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DAVOS, Switzerland Colin Powell's State Department, nibbling
its nails about anti-globalist protests, warned Americans about
traveling to the World Economic Forum in dangerous Davos, where
the elite meet to not compete. But intrepid opinion mongers trekked
into these Alps to learn how Chinese and Russian leaders react
to Bush administration plans for a missile defense.
Political paranoia in Beijing inclines its leaders to make a
deal. I asked Lee Kuan Yew why Beijing was so exercised over the
exercise movement. The senior minister of Singapore suggested
that when the fervor of an ideology dies, anomie sets in; gripped
by the lethargy of life without meaning, people turn to new movements
offering cohesion. Remembering the Boxer Rebellion, an imperfect
analogy, communism's leaders see the Falun Gong as a challenge
to authority. .Other Asian observers in Davos say that Beijing's
leaders are foolishly making martyrs out of the Falun followers,
much as the Romans did in seeking to suppress the nascent Christian
movement. .Feeling weakness within, Beijing wants a temporary
accommodation with the barbarians of the West. Hence a Chinese
position is being explored to agree to a level of U.S. missile
defense that would counter blackmail from rogue states but, in
return for inspection rights given to the U.S., would not be overly
effective against what China likes to think of as its own nuclear
deterrent.
In Russia a similarly happy outcome is possible, but the impetus
is different from China's. The Russian regime is supremely confident
of its political stability. .Vladimir Putin is building a corporate
state along Per?n Pinochet lines. The KGB, the army and a selection
of oligarchs rule through an elected president who maintains popularity
by tight control of the mass media. (The last opposition oligarch,
forced out of the country, is trying to sell his television network
to non-Russian media operators like Ted Turner, thought to be
"untouchable" by censors.)
This command combination will maintain power so long as the people
have bread. .Bread is now on Russian tables mainly because OPEC
has nearly tripled the price of energy, Russia's major export.
Saudi oilmen in Davos have passed the word that oil prices will
be kept up around $25 a barrel for at least a year. Add this to
the delayed effect of the pre-Putin ruble devaluation, which killed
imports and lately revived local industry, and Russians have a
sense of not so hard times.
The Chechen guerrilla war can never be won, but casualties are
down and international human rights pressure is weakening. Even
Russia's democratic reformers have taken to differentiating between
Chechen "bandits" and suffering Chechen people. .Those reformers
are dispirited because they represent less than a fifth of the
Russian electorate. The only two democratic leaders left standing,
Grigori Yavlinsky and Boris Nemtsov, are the best long-term hope
for a peaceful and prosperous nation, but they grind their teeth
as Mr. Putin visits a monument to the Stalinist Andropov in the
morning and honors the dissenter Sakharov in the afternoon. .As
the KGB-military-oligarch clique consolidates power behind Mr.
Putin, it faces a new U.S. president with firm ideas about a national
missile defense. Neither bluster about the ABM Treaty, nor visits
to Cuba or North Korea, nor arms deals with Iran will block the
new American policy. Mr. Putin will now have to deal with an inexorable
Bush decision, not a forlorn Clinton hope. .And his current stability
means that he will be able to negotiate major revision of the
ABM Treaty or its replacement with little internal dissent.
Russia's president can gain points with Americans by deploying
reformers, thereby jump-starting arms control, or he can string
out negotiations by demanding that the U.S. abandon NATO coverage
of the Baltics, which Washington won't buy. Thus do insecure leaders
in Beijing and too secure leaders in Moscow approach the changed
American defense policy. Expect posturing and jockeying, but their
policies must adjust to America's missile defense - the new fact
on the strategic ground.
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