America turns the clock back to Cold War returns as Bush gets tough
Barely 60 days after taking office,
America's President George W.
Bush is engaged in a spying row
with the Russians and is upsetting
the Chinese with his military plans
Special report: George Bush's
America
Special report: Russia
Ed Vulliamy in New York
Sunday March 25, 2001
The Observer
At dawn on a small wooden bridge in New
Mexico, Klaus Fuchs once passed the
blueprint for the H-bomb to Harry Gold, his
handler from President Vladimir Putin's
old employer, the KGB.
And it was on a small wooden bridge in
Virginia that Robert Hanssen, Russia's
recently arrested spy within the FBI,
would meet his man from Moscow's
secret services.
But this weekend the bridges between
Washington and Moscow - and with
Beijing too - are collapsing as George W.
Bush rattles the sabres of a new Cold
War across Europe and the Pacific.
In an echo from another time, four senior
Russian envoys will leave Washington
during the coming days, with a further 46
to follow before the muggy summer
descends on the Potomac. And in strict
accordance with the rules of Cold War,
Russia's retort is swift and symmetrical:
four senior Americans to leave
imminently, with 46 to follow after the ice
thaws on the Moskva.
And no sooner had the order for them to
leave been handed to Russian
Ambassador Yuri Ashakov than US
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took
another bellicose stride across the
Pacific, towards a new arms race with
China - giving Bush a 90-minute lecture on
his plans to overhaul America's arsenal to
face the new Chinese threat.
Based on the premise that the United
States' Far Eastern flank is the most
likely theatre for military operations,
Rumsfeld said that he wants to replace
dependence on aircraft carriers and
short-range fighters with long-range
bombers capable of flying across the
world's widest sea to fight and win a
nuclear war.
The Rumsfeld briefing coincides with a
White House pledge that the US will push
ahead with arms sales to Taiwan. The
Chinese have thus far responded with
cryptic remarks about continued
friendship, but the formality was shattered
in an interview with President Jiang Zemin
in the Washington Post urging the US to
halt the sale, which would cause his own
country to accelerate its military
modernisation programme. 'The more
weapons you sell,' he said, 'the more we
will prepare ourselves in terms of national
defence.'
The tit-for-tat with Russia and belligerent
glare towards China are partial responses
to a question that America thought might
be answered at the end of the Bush
administration's first 100 days, but to
which the first 60 have already articulately
replied: 'Will the real George Bush please
stand up?'
For all the talk about a 'gridlock' that
might follow his contested election victory,
Bush has embarked on a brazen agenda
of conservative policies at home and
combative international gestures. On the
domestic front, he has ridden roughshod
over his opponents on tax cuts, the
environment and - late on Friday night -
organised labour, with a new Executive
Order overriding eight years of work safety
legislation compiled by the Clinton
administration.
Overseas, Bush has ignored European
allies, bombed Iraq and spurned the North
Koreans and Palestinians. But the most
serious of these struts onto the
international stage, about which he
reportedly knew nothing until the final
days of his campaign, are the gauntlets
hurled last week into the faces of Russia
and China.
Mutual expulsions are a carefully
choreographed routine. A diplomatic
persona non grata is rarely, if ever,
punished - they are 'caught' and sent
packing while governments go after their
own kind. But these are the largest such
actions taken since the espionage
'bloodbath' of 1986 and the most
aggressive since the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
US counter-intelligence claims that
post-Soviet Russia has mobilised a
determined build-up of espionage in the
US out of proportion to American
intelligence activity. 'They've flooded the
zone,' said David Major, a former FBI
counter-intelligence official as part of a PR
blitz, 'and as long as they continue
flooding the zone it puts a strain on
American counter-intelligence.' Other
officials say that Putin has strengthened
his military intelligence web in the USA.
But there is manipulation in these alerts.
During Cold War days, a communication
line ran between the KGB and CIA, 'the
Gavrilov Channel', to maintain checks and
balances on numbers operating on each
side.
Last week the Washington station chief of
the post-communist SVR service was
reportedly left intact - a signal that Bush
accepts the Gavrilov principle and that the
US and Russia need each other's
intelligence services in modern combat
against drugs, fraud and organised crime.
Although CIA director George Tenet
supported the expulsions, the agency
itself was opposed, said one source,
knowing that they would provoke
retaliation and reduce CIA numbers in
Russia.
To real experts, the core issue is not the
Boy's Own melodrama of espionage but
the far more perilous monitoring of
Russia's isolated but vast nuclear arsenal
and American commitment to the bilateral
co-operation programme that destroys
warheads and stops proliferation. A recent
element in the degeneration of
Russo-American relations was Rumsfeld's
view of Russia as a 'nation of proliferators',
and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz's that
'these people will do anything for money' -
sneers which run contrary to most experts
agreeing that miraculously few 'loose
nukes' have found illegal passage out of
Russia.
