Washington Post - 05.14.2001

 

Washington Post

The Stage is Set for a Bush-Putin Summit

By Jim Hoagland

The stiffing of Vladimir Putin by George W. Bush is about to end. The American president is preparing to sit down with the Russian leader and begin a dialogue on the future of nuclear weapons and arms control.

A sense filters out of the White House that four months of openly rebuffing Putin's eager appeals for a one-on-one meeting accomplished a purpose: The stage is set for a brief Russian-American summit that will essentially be conducted on Bush's terms.

Bush aims at a foreign policy goal that eluded Bill Clinton's best efforts -- to win Russian acquiescence in overriding treaty limits to the development of a defensive system that would destroy incoming ballistic missiles.

The president appears to have settled on a complex, indirect strategy that will avoid both an outright renunciation of existing arms control agreements and a picking up of Clinton's efforts to negotiate treaty amendments with Moscow.

Instead, Bush will seek "informal agreements" with the Russians on ways to move out of the Cold War's nuclear posture and rationales, aides indicate. That effort will be Topic A at the Bush-Putin summit, which could come as early as mid-June, when Bush pays his first official visit to Europe. Bush will visit Spain, NATO headquarters in Belgium, Sweden and Poland.

"It is now a matter of calendars," not of calculation or reluctance, a senior U.S. official says. Agreement in principle on an early meeting was reached during a recent visit to the White House by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin, who saw Vice President Cheney.

Bush's May 1 statement on nuclear strategy, which underlined his determination to build a comprehensive missile defense for the United States, its allies and friends, elicited an essentially positive public response from Putin -- leaving both Bush's domestic critics and European allies who have been critical of missile defense dangling from a limb.

Briefing European diplomats in Brussels last week, a senior Bush official made clear that the time has arrived for a U-turn in Russian-American relations, which have been marked by spy expulsions and harsh rhetoric on both sides.

"Engaging" Russia in a search for mutual understandings on post-Cold War nuclear strategy is a U.S. priority now, Steve Hadley reportedly told NATO ambassadors in Brussels last week. Formally deciding the fate of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and of arms control in general is "secondary," Bush's deputy national security adviser added, according to cables reporting the meeting.

Bush diplomacy -- under assault on a number of fronts recently as an oxymoron -- has actually been effective in pursuing a new framework for relations with a diminished but still important Russia, and in defusing European concerns about his clear withdrawal of support for the ABM Treaty.

After long discussion with aides, the president appears to have decided to avoid at least for now the furor that a formal renunciation of the 1972 strategic document would bring.

Instead, he will walk away from it a step at a time. As research and development brushes up against the treaty's limitations, Putin will be forced into a trifecta of choices: cooperate in a quiet mutual fade-away; noisily complain but stop short of a formal challenge; or invalidate the accord on the grounds of U.S. violations.

There is a precedent for the complain-but-tolerate option: In the Reagan administration, U.S. officials argued with themselves and Moscow over whether the building of a Soviet battle management radar at Krasnoyarsk was a treaty violation. Washington made no formal challenge. In 1989, as the Cold War ended, the Russians admitted that the radar had in fact been a violation of the treaty.

Achieving a reverse Krasnoyarsk -- in which U.S. steps outside treaty limits would be tolerated by Moscow -- would be far more difficult for Bush than it was for Leonid Brezhnev. For one thing, legal experts and arms control advocates at Colin Powell's State Department might well voice public objections, even if the Russians did not.

Bush will also have to overcome Pentagon resistance to shifting resources from the uniformed services' needs. He has avoided immediate battle with the Europeans, the Kremlin and the Joint Chiefs of Staff by staying vague and somewhat stealthy on his plans.

"You want to keep the possibility alive that nobody has to walk out of the treaty, and that you can actually use it to move to a new relationship with Russia," says one Bush adviser.

Clinton saw it the other way: He sought to use the Russian relationship to save the ABM Treaty and preserve the arms control framework of the Cold War. But time ran out on that approach. In one of his last meetings in the Oval Office, a plaintive Clinton asked two senior aides: "Why wouldn't they make that deal with me?"

Putin preferred to wait and see what he could work out with a new administration. After four frustrating months of delay, he will soon have his chance.