| Russia and the US will be doing everything possible
to ensure that the May
23-26 summit
between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin looks good and sounds
good. On the
Russian
side this will be a relatively easy task, since the government
controls the
national
television channels from which the great majority of Russians
will get their
information
about the meetings in Moscow and St Petersburg.
The difficult bit for Mr Putin will come when the speeches are
over, the
photo-opportunities have been exhausted and the honoured guest
has departed.
Will the
summit have done enough to reassure Mr Putin himself, and to persuade
the
sceptics
around him, that the boldly pro-western foreign policy he has
pursued since
September 11
is the right one for Russia?
For the moment the scepticism is muted. Mr Putin's foreign policy
has few
high-level
critics. He is a powerful and popular president and few people
want to go
against him
openly. More striking is the fact that his policy has so few high-level
enthusiasts -
particularly in the centrist, conservative and military constituencies
that
are usually
viewed as loyal to him. Grigory Yavlinsky, a leading liberal politician
and a
backer of
the new foreign policy, said recently that Mr Putin's pro-western
gestures
since
September 11 had been made "despite the position and opinion
of virtually all
the
presidential circle".
Such gestures have included Mr Putin's acceptance of US troops
in central Asia
and
Georgia, his closing of Russian military facilities in Cuba and
Vietnam and
his softer
line on US missile defence and Nato enlargement.
To conservative Russians steeped in the geopolitics and confrontational
logic
of
Communist times, these have been big, rash concessions. For this
school,
personified by
Leonid Ivashov, a retired general who has become one of Mr Putin's
few public
critics,
such concessions make no sense unless matched by clear gains by
Russia from
the west -
and perhaps not even then.
But for Mr Putin, the idea of trading favours with the US - the
"shopping list"
approach, as one adviser dismissively puts it - has become outdated.
Instead,
the
argument goes, the US and Russia now have a common interest in
a stable and
peaceful
world. So anything that helps them work together benefits everyone.
The unstated continuation of this same argument is that Russia
views US
unilateralism
as one of the biggest potential threats to strategic stability.
By drawing
closer to the
US, Mr Putin hopes to make the US more sensitive to Russian views
and
interests.
Given the virtues of this argument and the confidence Mr Putin
will doubtless
be
projecting this week, it may seem odd to suggest that even he
may have his
worries about
betting so heavily on the US. But there have been signs of doubt.
He apparently thought it too big a risk, for example, to put
any praise of the
US or
any lengthy defence of his new foreign policy into his annual
policy speech to
the
Russian parliament last month. Instead he insisted Russian policy
was "purely
pragmatic". Nor has he made any effort to change his defence
minister, Sergei
Ivanov, or
his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, even though both men have appeared
uncomfortable at
times with the speed at which policy has tilted westward. Mr Putin
may have no
better
replacements to hand. But, equally, he may be leaving his ministers
in place
in case he
does decide he has gone too far, too fast, and wants to shift
back to a more
assertive
or just a more ambiguous foreign policy.
Whatever conclusions Mr Putin himself draws from the coming summit,
it is
unlikely the
event will produce much to win over the sceptics. In concrete
terms, the main
formal
business will be the signing of an arms-control treaty, the main
points of
which were
announced last week. The treaty is being presented as a radical
reduction in
both sides'
nuclear arsenals, from 6,000-7,000 nuclear warheads to 1,700-2,200,
over 10
years. But
the US has insisted on the freedom to store surplus warheads rather
than to
destroy
them, making the treaty more about the deployment than the reduction
of
weapons.
With this comes the risk that Russia may also decide to store
warheads rather
than
destroy them, in stockpiles that will be worse maintained and
worse guarded
than its
deployed weapons. The US reputedly wants to offset this danger
by arranging
more funding
from Group of Seven countries for Russia to destroy weapons and
secure
stockpiles.
Drawing the US into an arms treaty at all may count as a gain
for Russia,
given the
early US preference for unilateral action. But the US seems to
have agreed to
a treaty
only after dictating most of its terms. "The Russians got
a treaty; we got
everything
else," says Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings
Institution
in
Washington.
In addition to the treaty, the summit is likely to bring a political
declaration in
which Mr Putin and Mr Bush will insist their countries have put
past mistrust
and enmity
behind them.
Missile defence is likely to be dealt with in this declaration.
According to
one
diplomatic source, the US hopes to overcome Russia's lingering
reservations
about its
national programme by promising to share information and to look
for ways of
working
jointly on some technology.
There will also be Russia's new, closer relationship with Nato
to mark. A
summit in
Rome on May 28 is due to approve the creation of a new council
on which Russia
and the
Nato countries will sit as equals to discuss a limited range of
security
issues.
On the economic front, the summit may be the occasion for Mr
Bush to indicate
that the
US will at last classify Russia as a "market economy".
This would give the
summit a
psychological boost and, once done, would give Russian exporters
slightly more
protection against US anti-dumping actions.
Mr Bush is also likely to repeat his support for Russia's entry
into the World
Trade
Organisation and to emphasise the west's keenness to buy oil and
gas from
Russia.
All of this should put a smile on Mr Putin's face while the summit
is under
way. But
the following morning it may not seem quite the watershed in relations
with
the US that
he needs.
For all the optimistic language about US-Russian political partnership,
specific
disagreements will remain. The biggest may be over relations with
Iran. The US
believes
Russia is helping Iran in nuclear weapons and ballistic missile
programmes.
Russia
denies this flatly - and denies that Iran even poses a threat
to the west. As
proliferation rises to the top of the US foreign policy agenda,
so does the
scope for a
big dispute with Russia over Iran.
It would greatly help Mr Putin's position if he could point to
some big
economic
benefits flowing quickly to Russia from closer ties with the west.
But whereas
Mr Bush
is likely to talk encouragingly about Russia's economic potential,
the US
still sees
foreign investment as something that Russia has to attract, not
something
governments
can provide. Declarations of intent from more big US companies
to invest in
Russia would
help here.
At worst, if Russia's pro-western foreign policy loses momentum
and if the
sceptics
quietly declare victory, that will not threaten Mr Putin's presidency
as such.
He is too
popular - and there is still a big consensus behind his domestic
policies.
The danger is more of a drift back to the way things often were
under Boris
Yeltsin, Mr
Putin's predecessor. The army, the security services, the atomic
energy
industry, the
arms exporters, the oil companies, the regional governments, even
the railways
pursued
whatever overseas dealings and adventures served their own short-term
interests. Russia
had not one foreign policy but many.
A return to that confusion would not end Mr Putin's presidency.
But it would
undermine
his - and Russia's - power.
See also:
the
origainal at http://news.ft.com
Russia-US
Relations
| 