Bush, Putin: seeing eye to eye

By PATRICK E. TYLER, New York Times

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 17, 2001

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia -- Whatever happens now, for good or for ill, a new era in America's relations with Russia began on Saturday.

Seldom have two leaders so strikingly overcome the limited expectations about their first meeting as George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin did on Saturday, putting their new friendship on a high plane of newfound trust and instructing their defense chiefs, both hard-liners, and their foreign secretaries to find a common approach for a new framework for international security.

Whether this constructive new beginning -- begun with surprising buoyancy and personal engagement -- will succeed as the genuine partnership that Bush and Putin described after their talks at Brdo Castle will depend on how they follow through on the collaborative venture that they outlined only in broad strokes.

It includes joint work to study security threats, cooperative energy projects and new studies on how American corporations might find investment opportunities in the struggling Russian economy. It also includes American support for Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization.

"This was a very good meeting," Bush said standing alongside the Russian president. "He is an honest, straightforward man who loves his country," Bush added, and he called Putin a leader that Americans can trust.

Putin confirmed the American president's assessment and said the meeting proved that "reality was a lot bigger than expectations" and he asserted that an important Cold War milestone had been passed with Bush's declaration that Russia is no longer America's enemy.

The two men came to look each other in the eye and they both appeared to like what they saw, even as they laid out the agenda of their extensive disagreements on missile defenses, the expansion of NATO onto the territory of the former Soviet Union and Russia's growing arms trade with Iran.

Saturday's surprising reversal of tone in American-Russian relations may reflect how much each leader needed the positive outcome. Bush needed to prove to Europe and to the Senate that he was not engaged in recklessness as he pursued a new security concept that includes missile defenses. And Putin needed to know that the new Bush administration was not looking for a confrontation because Putin has his hands full at home trying to pull Russia beyond the wreckage of the Soviet era.

In his first major diplomatic foray abroad, Bush discovered last week that Europe is becoming its own powerhouse of new economic and security interests that, while similar to those of the United States, are by no means identical.

And though Bush may have succeeded in fostering what he termed a "new receptivity" to his proposal for missile defenses among some European leaders during his visit, Germany and France stood as formidable skeptics at the center of Europe, each concerned that Bush's plan would trigger a new arms race by not taking into account Russia's and China's concerns.

As if to sharpen that point, Putin made his entrance in Slovenia after flying from China, where he and President Jiang Zemin and the leaders of four Central Asian republics had signed the founding charter of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, not quite an alliance, but a potent new expression of Asian interests.

Indeed, despite the warming with Bush, Putin seems to be fostering a new era of triangular diplomacy, positioning Russia to be an ally of China and of Europe as a hedge against American unilateralism, a concern he mentioned Saturday. His tactic put Bush on the defensive, and Bush last week was at pains to assert that America is not about to go it alone in international affairs but was trying instead to galvanize support for a new international security concept. The concept remains largely undefined except that missile defenses are a prominent piece.

With all the disagreement, however, what seemed most important was that the two presidents -- neither of whom has been in office very long -- had finally met.

Putin had been seeking this meeting since almost the day after Bush's inauguration, but Bush's advisers delayed it for months, saying they were formulating a new policy toward Russia, which now seems to be taking shape.

The two leaders will see each other again in July and October at the summit meeting of leading industrial nations in Genoa and of Asia Pacific leaders in Shanghai.

Between now and then, both leaders must return to domestic political challenges. Bush faces a Senate now led by Democrats, many of whom are as skeptical as some European leaders about the consequences of abandoning the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty and how to pay for missile defenses even if they turn out to be feasible.

And Putin returns to Moscow where he must prove that he is the democratic leader he advertises himself to be, one who wants to take Russia into Europe. That goal will be difficult to reach as long as the partisan war in Chechnya continues without negotiation.

Putin's year-old government also stands at a critical juncture of reform, with sweeping proposals to build a new judicial system, institute jury trials and privatize land ownership this year, an issue still so contentious in post-Soviet Russia that a fistfight broke out Friday among lawmakers contesting the issue. And though Putin last week reaffirmed his commitment to a free press and to building civil society, his administration has been dogged by incidents of pressure and intimidation that have called that commitment into question.

"This is a unique opportunity," said Aleksei Arbatov, an influential member of the Russian Parliament watching events here from Moscow. "There are a lot of problems and mutual suspicions between our countries, and the main issue for both leaders is to decide whether they want to resolve these issues cooperatively or to deal with those problems without dealing with each other.

"The fact that the United States is the only remaining superpower in the world," he continued, "means that it has to use this opportunity to demonstrate that it is a well-meaning state trying to establish the rule of the game for international relations on the basis of cooperation and not on force."

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