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A summit of diminished expectations

Vladimir Frolov

On July 1 and 2, Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet his American counterpart George W. Bush at the Bush family’s oceanfront summer retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine. The setting implies a relaxed atmosphere of boating and deep-sea fishing, which would be quite suitable for an informal discussion of global affairs. Of course, George H.W. Bush will drop by for a fireside chat with the two most powerful men in the world, one of whom is his eldest son. No specific agreements are scheduled to be unveiled at Kennebunkport. This is not accidental: the two Presidents will find little substantive to agree on. They are meeting to vent their grievances and mask, with a show of camaraderie, the gaping void of differences.

Mr. Bush invited President Putin to his family home in early June, when Moscow and Washington were engaged in a war of rhetoric that was doing considerable damage to the bilateral relationship. The intention was to change the tone and possibly make progress on a thorny issue or two — like Kosovo or U.S. missile defence in Eastern Europe.

Then, after the G8 meeting in Germany during which Mr. Putin made his surprise offer of shared use of the Russian ABM radar station in Azerbaijan, it seemed for a while that the tide had turned and that Russia and the United States were reverting to a more cooperative mode.

But the missile defence breakthrough appears to be fizzling out. Senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, have stated quite plainly that they want to use the Gabala radar as a complement to, not a substitute for, the systems planned for Poland and the Czech Republic. Moscow’s calculation that by offering Gabala it might derail entirely the construction of U.S. missile defences in Europe is not working. The statements from Russian officials reflect a growing realisation that things are not going according to plan. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again talked of Moscow’s “response at the strategic level” if U.S. missile defences were deployed in Europe. Another idea that Moscow appears to be pushing is to turn the proposed missile defence into a multilateral international project that would deal with missile threats if and when they emerge. Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces General Yury Baluyevsky and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak made it clear at their joint press conference last week that Russia did not see a missile threat from Iran as realistic and continued to hope that the use of the Gabala radar would dissuade Washington from deploying radar and interceptors in Europe. I am afraid this is not a viable basis for a strategic compromise at Kennebunkport.

The most that could be expected from the summit on missile defence is a decision to form a joint task force to discuss the issue. Moscow’s strategy then would be to stall the work of the task force until there is a change of government in Washington — which is still nearly 20 months away, while the U.S. strategy would be to rush the deployment in Europe as soon as possible, since the next U.S. administration may quash the missile defence project. After all, it is a multibillion-dollar system of dubious effectiveness. But if this happens, it will be for reasons largely unrelated to Russian actions.

On Kosovo, even less progress should be expected. For a while, there was some hope in a proposal by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to give the Serbs and Kosovo Albanians some more time to come to a negotiated divorce before the Ahtisaari plan comes into effect through a United Nations Security Council resolution. But then Russia publicly threatened to veto the draft Security Council resolution that incorporated the Sarkozy plan, since Moscow envisaged the Ahtisaari plan coming into effect if the two sides failed to reach an agreement in the specified period of time. On a visit to Albania after the G8 meeting, Mr. Bush wasted no time declaring that “independence [for Kosovo] is the goal.”

It is still possible that Mr. Putin will come to the U.S. with another surprise proposal, but this appears unlikely. To yield on Kosovo now, while the west has shown little effort to take Russia’s concerns into account, does not make sense. A much more preferable strategy for Mr. Putin would be “to agree to disagree,” just as he did on Iraq in 2003 when he told President Bush that the invasion was a mistake. Interestingly, Mr. Putin is trying to win some unusual allies with this position. He told Georgian President Mikhael Saaskashvili, who has long sought to regain control of his country’s breakaway regions, that it is inadmissible to forcefully cut out a piece of sovereign territory from a country and legitimise this land grab with a Security Council resolution. Mr. Saaskashvili found nothing to object to. It makes complete sense for Mr. Putin not to budge on Kosovo; almost everything he might do would work against him. Domestically, he cannot make a concession on Kosovo for fear of appearing weak and inconsistent, and internationally he knows that any compromise on Kosovo would be pocketed without a thank you note. He gains everything by waiting until the project goes awry.

There are, of course, important areas where U.S.-Russian cooperation continues to grow and progress is being made. Russia has been instrumental in bringing pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear programme. And Russia helped arrange the transfer of North Korean funds through a Russian bank, a key North Korean demand before it starts to roll back its nuclear programme. But the U.S.-Russia relationship is still heading south.

President Putin took another veiled swipe at the U.S. at a recent meeting with history teachers: “We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population,” he said. “We have not sprayed thousands of kilometres with chemicals, [or] dropped on a small country seven times more bombs than in all the Great Patriotic [War].” Mr. Putin’s point: don’t try to impose on us a guilt complex.

President Bush, inaugurating the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, compared Communism to Nazism, prompting a furious response from Moscow. Chairman of the House International Affairs Committee Tom Lantos (Democrat, California) compared Mr. Putin to Popeye, eating the spinach of oil revenues and seeing his muscles bulge big enough to threaten his neighbours. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried stated at a Senate hearing: “Russia’s current political situation is influenced by the lack of a free media or robust opposition that would critique and critically analyse the government’s performance. Russian citizens who want a wider view must make an extra effort to find such opinions in the remnants of the free press and local electronic media or on the Internet.”

Obviously, all of this is unhelpful. But such is the reality the two Presidents will have to deal with.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush are meeting in very different political circumstances. Mr. Bush is a highly unpopular President with approval ratings below 30 per cent in a country stuck in a war it cannot win. Mr. Putin is the unquestioned leader of a resurgent nation with personal approval ratings around 70 per cent. Mr. Bush will never again be President. Mr. Putin has that option should he so choose. He is in the process of setting up a system that will continue his policies long after he leaves office.

Since there is little practical business to discuss at Kennebunkport, Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush might just as well talk about their legacies. — RIA Novosti

(The writer is Director, National Laboratory for Foreign Policy, Moscow.)

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