New York Times - 06.29.2001

 

 

The New York Times

Soul Brother

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Can you imagine what the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page would have written had Bill Clinton, in his first meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, declared afterward, as President Bush did, that he had looked Mr. Putin in the eye, got a sense of his "soul" and found the former K.G.B. boss a "remarkable leader," an "honest, straightforward man . . . who loves his family"? Let's see, the lead editorial in The Journal would have been titled "Soul Brother." There would have been one of those little drawings of Mr. Clinton over the caption "The Manchurian Candidate," and the first line of the editorial would have read: "For a guy who says he never inhaled, we can't help but wonder what exactly President Clinton was smoking when he met Vladimir Putin the other day. . . ."

Ahhh, but that was then and this is now. Other than some searing criticism by Jesse Helms, Mr. Bush's loopy comments about the Russian leader were given a pass by the Republican right — just George's boy getting a little carried away. In fact, Mr. Bush's words need to be taken seriously — not for what they tell us about Mr. Putin and his soul, but for what they tell us about Mr. Bush and his foreign policy.

Why would Mr. Bush — who came into office sneering at the backslapping friendship between Mr. Clinton and Boris Yeltsin and promising not to follow suit — be hailing Mr. Putin's soul and inviting him home to Texas? Answer: Mr. Bush has learned something in his first few months. If he wants his two great projects on foreign policy to succeed — NATO expansion and a missile shield — he needs Russian help.

Reason: Mr. Clinton was able to get the first round of NATO expansion through only by promising the U.S. public and the Pentagon four things: It wouldn't cost anything, the U.S. would never actually have to deploy troops to defend these new NATO members from Russia, our European allies would all go for it, and the Russians could be bought off. Indeed, Mr. Yeltsin was paid well for his wink. The only way the U.S. can now expand NATO all the way to the Russian border, as Mr. Bush has vowed, is if he can make the same promise to the American people and the Pentagon and win the same acquiescence from Russia.

But Mr. Putin will have to be paid with more than praise. Because he can very cheaply counter any NATO expansion by letting the Germans and other Euros, who are already lukewarm about it, know that he can't tolerate it. Or Mr. Putin can move a few troops to the border, which would do exactly what Mr. Bush must avoid — force the U.S. to actually pay a price for NATO expansion, which has zero strategic value for the American people — or for the Pentagon, which has no desire to defend Latvia.

The same is true for missile defense. The Europeans will support a missile shield only if the U.S. can agree with Russia on how to modify the ABM treaty, which now blocks Star Wars defenses. If the U.S. acts unilaterally, Mr. Putin can very cheaply overwhelm any U.S. shield by selling or giving away missile technology to rogue states or China. So again, Mr. Putin has a veto, and he will want to be paid.

"The Bush team has discovered that on their two big foreign policy objectives — NATO expansion and missile defense — it is not enough to just declare it, you actually need support, and it turns out the key player in generating that support is Russia," says the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. "So in other words, the Bush people have put Russia back at the center of U.S. foreign policy and given Putin enormous leverage, because he can block the U.S. on both these issues without much cost or effort."

So I hope Republican hawks won't go too hard on Mr. Bush for praising Mr. Putin. Mr. Bush seems to understand some things they don't — that NATO expansion doesn't matter and missile defense doesn't work. If they really were vital, the Pentagon, the public and the allies would support doing both unilaterally — at any price. But since both seem to grow more out of Republican theology than strategy, and since both seem unconnected to the immediate threats facing America, our allies and the Pentagon today, they can proceed only if the costs are limited. And the man who can most determine those costs is none other than that "remarkable," "straightforward" family man in the Kremlin, our soul brother — Vladimir Putin.