Among the leading observers of Russia is
Susan Eisenhower, director of the
Eisenhower Foundation and
granddaughter of Ike - general, President
and founder of Nato. Interviewed by The
Observer on Friday, Eisenhower
questioned the validity of the Hanssen
panic and warned: 'The irony is that the
US is in a more vulnerable position than
the Russians.
'We have hundreds of professional
personnel all over the most remote and
sensitive nuclear sites in Russia under the
co-operation treaties. The big issue is
access to sensitive sites, and this is
contingent on the good grace of the
Russian government.
'But now,' she continued, 'the Russians
have the absolute right to say at any time
"for security reasons we can't continue to
allow you access to our most sensitive
sites".' Eisenhower added: 'There are a
number of ways to handle this situation,
and one has to wonder why the
administration decided to do so this way.
What else did they expect the Russians
to do? It probably means that the
administration is not as sympathetic to
the monitoring co-operation programme as
was the case in the past, and that is very
serious indeed.
'The Russians are very prideful of the fact
that there has been so little proliferation,
and it is dangerous for the US to
undermine that.'
Bush is seen as using the Hanssen case
as a pretext to reduce Russia's
intelligence presence in America, but
experts regard the rationale as political.
The expulsions are the latest in a rapid
series of antagonisms, including the
missile defence screen, threats to cease
aid and a meeting last week with Chechen
'ambassador' to Washington Ilyas
Akhmatov which - whatever the merits of
the case - would be equivalent through
British eyes to meeting the IRA. Putin has
thrown his own challenges: arms trading
with Iran, repression in Chechnya and
tacit backing for the tyrannies in Belarus
and Ukraine.
The engine behind Bush's foreign policy,
National Security Adviser CONDOLEEZA
RICE, HAS BEEN SPOILING FOR A FIGHT WITH
MOSCOW FOR YEARS---------- - long before she
bewitched Bush with her ability to talk
baseball and had a view of Russia that
applied whether the country was
communist or not.
RICE is a lifelong hawk who switched from
the Democrats to Republicans because of
Jimmy Carter's 'feeble' response to the
invasion of Afghanistan, has long insisted
that Russia 'modify' the bedrock ABM
treaty of 1972 and accused Bill Clinton of
'romanticism' in his relations. She
opposed détente and aid programmes by
the World Bank and IMF, and her finest
hour came when these were discredited
by corruption scandals.
But RICE's last experience in office was
during the final years of the communist
regime and, says one former Russian
desk official in the Clinton State
Department: 'Condie is not a Russian
expert, she's a good Soviet-ologist, which
is not the same thing.'
Russia is not the only country facing
Bush's new hard line. Briefing The
Observer two weeks ago, Bush's
spokesman Ari Fleischer made it clear
that European objections to the missile
defence screen would make no difference
to the ultimate US objectives; negotiations
with North Korea have been frozen. And
last week the US dealt a triple blow to the
world's fastest-emerging power, China.
As RUMSFELD submitted his defence
proposals, Bush made it clear that he will
push ahead with selling the Aegis missile
radar system to Taiwan - enabling the
island to steal a military edge over the
mainland - which China stresses will
rupture relations between Beijing and
Washington. This he did while shaking
hands with Chinese Deputy Premier Qian
Qichen, who warned against the Taiwan
sale and was told by his host that the
warmth of the Clinton era would be
replaced by a policy that was 'respectful'
but 'firm'.
Rumsfeld also briefed senior Pentagon
officers when their chief of staff, General
Henry Shelton, was away - reflecting the
domination of military affairs by White
House political thinking and exclusion of
senior military from policy-making.
Rumsfeld told them that operating across
the Pacific will require an additional
emphasis on 'long-range power projection'
- which means dispatching bombers and
firepower across thousands of miles.
Strategically, the shift requires building a
new generation of long-range bombers
which may or may not be an unmanned
enhancement of the B-52 warhorse that
the US has been making since 1954 and
is commissioned until 2020.
Politically, it means infuriating and
alarming the Chinese. The Beijing
government's greeting to Washington
upon Bush's inauguration stressed that
'we don't like your national missile
defence, but we are willing to talk about it.
We believe our differences must be
subordinate to our common interests - but
with one exception. If you take the crucial
step towards extending missile defence to
Taiwan - that is a step too far'.
Although Rumsfeld's proposals do not
specifically extend the screen to cover
Taiwan, it does swing America's military
posture from the European theatre
arraigned against Russia to a more
aggressive readiness to fight a war across
the Pacific, as Russia apparently
weakens and China is perceived to be
strengthening its nuclear arsenal.
Between the two, the United States is
closer to battle stations and more isolated
than any time since Bush's father, George
H, hailed the dawn of the 'New World
Order' a decade ago.
• Additional reporting by Amelia
Gentleman in Moscow and by John
Gittings in Shanghai
guardian.co.uk |
