It is difficult enough to try to figure out what President Bush’s real goals are during his current whirlwind trip to Europe. It is more than possible that the trip has more to do with asserting imperial dominion – or at least reminding people that the United States is still the world’s sole superpower – than with any of the issues that have been the subjects of carefully orchestrated joint news conferences. In this regard, it could be that the president’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most important stop.
If a goal of the president’s trip is to reassert a semblance of dominance over the man into whose soul President Bush once claimed to be able to see – which would be advertised as a new spirit of cooperation and mutual respect, of course – he visits with Mr. Putin at an especially vulnerable time for a Russian leader whose power seemed virtually indestructible just a year ago. It is still unclear whether Mr. Bush asserted dominance during private meetings; in public, they were careful to stick to safe "common concerns" like keeping weapons out of the hands of non-state terrorists.
In focusing, during earlier meetings with other European leaders, on the issue of backsliding on democracy rather than on other issues that might be of more genuine concern, like providing nuclear technology to Iran, Mr. Bush may have hit on a winning propaganda theme that offered leverage on other issues. Russia under Putin has hardly been a model of democratic or libertarian practice, although it’s questionable whether this constitutes backsliding or simply the termination of practices to which Russia was never especially committed in the first place.
A Tough Year
Putin’s vulnerability on issues revolving around democracy – in the expanded vision that in fact has more to do with the idea of a civil society than with democracy per se, including the rule of law, respect for individual rights, and transparency and predictability in governmental procedures – is by no means his only vulnerability as he meets with President Bush. But his decision to use attacks in Chechnya as justification for appointing regional governors, when in the past they had been elected, hardly suggests an instinctive democrat.
A year ago lingering violence in Chechnya seemed like Vladimir Putin’s only vulnerability. But in May the inability of Russian forces to control violence became apparent with the assassination of Russian-backed nominal Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov in a bombing on Russia’s Victory Day holiday.
A month later, Chechen fighters killed 90 people and seized numerous weapons in a raid on police facilities in a neighboring republic.
In August, two passenger planes were brought down by apparent suicide bombers, and in September came the bloody raid on a school in Beslan. That made Putin look ineffective and weak.
Putin’s prosecution of former Yukos president Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is still in jail, on back taxes and related charges, has undermined any lingering notion that Russia’s government was developing respect for the rule of law. Not coincidentally, it also wiped out virtually the last independent media voice in the country.
Putin lost further respect over his handling of the election in Ukraine, where he campaigned openly for incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych, the eventual loser, after a court decision and an election rerun.
And there’s Russia’s decision, after Putin assured everybody that Iran was not trying to acquire the capacity to make a weapon, to continue a program of transferring Russian nuclear technology to Iran. Not to mention his decision to send missiles to Syria just as almost everybody else has decided Syria must be to blame for the assassination of Lebanese former prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Weakness at Home
All these problems, magnified by an economic slowdown that has a great deal to do with a retreat of foreign capital sparked by Putin’s persecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have made Putin less secure in the affections of ordinary Russians than might have seemed possible a year ago, when he won reelection with 71 percent of the vote.
This economic malaise is fed to some extent by Putin’s apparent decision to retreat from free-market principles that had established at best a tenuous grip on Russia amid abuse by oligarchs and others. His dismantling of Yukos increases the power of the central government over the economy. His decision to embrace the Kyoto treaty on global warming – following intensive behind-the-scenes lobbying to maintain the previous Russian posture, that Kyoto would be bad for the Russian economy without doing anything very significant about global warming – offers only the most recent evidence that the few free-market advisers remaining in the Putin government have close to zero influence on Russian economic decisions.
All this feeds malaise in Russia. A lot of people besides the oligarchs – though the politically connected oligarchs did extract obscene monopoly rents – prospered or seemed to prosper during Russia’s brief flirtation with free-market principles. Few people – except perhaps retirees who believe in the promises the former communist regime could not have made good on anyway – desire a return to the old command-and-control Soviet days, despite the excesses of what is inaccurately viewed as a Russian excursion into pure capitalism. But attacks on successful businessmen who are also political opponents can seem like the first step on a slippery slope leading to a return to the worst aspects of the bad old days, compounded by the arrogance of the nouveau riche connected classes.
All in all, the Vladimir Putin President Bush met yesterday, despite his own apparent confidence in being able to reconnect with the president on a personal level and evoke understanding of the crises he faces, is a far cry from the man who seemed poised to dominate Russian politics for a generation or more. Perhaps it is political karma.
Bush’s Challenges
Vladimir Putin may be a weakened political figure, but President Bush faces some challenges during the meeting as well. He has made the promotion of democracy, at least in the incantatory sense, an increasingly central aspect of his political rhetoric. He has declared that his concern is not just for autocratic practices and institutions in Muslim-dominated countries, but wherever the rights of individuals are affected. From the perspective of an apostle of an ever expanding democratic world order – which is not necessarily a core interest of the United States but a goal Bush embraces aggressively – Russia under Putin virtually demands at least a firm tongue-lashing.
Did Bush, who still seems to think that his purported warm personal relationship with Vladimir Putin is a strategic advantage, deliver that tongue-lashing? Did he do so in a way that seems credible to the Europeans and others but still doesn’t alienate Russia in ways that prompt it to become a real rather than a potential threat to stability? Besides China, Russia is the only other country in the world that could conceivably – even though it seems unlikely and could become even more unlikely if the Russian economy continues to deteriorate – challenge the United States as a world hegemon. Putin may be reconsidering some recent interventions into the "near abroad" that Russia has generally dominated under czar and commissar alike, but he’s still acting and presumably thinking like someone who believes in at least a regional Russian imperial presence.
The U.S. National Security Strategy promulgated in 2002 has never been rescinded, and it calls for preventing any nation or group of nations from becoming a threat to U.S. dominance in virtually any part of the world. I suspect that Bush, however personally he might or might not have been involved in the preparation of that document, believes in that principle to the core of his being. From an imperial perspective, therefore, it is important to bring Russia to heel before she becomes such a threat, and deliver a message to potential upstarts that too much straying will not be permitted in the new world order.
The earlier minuet with Western European leaders carried fewer imperial implications. The leaders of Germany, Britain, and France know Bush is the man in the hegemonic power for the next four years, while all of them have to face voters in a year or less. It was in everybody’s interest to pretend that past is the past and now’s the time to work together on key issues for the future blah blah blah.
Bush’s position is to some extent weakened by his willingness to wink and nod during some of the more brutal aspects of the Russian campaign to subdue Chechnya. Will an American leader who tacitly assented in the murder and brutalization of thousands of Chechens, in a campaign that hasn’t even been successful, carry much credibility when he complains of persecuting one of the newly rich oligarchs and being insensitive about how regional governors are chosen?
Although he might not acknowledge it even tacitly to himself, Mr. Bush is also vulnerable because of the way the occupation of Iraq was botched, especially when it comes to practices at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. In imperial terms, the brutality may be less important than the incompetence, but neither reflects favorably on the U.S. regime Bush heads. Many Russians, including many with no fondness for Vladimir Putin, see the United States as operating on a double standard, willing to condone brutality when there’s the most tenuous connection to the vaunted War on Terror, but gagging at gnats when it’s convenient to do so.
It could take months to sort out the implications for how the two empires deal with one another. My first impression is that it’s something of a draw, that Bush, despite Putin’s vulnerabilities, did not get much of what he wanted and agreed to paper over disagreements to save face on both sides. But I’m certainly not privy to what went on in private.
