Washington Post - 06.19.2001

 

 

The Washington Post

Bush Still 'Positive' on Putin Meeting
Democrats, Others Concerned About President's New Trust in Russian Leader

By Steven Mufson and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers

President Bush telephoned three European leaders yesterday to reinforce a positive view of his talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as foreign policy experts questioned whether the substance of U.S.-Russia relations would live up to the gushing rhetoric that followed Saturday's summit.

Bush called British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, then said he would "follow up and put an action plan in place to take advantage of the cooperation that I'm confident can exist."

Bush reiterated to reporters that, "The conversation with President Putin was positive. . . . It indicated to me that we can have a very frank and honest relationship, that there are areas where we can work together."

But many Democrats and some Republicans expressed concern about the summit. Democrats on Capitol Hill particularly took issue with Bush's declaration that after 90 minutes he had decided Putin was "trustworthy."

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press" that he did not trust the former KGB officer. Yesterday, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) told reporters and editors at The Washington Post that he was baffled by Bush's statement that he had seen Putin's soul. "He decided on the spot that he would trust him? I don't know," Edwards said.

"It may be a little premature for that kind of judgment after a 90-minute meeting," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser. Bush was "overdoing the personal gushiness, which had an amazingly patronizing element," he added.

Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, dismissed suggestions that Bush's public effusiveness reflected any naiveté about the Russian leader or the differences between the two countries on issues such as missile defense, NATO enlargement, fighting in Chechnya, nuclear proliferation and Russian press freedom.

"This was not a meeting in which anybody pulled any punches," Rice said in a telephone interview last night. "It wasn't one of those cases of both trying to make the other feel good by agreeing where they didn't. . . .

"What the president did was establish a personal relationship, even a rapport, from which they can now try to work on the agenda before them," she added. "But this is not a president who is at all uncertain about what he's trying to achieve with the Russians."

Still, some foreign policy experts took a skeptical view.

"He's taken a gamble that this personal relationship will pay off in terms of tangible things later on," said Michael McFaul, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

McFaul applauded Bush's speech in Warsaw the day before the summit, in which the president called for expanding NATO to include the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. But he said he worried that Bush had blunted his own message about the importance of building democracy in Russia by being "too cozy with Putin."

"It's obviously a good thing that they met, that they got along well. . . . If they had gotten along badly that would have been a really major drama with consequences," said Richard C. Holbrooke, ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration. "But the meeting had no substance to it. Since the meeting was bookended by actions by Putin in Shanghai and Belgrade that are hostile to American policy, the question must be asked, 'Where's the beef?' "

Shortly before seeing Bush, Putin met the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in Shanghai, where they condemned U.S. plans for missile defense. On Sunday, immediately after meeting Bush, Putin made a stop in Belgrade, where he sharply criticized NATO's performance in the Balkans.

In criticizing Bush, some Democrats noted that Republicans had repeatedly attacked President Clinton for relying too heavily on his personal relationship with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

But a senior Bush administration official disputed the comparison. "The problem in the [Clinton administration] was that Boris Yeltsin became synonymous with Russian reform," the senior official said. "When it became absolutely clear that Boris Yeltsin was not committed to reform and that things were going badly for reform, the personal relationship got in the way of speaking plainly about what was going on in Russia. That is not what happened with Putin."

Bush's vow to push NATO expansion blunted criticism he might otherwise have drawn from conservative Republicans wary of Russia's intentions.

William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said conservatives were pleased with Bush's overall performance and "willing to overlook the slight rhetorical excess" about Putin. He said "Reaganite conservatives" felt vindicated that a president could push for NATO expansion to Russia's borders, advocate missile defense "and still have a relationship" with the Russians.

"Bush loses nothing by taking this position and hoping that it turns out to be vindicated by events," said Richard Perle, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who is close to the Bush administration. "If events don't vindicate him and Putin turns out not to be trustworthy, no one would complain if the president pronounced that at some point in the future."

Brzezinski also said that "the important part of the meeting is that basically Putin went to it all smiles the day after Bush pledged, really in a binding fashion, to significantly expand NATO."

Presidential counselor Karen P. Hughes said Bush's public comments about Putin reflected his sense that "the meeting surpassed his expectation in terms of how frank and candid it was."

But some conservatives were still put off by Bush's embrace of Putin. The Center for Security Policy, a think tank run by former Reagan official Frank J. Gaffney Jr., said that the "one blemish" on Bush's trip was his declaration that he was able to get a sense of Putin's "soul." In a statement, the group said Bush's description of Putin as "an honest, straightforward man" was "simply over-the-top."

Bush's European debut tour did nothing to halt the erosion in his approval ratings at home. In a new poll by the Pew Research Center, completed Sunday, 50 percent of those surveyed now approve of how he is handling his job, with 33 percent disapproving.

The Pew study also found that most people paid little attention to the European trip, with just 10 percent saying they were following Bush's first major foreign journey very closely. That's half of the percentage that paid very close attention to the decision by Vermont Sen. James M. Jeffords (I) to leave the Republican Party.