Good column from Hoagland on our new relationship with Russia, and how it pushes Europe into our camp. What a change 20 years can make. The old saw about no permanent friends or enemies seems to be true.
washingtonpost.com
U.S., Russia and Global Entente
By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, July 25, 2002; Page A21
America's war on terrorism and Russia's pursuit of economic engagement with the West reinforce each other and now dominate world politics. Only a decade after the end of the Cold War, American and Russian leaders move toward an era of global entente that will reduce the strategic influence of Europe, China and Japan on Washington and Moscow.
This chilling thought has begun to take form in Europe's major capitals, where it is seen as a deeper and even more unwieldy phenomenon than American unilateralism. Concern also surfaces in statements from Tokyo and Beijing. A world long fearful of the consequences of superpower nuclear war now frets about the effect of deepening cooperation between the White House and the Kremlin.
If Global Entente replaces the Cold War, one metaphor will survive the transition. It is still useful to see the Americans playing poker while the Russians play chess.
Vladimir Putin has become George W. Bush's hole card with the Europeans. Bush is Putin's queen on the chessboard, to be moved into a position of rescue or of domination at decisive moments. They play different games, but intersecting goals and interests put them on the same side of the table.
Case in point: Once-vocal opposition from Berlin, Paris and elsewhere to U.S. national missile defense -- and particularly to Bush's proposal to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- evaporated last autumn when Putin quietly accepted Washington's withdrawal from the 1972 accord.
"It is a mistake," he grumbled, sacrificing the treaty as a lost pawn in his longer-term game.
Without Putin and the Russians expressing righteous indignation, European leaders could no longer defend the arms control treaty as the cornerstone of strategic stability. And without the Europeans predicting doom, Bush's American critics were deprived of critical ammunition.
This pattern could come into play again in the diplomatic run-up to an American military strike against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein next winter. Diplomats recently in Moscow detect signs that Putin has already reached an informal, private understanding with Bush that Russia will not be an obstacle to American use of force -- once Bush has clearly and effectively made his case against Iraq to world opinion.
The Russian Foreign Ministry continues to argue otherwise as it frantically tries to rally Europeans and the Chinese to a common effort to save Moscow's ex-client in Baghdad. But the Russian president's pragmatism is almost certain to trump lingering Cold War loyalties once again.
In an unusual public keynote address at the Foreign Ministry on July 12, Putin challenged Russia's most senior diplomats to take up his view of U.S. cooperation as the key to Russian economic and political revival. Putin told his ambassadors that Russia's diplomacy is unequipped to respond to free markets, modern media or the threat of global terrorism -- and must be overhauled.
Open Russian acquiescence on Iraq will change the international environment, particularly in the U.N. Security Council. Putin's tentative commitment to Bush moves Russia close to current French and British positions.
French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have separately told Bush that they will support U.S. action after Washington has launched and completed a fresh, thorough effort to get Hussein to accept effective U.N. inspections for weapons of mass destruction, officials report. The assumption in London and Paris is that Hussein will risk war rather than accept intrusive inspections.
Russia's defection would isolate China as the only permanent member of the Security Council opposing any form of military action against Iraq. Beijing is unlikely to push its opposition very strongly in these circumstances. And Europeans unhappy with American policies see their room to maneuver diminishing.
"Since Sept. 11, Bush has treated Russia as a more reliable partner than his European allies," says one senior European official. "Russia is more eager, and more pliable, on security matters. For Washington, the Europeans are too strong to be treated like Russia, as a junior partner, but too weak to oppose American designs. We are bothersome in-betweens."
That view is speculative at this point. Russia's strategic leapfrogging of the Europeans is contingent on two developments. Putin's Foreign Ministry speech was an implicit admission that his policies do not yet have the support of his own national security elite or public. He must eventually secure that support. And its puny economy must expand rapidly if Russia is to have true weight in world affairs.
But the trend lines do bring together the instinctual Bush and the intellectual Putin. The American must avoid letting the short-term demands of each hand that he plays block what he will need to do in the future (letting Putin off the hook on Chechnya or ignoring Russia's arms sales to China.) And Putin cannot rely on the elegant inevitability of chess, as his communist predecessors did while their empire collapsed beneath them.
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