Economist - 11.08.2001

 

The Economist

Russia and America

Suddenly, Such Good Neighbours

With America at war against terror, and keen to build missile defences, Russia has an opportunity

IT COULD almost be old times. America's president meets his Russian counterpart for a summit to discuss missile defences, tallies of nuclear warheads and the need to avoid unnerving instability between the world's two biggest nuclear powers. But there the cold-war similarities end. As George Bush prepares to show Vladimir Putin round his Texas ranch, their officials are totting up not how many missiles are enough to keep the peace, but how few. It is more than a decade since the nuclear rivalry between America and Russia threatened the world with Armageddon. Across-the-fence relations have been much more neighbourly for decade. All the same, there is a whiff of history about next week's encounter.

If all goes well, the summit centrepiece will be a new set of strategic understandings better suited to the post-cold-war world. One could be an agreement that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which banned most missile defences so as to keep either Russians or Americans from believing they could strike first and be safe from counter-attack, should not now inhibit the testing of defences against smaller missile threats from places like North Korea, Iraq or Iran. Another might cut each side's long-range nuclear arsenal to perhaps 2,000 or fewer (compared with 3,500 or so under the yet-to-be-implemented Start-2 strategic-arms treaty). That is especially important to Russia, which can barely afford the weapons it has. Yet it is Mr Putin's apparent readiness, by standing four-square with Mr Bush in the anti-terror campaign, to signal an end to Russia's decade-long sulk over its loss of influence in the world that makes this a potentially history-making summit.

China next?

Mr Bush was anyway determined to press on with what would eventually have been treaty-busting missile-defence tests. Doing so without picking a fight with Russia reduces the diplomatic friction with America's allies in Europe. It also blunts the more determined opposition from China, which, unlike Russia, fears for the usefulness of its smaller nuclear deterrent force and worries that regional anti-missile defences could someday be used to protect Taiwan. China has worked hard to build a rejectionist front with Russia against America. But if Russia breaks ranks, China may be persuaded to talk too.

It was Mr Putin's reaction to the September terrorist assaults on America, standing down his soldiers even as America's went on red alert, that Mr Bush says persuaded him that Mr Putin had finally understood the cold war was over and that a new strategic bargain could be had. But Russia is helping in other ways too. Overriding the instincts of his generals and diplomats, Mr Putin has offered over-flight rights to American military aircraft, provided intelligence help, and encouraged Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, two neighbours of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, to allow the use of bases on their territory.

The question for Mr Bush is how far he wants to make use of the better relations that Mr Putin is offering. Some of his advisers have wanted to press ahead on missile defences regardless. They scorned the Clinton administration's efforts at “partnership” with Russia; in the first months of Mr Bush's presidency Russia's diplomats were pushed further down the receiving line. Mr Bush had started out trying to cut the money America spends in Russia to prevent the leakage of materials and expertise from its sprawling complex of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Given the new dangers of such weapons in terrorist hands, it would be wiser now to step up these efforts-increasing security at storage sites, improving the ability to detect theft, finding safe ways to dispose of dangerous stockpiles, finding useful work for former weapons scientists-not pare them back. And for safety's sake, monitorable ways need to be found to dismantle surplus nuclear warheads, from any new arms-cutting deal at the summit, as well as from earlier agreements on both long- and short-range weapons.

Better Russian-American ties offer Mr Bush more such opportunities than he may care to take. But for Russia this is a chance to recover lost respect and influence in the world. Early post-cold-war hopes for a “strategic partnership” with the West foundered on old thinking in the Kremlin that still weighed up the world in spheres of influence. Russia's response to NATO's decision to take in the first recruits from Eastern Europe, and to western intervention in Kosovo to end Serb ethnic cleansing, was to toss as many spanners in western works as possible, and to seek friends instead among awkward regimes, such as Iraq, which continues to flout UN disarmament resolutions, and Myanmar. Asked to set aside the one flattering measure of Russia's old worth-the raft of cold-war treaties, including the ABM treaty, with America-the instinct was to dig in its heels.

Mr Putin is not about to drop all Russia's old friends, but he has a clearer-eyed assessment of where its real interests lie. He knows it is not western ill-will, but his country's own political and economic weakness, that has reduced Russia's standing. The stand-off over limited missile defences, which anyway do not threaten Russia's security, had been getting in the way of his other foreign-policy goals: to put Russia back in the diplomatic mainstream, to win a bigger voice in European security matters, and above all to build up its economy. The anti-terrorism campaign gives Mr Putin an unexpected diplomatic opening to show that Russia is still a country worth doing business with. His other two goals will be harder to achieve.

A new agenda for Russia

Russia has long made a big play of putting its name to the human-rights rules and codes of conduct of organisations like the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, only to flout them repeatedly in the brutal fighting in Chechnya and by meddling in conflicts across its own borders: in Georgia, in Moldova and in the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. If Russia wants a more constructive voice in European security, it could show earnest by doing more to resolve these conflicts rather than stirring them up. Similarly, Russia has in the past leaned hard on the Balts-by refusing to ratify new borders, for example-and others to deter them from closer contacts with the West. Mr Putin at last seems to have recognised that NATO is the least of the threats he faces, that he can anyway have no veto over who joins the alliance nor over America's defences, and that heavy-handedness has merely lengthened the queue to join.

Better working relations between NATO and Russia now seem in prospect, though frictions are bound to continue. But it is other clubs, such as the World Trade Organisation, that Mr Putin needs to have in his sights. He has already said Russia would like to join the WTO. The difficulty will be in getting Russia's mafia-like economy in any sort of shape to do so.

So far Russia has bumped along, selling weapons, oil and gas. Mr Putin wants to change that. Oil and gas will remain important: Russia may find itself increasingly attractive as a non-OPEC supplier and, 20 years from now, as the European Union expands, Russia could end up controlling the taps of well over half of Europe's gas. Yet Mr Putin wants Russia to be more than a giant pumping station. He wants it to have a seat alongside the richer, industrialised nations. He has started to speed up economic reform at home, but it is still galling to Russians that China pulls in vastly more foreign investment each year. Prospective WTO membership could be a useful tool, as it has been in China, to force the better business practices and rule of law that would make Russia a place worth investing in.

All this may seem a long way from Mr Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. But Mr Putin has a vision of Russia's future that is different from its past. Mr Bush has started to see that. Now Mr Putin has to persuade his countrymen of it too.