#2
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
November 26, 2001
We can welcome this bear
Inviting Russia to help NATO plan the war on terror underscores how Sept. 11 has
forged new bonds between old enemies
By JOHN LLOYD
John Lloyd, a former editor of The New Statesman, was Moscow bureau chief for
the Financial Times from 1991 to 1996.
As the end of 2001 approaches, it becomes clearer that Sept. 11 is not the defining moment it was thought to be. Days in which the world changes are -- unless they are to be devalued by overuse -- rarities. Sept. 11, 2001, was momentous. But it is a page in a chapter already begun, not a new chapter in itself.
Nothing makes that clearer than NATO's proposal last week to offer Russia equal status with the alliance's permanent 19 members in developing and implementing certain policies. This confirms signs at last weekend's meeting between presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin of the instantly closer amity of two men who have found an enemy in common. But the lines of that amity were laid down in 1989, the emblematic year of the profound shift in world affairs caused by the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union itself. In the world-changing stakes, 1989 still has it.
That is in large part because the world's people are moved by, ruled by, and sometimes imprisoned by, ideas. And the idea that the world should be socialist rather than capitalist, should be organized by the rules of a people's democracy (the Communist Party) rather than those of liberal democracy, had more resonance than a religious radical's claims for vengeance.
Even were it true that a war of religions is under way (it is not), then the clash would not have the epic quality of the socialist-capitalist antitheses of the 20th century. That clash of great idea-systems is largely over.
Russia, in its Soviet clothes, was the country that most obviously lost the Cold War. The general idea, with which its post-Soviet leadership seemed to agree, was that it would happily realize it had wasted much of a century and take its place among the capitalist democracies: an honoured place as the "strategic partner" of the United States.
Instead, Russia plunged into deeper poverty than it had experienced in late Soviet times. It rapidly became obvious it would have a hard time remaining a regional, let alone a global, power. Russians, who had appeared to be all for the West in the late 1980s and early 1990s, now seemed to be sick of their new "friends," who were always nagging them to reform this and liberalize that while they didn't have two kopecks to rub together.
The pro-Western president, Boris Yeltsin, disappeared as anti-Western voices grew stronger. Vladimir Putin came in to power. Much of his working life had been dedicated to spying on, and destabilizing, the West. Who expected he'd be friendlier than Mr. Yeltsin?
He was not. He was simply less sentimental -- and less prey to Mr. Yeltsin's innocent wonder at the sheer profusion of consumer goods in the West, and simple desire to get the same for Russia.
In his memoirs, Mr. Yeltsin was at his most lyrical when he described being taken on a tour of an ordinary supermarket during a 1989 tour of the United States. He believed for some time that it had been built specially to impress him. Mr. Putin, a younger generation, spent some time in better-stocked East Germany, and had trips to the West. He is modern in a way in which neither Mr. Yeltsin nor Mikhail Gorbachev could be.
His reading of the balance of world power, long before Sept. 11, was that an alliance with China was not an option. Cultivation of the radical Middle Eastern states was even less attractive. Markets, technology, aid and cultural closeness were all to the West. That was hardly a decision -- more an inevitable outcome of the collapse of the socialist experiment. Mr. Yeltsin thought it could happen fast. Mr. Putin knows it happens over time -- but the only way to make it happen is to be part of the West's orbit.
For this strategy, Sept. 11 was a huge help. Once the expression of regrets was over, Mr. Putin could see one thing very clearly. America was shocked and angered: Its people were focused on Osama bin Laden in particular, and terrorism (especially radical Islamic terrorism) in general. The latter had been, in his eyes, Russia's largest security threat for years -- both in the would-be independent republic of Chechnya, where war has gone on for seven years, and in the Taliban-supported attempts to spread radical Islam in Central Asia, Russia's southern flank.
Suddenly, strategic alliance had a point: Both countries had the same enemy. Suddenly, there was something Russia could do for America: Give it bases in Central Asia from which to hunt down the enemy. Suddenly, there was something America could do for Russia: Hunt down that enemy and destroy it.
This is not like Stalin's Russia coming together with Churchill's Britain and Roosevelt's America to defeat fascism. After that -- as Churchill was among the first to see -- the Iron Curtain had to come down, for the ideological struggle at the root of the Cold War began once more. That struggle is over.
The promise is thus now real for Russia to become, fully, a part of Europe. A Canadian idea (claimed by Tony Blair) to bring Russia into NATO's political activities has just been put forward by NATO and cautiously welcomed by Russians (in any case, NATO is more of a political than a military alliance these days).
Quite separately, a trio of distinguished foreign affairs policy analysts, led by Harvard's Graham Allison, a former assistant secretary at the Pentagon, called for a "Global Alliance for Security" based on the G-8 (Russia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States), with a mission "to prevent and fight terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the infrastructure of international criminal activities and drug traffic that feed terrorist networks."
What Vladimir Putin has to gain is a reordered world of (at least) European security that includes his country. But he faces some domestic opposition. Many among his military still want to fight the Cold War; Genady Zyuganov, leader of the Communists (still the largest party), growled earlier this week that Mr. Putin was courting trouble with the Muslim world for the sake of a few baubles from the Americans. But Mr. Putin probably has enough popularity and political strength to ride the waves.
This time, when a Russian leader looks westward for alliance and support, we should realize we are being offered the chance to make the world safer, and to help the former Soviet Union enter into as much stability as the 21st century will offer. We were grudging when Mikhail Gorbachev came. Probably, we didn't believe what he said. Now, a cold, calculating KGB colonel comes and says: It's over. This time, believe him.
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