Beijing, says Sarah Mendelson, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Putin gained Bush’s imprimatur for Sochi, which is in the North Caucasus, not far from the ruins of Chechnya.

Putin also scored at least a tactical victory at the NATO meeting when Germany stepped in to veto accession plans for Georgia and Ukraine. Chancellor Angela Merkel was not pleased that the Americans had left her no choice but to play that role, Simes said, even though some officials within the Bush administration question the advisability of committing NATO troops to the defense of a small nation in the Caucasus.

“We didn’t surprise them,” Fried says of the Germans. “Yeah, they may have been embarrassed. But they knew this.”

“Putin looks like the big winner this week,” Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford University and an adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, wrote in an e-mail from Kiev. “As one of my Ukrainian friends said, Russia de facto is already a NATO member as they have the power to veto members, while Ukraine has no such similar powers.”

When Bush meets Medvedev at the G-8 summit in Tokyo in July, the big question will have to do with the new Russian leader’s authority. Putin hand-picked his successor, and Medvedev was voted into office in March in an election that was arranged so he would have no serious opposition. He is to be inaugurated on May 7, and Putin is expected to be named prime minister the next day. If Putin is also elected leader of the United Russia Party at its May congress, as seems likely because the party is entirely his creature, it would put him in uncontested control of a majority in the Duma—a big enough majority that he could unseat Medvedev by impeachment if he chose to do so.

“This dramatically changes the dynamics,” Simes says. But, according to Fried, Putin declared in Sochi that he does not intend to usurp the president’s rightful duties. Medvedev, Fried says, “is going to be the president. We’ll deal with him as president.”

Medvedev’s powers, in theory at least, will be sweeping. He is being cast as a pro-Western “liberal,” and unlike Putin and many of those around him, Medvedev doesn’t have a background in the KGB. He is clearly stoking a certain amount of optimism on the American side—although Putin did, too, when he first came to office.

“Whenever there’s a new leader, we somehow think things are going to be better,” says Randall Scheunemann, a foreign-policy adviser to GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

McFaul says that the smart thing would be for the U.S. to treat Medvedev as a thoroughly legitimate leader, last month’s election notwithstanding, so as to afford him some standing apart from Putin.

Even now, Russia’s recent ferocious anti-American rhetoric has moderated considerably, perhaps in part because the elections are finally past. Some doubt that it presages a genuine warming trend, but Bush administration officials see progress.

They believe that Putin’s willingness to discuss the missile defense system stems from a headway-making visit to Moscow last month by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who talked about including transparency measures in the system as a way of building Russian confidence in U.S. intentions. Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the Russian army chief of staff, has been sent to the sideline, removing the most vociferous critic of the U.S. proposal—though what got him into trouble in Moscow was his resistance to the property reforms of the defense minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, who is a former furniture dealer and the son-in-law of outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov.

In the Sochi agreement, Bush and Putin committed their governments to work toward a replacement for the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which led to significant cuts in both sides’ nuclear arsenals by 2001, and which expires next year. It would be the first important nonproliferation agreement since the Moscow Treaty of 2002, which limits the number of deployed nuclear warheads.

In Tokyo, Medvedev will most likely take up the campaign for Russia’s admittance to the World Trade Organization. Bush reiterated his support for Russian membership in the document that came out of Sochi; he also promised to work with Congress toward getting Russia a permanent exemption from the trade restrictions of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which has been in force since 1974 and is a genuine irritant to the Russians—and which may, after all, suggest that the Cold War isn’t altogether over.

Kosovo and Serbia weren’t mentioned in the Sochi agreement, and they could spell trouble because of the way that things in the Balkans tend to get unpredictably out of hand. “What I worry about is the Russians giving the Serbs a blank check,” Fried says. “And if that sounds very 1914-ish, it’s meant to.”

Kosovo, Nikonov says, “is a real pain in the ass.” It holds the potential for a genuine confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, even though, in his view, it’s not a genuinely important issue. “It’s just stupid. Like Iraq.”

Bush may have to face the question of how to get Medvedev to focus on an administration that has only a few months left. Mendelson says that Putin, in 2000, showed very little interest in establishing a relationship with President Clinton. Some in Moscow believe that Bush is working a good-cop, bad-cop routine. McCain has said he wants to toss Russia out of the G-8, on the grounds that neither its economy nor its system of government is open and free. “That will make an interesting start,” Nikonov says. Moscow might think it could do better with a Democrat in the White House, except for a long tradition of wariness about Democrats feeling the need to prove their mettle. So, the thinking goes, maybe it makes more sense to deal with Bush for now.

The president can hope that’s the case. He has pledged his administration to the spread of freedom and democracy, and Mendelson is one of a chorus of American critics who say that no country has moved further from democracy than Russia under Putin. “He’s got almost no U.S.-Russia policy left,” she says of Bush. “It’s really been a disaster on the democracy and human-rights front.”

Mendelson argues that the United States must get away from the “personalized relationship” that American presidents keep trying to forge with their Russian counterparts. It’s a one-way street. As Simes puts it, “Bush was initially sentimental about Putin. Putin was never sentimental about Bush.”

Sometime next year, President Medvedev will meet his new American counterpart. Hope dies last, as the Russians like to say. Maybe they’ll begin by burying the Cold War.

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