Putin says a polite ''no''

THE WEEKEND'S FULL-SCALE summit meeting between a President who is to demit office in a matter of six months and another who entered it barely a month ago has one message for the world: at the helm in Moscow is a strong, determined leader who is ready to cooperate with the sole superpower but will stand up for what he deems is in the national interest. The summit was part of a global farewell tour for the American President, Mr. Bill Clinton. But for Mr. Vladimir Putin, this was the first major international encounter as leader in his own right, with the world watching to see if he would tread the path of his unpredictable predecessor, Mr. Boris Yeltsin, and yield to Western blandishments or chart an independent course. The signals from Moscow point to a departure from the Yeltsin era. By signing two agreements and agreeing to disagree over a highly controversial security issue, Mr. Putin has let it be known that he has arrived on the international scene. The implications of the message cannot be overemphasised in a global security situation that is in a state of extreme flux. A new President set to take office in January in the U.S. adds another imponderable.

The two agreements signed by Mr. Clinton and Mr. Putin during their summit will doubtless make for a more secure world. Under one accord, the two countries agreed to convert 34 tonnes each of weapons-grade plutonium, enough for thousands of nuclear missiles, into a form unusable on warheads. A part of the huge funds needed to build a new Russian facility to do the conversion will come from the U.S. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. had successfully concluded such agreements with the new republics, essentially Ukraine, to dismantle their nuclear stockpile and with Russia, the successor state, to convert weapons-grade plutonium as part of a larger effort to address the nuclear proliferation threat. The second agreement initialled in Moscow will help to create a permanent joint U.S.- Russia early warning system to detect nuclear missile strikes.

Mr. Clinton, however, appeared unable to persuade Mr. Putin to accept an American plan for a national missile defence system. The result of a study which predicted that in five years the U.S. will be vulnerable to missile attacks by the so-called ``rogue'' nations, it called for building a land-based shield. European allies, Russia and now China fear that the plan could undermine the strategic stability based on the notion of ``balance of terror'' that emerged from the historic 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty and heralded nuclear disarmament. The American plan, allies fear, can trigger an arms race as others seek to raise their own protective shields. During the summit, Mr. Putin acknowledged the dangers from irresponsible states acquiring strike capacity and, aware that a Republican at the White House next January might press Moscow even harder, offered to study the possibility of a joint effort to counter such threats. En route to Moscow, Mr. Clinton heard his European allies raise suggestions that Washington was overstating the threat from the ``rogue'' States since no nation would launch such suicidal strikes. An America showing signs of a return to isolationism and ready to hunker down in its own shield is a nightmarish scenario for the European allies. They and the rest of the world have increasing cause for worry from the competitive militarism in evidence in the U.S., driven by domestic politics in this Presidential election year. The Republicans' presumptive Presidential candidate, Mr. George Bush, has called the ABM treaty a relic of the past and has unveiled a defence system that rivals Ronald Reagan's Star Wars. The polite ``no'' that Mr. Putin delivered to Mr. Clinton is addressed as much to Mr. Bush.

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