The Hindu : A different summit

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Saturday, May 04, 2002

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A different summit

By Pran Chopra

The issues will be divisive this time (at the Bush-Putin summit on May 13)... There will be a shortage of trust.

ON MAY 13, there will be yet another summit between the U.S. President, George W. Bush, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. But it will be of a very different kind. The American might again look into the Russian's eyes, as he did when they first met. But instead of seeing there what he was later to describe rapturously as Mr. Putin's trustworthy "soul", he will see the eyes of a disillusioned Russian. Nor will the chemistry of the issues before them help, as it did when they talked about September 11 at their previous summit. The issues will be divisive this time. Hard disagreements may yet be avoided, because Russia still cannot afford them, but there will be a hard-nosed assessment of each country by the other, and there will be a shortage of trust.

The sharpest focus of the mistrust will be what Russia sees as an unwarranted fallout of September 11. Russia would call it an unacceptable fallout if it were in a position to declare any American initiative to be so. Nor is there likely to be much cheer about the other main areas of disagreement — NMD, ABM, and related nuclear and "rogue states" issues, particularly about Iraq; and the status and spread of NATO, and Russia's position on that. In talking about mutual trading problems also the two leaders will have to walk on eggs.

Russia seems confident that it can handle any unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty by America, because that would free it also from the restraints it had accepted under that Treaty, and it can then lift deterrence to a still higher level. On NATO-related issues, Russia takes some comfort in its belief that Europe is more understanding even if the U.S. is not. But it is truly agitated about the American inroads into the Central Asian strategic space and into the region's energy assets. Just in the past few days Russia has failed to build up a united front of Caspian states to ward off external encroachments, and it is inclined to blame America for this. Its only hope is that China will be by its side because of Beijing's own anxieties about Central Asia.

After surveying this misty horizon, that wise old owl of Russian affairs, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom the Public Broadcasting Service recently described as "the architect of the ending of the Cold War", told PBS that in the matter of "cooperation with Europe, the U.S. and other countries... Putin is open to such cooperation... Those people who think he is distancing himself from the West... are totally wrong ... and our partners need to understand this." A few days earlier, the shrewder and more blunt Yevgeny Primakov, long time Foreign Minister and once Prime Minister of Russia , criticised America for what he saw as its narrower security concerns, praised Europe for being more understanding, and recommended that "in the circumstances Russia should follow the policy of converging with the Western states", meaning Europe. He particularly mentioned their attitude towards the Middle East and opposition to an attack on Iraq.

More pointedly, the Speaker of the Russian Federation Council, a kind of upper house of the Federation, said "Russia should be as active as possible in European organisations because Russia and Europe cannot exist without each other." According to the Parlamentaskaya Gazeta, the Deputy Chairman of the Defence Committee of the Duma, Alexie Arbatov, is of the view that though anti-American sentiment is not as widespread in Russia today as at the time of the American bombing of Yugoslavia, "only a minority of the political elite support the policy which Mr. Putin launched after September 11", and "the bulk of the military was not happy with (it) either", while the sentiment was turning against America in Parliament also.

And also among the Russian public in general, according to an opinion survey conducted in the last week of March and recently published by Interfax. Fifty-two per cent of the respondents said the relations with the U.S. were "cool" to "hostile", the number of those who said they were "normal" fell from 42 to 29 per cent, and a mere 13 per cent thought they were "friendly". Less dependent though he might be upon public opinion than Mr. Bush, without that even Mr. Putin cannot carry to the summit such a major plank of state policy as the cosy relations with America which began on the morrow of September 11. And what the two Presidents cannot jointly carry to the summit, neither of them can carry alone. Success of the summit therefore needs a substantial consensus about Central Asia, the most divisive of the issues; more than even NATO.

Of course, Russia itself is also responsible for some of its problems with its Central Asian neighbours. It has not been able to carry them with it, and the failure stood out a mile as recently as April 23. On that day, and for the first time ever, the Presidents of all the five Caspian Sea countries — Russia, Iran, Kazhakstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan — met in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, to try and reach an agreement on the development and use of their huge oil and natural gas resources, believed to be the third highest in the world, and the very large fishing resources. But even an agreement on general principles eluded them. All that Mr. Putin could claim afterwards was that the talks would continue. The difficulties were probably as many as the number of participants, but the two most important, Russia and Iran, are inclined to blame it on U.S. influence in the region, that is on the lesser participants whom America got the chance to influence as a result of the war on terrorism in the region.

In the wake of the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. has been able to set up military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgystan. In response to this, and to contain a radical Islamic movement based in Uzbekistan, some of the Caspian states have jointly set up a CIS Anti-terrorism Military Centre. In the middle of April the Centre held its own military exercises, described as the largest ever in the region, under a Russian commander, Boris Mylnikov. Justifying them, Gen. Mylnikov said, "we cannot overlook the expansion of U.S. military influence. It would give America the chance to exercise control over the military-political processes in Central Asia and in adjacent states such as Iran and Iraq.''

In a similar comment, John Schoeberlein, Director of Central Asian Studies at Harvard University, has said that the increased U.S. military presence in the region "raises doubts in Russia".

The same doubts have been surfacing in China for some time, as the Central Asians have noticed. Only a few days before the exercises by the Anti-terrorism Centre, the Kazhak newspaper, Express, had said that because of the same suspicion "China will now try to get closer to Russia and to expand its presence in Central Asia."

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