#8
New York Times
December 16, 2001
The Morning After Dawns on Moscow
By PATRICK E. TYLER
WASHINGTON
UNTIL last week, Russia and its leader were on a roll. In this season of strategic realignment and war against terror, Russia once again became central to American foreign policy and it seemed that one of the big winners was its president, Vladimir V. Putin. Then came President Bush's announcement that the United States was pulling out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.
Now a question arises: In the most interesting game of diplomatic casino in decades, between the son of a former C.I.A. chief and a man who grew up in the K.G.B., who is getting the better of whom?
After the inferno of Sept. 11, no foreign power acted as swiftly and decisively as Russia to offer intelligence support, air rights and a free hand for United States military forces to fly into bases in Central Asia to conduct their war in Afghanistan.
And no one gained from that cooperation more than Mr. Putin. His exposure at Mr. Bush's side in four summit meetings stripped away much of the negative image he had in the West — as a former K.G.B. officer who had brutalized Chechnya and stifled Moscow's independent news media.
Now, with victory in sight in Afghanistan, President Bush's decision to pull the plug on the ABM treaty, which had come to preoccupy the affairs of the two big nuclear powers, raises the question whether Mr. Bush is moving on from his Russian dalliance.
If foreign policy was a song, said Toby T. Gati, the Russia specialist who was the State Department's intelligence chief in the Clinton administration, Mr. Bush's actions brought to mind the Paul Simon refrain, "Fifty ways to leave your lover." An aide to Mr. Powell had a similar thought, likening the question on the minds of Russian parliament members who recently met with Mr. Powell to another song: "Will you still love me tomorrow?"
Those Russian legislators did not know that the ABM announcement was coming, but they were already concerned that Mr. Putin's decision to align Russia squarely with the United States, to open the doors of Central Asia to American forces and to renew Russia's embrace of the NATO alliance could backfire — if it turned out that Mr. Bush was simply "playing" Mr. Putin to win support for American war aims.
That would be rich irony, since some of Mr. Bush's American critics have grumbled for many months that Mr. Putin has been using wiles learned in K.G.B. days to manipulate the American president.
It was, after all, Mr. Bush who said he had looked into Mr. Putin's soul and found a partner to be trusted. And now, in Afghanistan, America was fighting the war against terrorism that Mr. Putin wanted. Russia did not have to contribute a single soldier for the military operations. But it gained immensely from them, stanching the flow of heroin from Afghanistan and cutting the infiltration routes of Islamic militants who have been part of the Chechen rebellion.
For three months, Mr. Putin has cheered America from the sidelines, offering political support at the United Nations and opening for Washington a library of Russian intelligence dossiers on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terror network, which has plagued Russia and Central Asia for years.
"Putin now had the Americans doing his business in Afghanistan and he was fighting to the last American," Ms. Gati said.
When Kabul, the Afghan capital, fell last month, the Russian-backed Northern Alliance was the first to claim the city. Russia's guys had won. A dozen Russian air transports flew in to Kabul even as British and French troops — hoping to play a role in the security and humanitarian chores of liberation — were barred from entry by the Northern Alliance and by Gen. Tommy Franks, the American commander.
For Russia, it was clear that America did not want to stay in Central Asia and, therefore, Russia's role there — as a member of the coalition and a new American partner — would gain legitimacy even though the whole region's newly independent leaders had spent the last decade straining to keep Moscow at arm's length. Russia was back in the great game, garnering influence and a chance to dominate oil and gas extraction in the region because all roads there — especially pipeline routes — lead to Russia.
And there was more. Saudi Arabia's image has been suffering from the discovery that so many of its mosques were infested with bin Laden radicalism. Mr. Putin deftly suggested that Russia — with its abundant energy resources and pipeline network — could assume the role of a critical supplier of energy to the West if the Arabian peninsula was convulsed by instability.
But if that was a clear vision of how things looked last week, to many in Moscow it now feels like the morning after.
Mr. Putin's first reaction to the ABM decision was tempered, as Washington had hoped. No hysterical recriminations in public. The decision was a mistake, he said, but it "does not create a threat to the national security of the Russian federation."
Where does that leave Russia now in American foreign policy? Mr. Putin and the political establishment that has been supporting him would certainly like to know.
Ivo Daalder, a Brookings Institution specialist on Russia who served under President Clinton, wonders whether Russian- American relations "can endure and become stronger even with this big blot" on the ledger. Russian cooperation might slowly dry up again in critical areas, like securing Russian nuclear weapons and their radiological innards that many terrorists would like to get their hands on.
"I don't know the answer," Mr. Daalder said, "but I fear the worst."
The reason a number of specialists are thinking so darkly about the long-term impact of Mr. Bush's ABM decision is that the Russians see — as Americans can see — that there is an ideological struggle going on within the Bush administration and Russia policy is often the fulcrum of that debate. To some of Mr. Bush's advisers, it is a mistake to give Russia an exalted status; they think it just doesn't deserve it, given its decline and its geopolitical irrelevance in a globalized economy.
A month ago, Mr. Bush promised Mr. Putin at their meeting in Crawford, Tex., that the United States would welcome Russia into NATO's decision-making councils. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sought to remove from a press statement all references to "NATO at 20" — the new characterization of 19 NATO members sitting with Russia as an alliance of 20 nations.
Mr. Rumsfeld lost the battle, but his intervention delayed the debate over how to integrate Russia into the alliance. One thing the hard-liners wanted to insure was that Russia would not get to influence next year's round of NATO enlargement, in which as many as nine new nations will enter.
AT week's end, the White House statement welcoming Mr. Putin's acceptance of the ABM decision was conspicuously void of any reference to Russia's role in Western security and seemed to drive home the new reality that the strategic chips are falling exclusively in America's favor.
"Raw national interests dictate that other countries" — including Russia — "will continue to cooperate with us when it is in their interest to do so," Mr. Daalder pointed out. But in the long run, he said, Russia's disappointment over the ABM treaty could end "the presumption of future cooperation that has been so central to our relations with allies and friends around the world."
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