Financial Times - 03.20.2002

 

The Financial Times

Soft Stance On Russia Keeps Options Open For The U.S.

By Stephen Fidler

Washington rounded on Paris with ferocity after the failure of efforts to secure a United Nations resolution to back the use of force in Iraq. Yet Russian condemnation of U.S.-led military action has been almost as strong, and continued yesterday at the UN. So why has Washington gone easy on Moscow?

At one level the answer is simple. "It was the French who stuck their necks out. They clearly went out of their way to lead the opposition. The Russians had no such role," says a senior U.S. official. 

Unlike the French, Russian officials did not travel the world drumming up opposition to the U.S.. And the U.S. remains convinced that without the cover provided by Paris, Moscow would not have vetoed the resolution. 

Russia has opposed military action in part because it was unpopular among Russians. But it also felt its interests would be complicated by an invasion, not least because it feared the repercussions among Russian Muslims, particularly in Chechnya.

Something deeper was going on too, says Wayne Merry, a former U.S. diplomat in Moscow: a preoccupation with the implications of a more aggressive American foreign policy.

"There was a misperception. People in Washington thought the issue was Iraq but for most governments, including Russia, the issue was the U.S.," he said.

Those concerns could have been overcome. That they were not was because of weak U.S. diplomacy and the sense in Moscow that Mr. Putin has not got more out of his much criticized tilt towards Washington than the dubious pleasure of a trip to the Bush ranch in Texas.

Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a rightwing think-tank, says Moscow hoped that the U.S. would treat it in a similar way to the UK, by giving it, for example, a role in drafting a second resolution on Iraq.

Beyond that, he says, France courted Russia far more assiduously than did the U.S.. There were daily telephone calls between the two foreign ministers and regular conversations between presidents Chirac and Putin.

The Russians have also felt Mr. Bush's warm rhetoric towards Mr. Putin during the past two years has not yielded much tangible benefit. The two leaders get on well - but the relationship has developed no depth. The Jackson-Vanik amendment threatening Russia with U.S. sanctions for not allowing free emigration, though regularly waived, has not been repealed as promised.

Among other things, Moscow has also felt ill-served in trade disputes about poultry and steel. 

Mr. Simes says the Russians offered to fly Mr. Putin to Washington, where he might have disagreed with aspects of U.S. policy but have firmly placed the onus on Saddam Hussein to resolve the crisis.

That did not happen - but neither did any senior U.S. official visit Moscow. Instead, Igor Ivanov, foreign minister, stood on a podium in Paris with his French and German opposite numbers - a chance to demonstrate how Russia's place in the world really has changed - and agreed with their anti-war stance.

Yet Mr. Merry, now with the American Foreign Policy Council, draws a strong and favourable contrast between Mr. Putin's handling of this dispute and the way Boris Yeltsin dealt with the Kosovo crisis in 1999.

The Yeltsin approach - which culminated in an infamous race between Russian and NATO troops to the airfield at Pristina - still hankered after superpower status, but Mr. Putin's, he argues, is more realistic.

In Saturday's Washington Post, Mr. Ivanov argued that U.S. policy on Iraq was a mistake. But he also said this: "We have irreversibly abandoned the cold war formula: the worse things are for the U.S., the better for us."

Repairing some of the crockery broken in the fight at the UN makes a lot of sense for Washington too, says Mr. Simes. Even the world's only superpower will find it tough to manage its foreign policy interests against the permanent and combined antagonism of Russia, China, France and Germany.