On Trusting Putin

(Washington, D.C.): One blemish on a presidential visit of Europe that can otherwise only be described as a tour de force was George W. Bush’s declaration that he was able to “get a sense” of Vladimir Putin’s “soul.” While no fault could be found with Mr. Bush’s insight that Putin is “a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country,” his statement that he deemed his Russian counterpart to be “an honest, straightforward man” is simply over-the-top.

Still, this might have been nothing more than a bit of bonhomie, attributable to Mr. Bush’s famous friendliness and courtesy to a foreign dignitary. Or perhaps he was merely waxing enthusiastic, having gotten through a two-hour meeting with Putin without the career KGB man going ballistic over America’s determination to deploy a missile defense.

It is harder to dismiss, however, the President’s description of Putin as “trustworthy.” Mr. Bush went so far as to say “I wouldn’t have invited him to my ranch if I didn’t trust him.” This statement conjures up memories of too many American leaders who have indulged in the popular, but generally fatuous, notion that warm personal relationships with the top man in the Kremlin creates a realistic basis for constructive and close ties between the two nations. As syndicated columnist William Safire notes in today’s New York Times, this hubristic practice on the part of U.S. presidents goes back at least to Franklin Roosevelt’s day. In recent years, it has induced Ronald Reagan and George Bush the elder to prop up Mikhail Gorbachev and his dying Soviet Union. It contributed to Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s determination to ignore the corrupt and anti-reform behavior of Boris Yeltsin and Viktor Chernomyrdin.

The regrettable fact is that Vladimir Putin can be trusted only to pursue his vision of a Russia that is once again a great power — at the expense of the freedoms enjoyed by his own people, the security of their neighbors and the interests of the United States more generally. If that is what Mr. Bush meant when he said he trusts Putin, he has it about right. If not, some further clarification is in order lest he repeat errors made by his predecessors on the basis of reposing unwarranted confidence in their Kremlin counterparts’ honesty and straightforwardness and our ability to do business with them.

“I like Old Joe,” said F.D.R. about Joseph Stalin. Carrying on that self-deluding tradition of snap judgments, George W. Bush looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin, announced, “I was able to get a sense of his soul,” and after two heady hours concluded he was “straightforward” and “trustworthy.”

Ever since the K.G.B. man emerged as the Russian oligarchs’ choice, President Putin has shown himself to be duplicitous (ask the Chechens), anti-democratic (ask the remains of Russia’s free press) and untrustworthy (ask the exiled oligarchs). We can hope that the Bush gush was flattery intended to show the U.S. president to be nonthreatening as his administration presses ahead with a missile defense.

The American gave the Russian what he most needs: public deference that salves Russia’s wounded pride, and respect to its leader abroad as Putin methodically chokes off opposition at home. Bush topped this off with a pre-emptive concession: agreement to exchange warm ranch- and-home visits, for which Putin was eager, even before any progress was shown in agreement to scrap the old ABM treaty.

The Russian partly reciprocated, as Bush hoped, by accepting the American formulation of “a new architecture of security in the world” and by hinting that “we might have a very constructive development here in this area.” That public optimism from Russia takes a little of the steam out of alarmist Franco-German protests that America, in defending its cities from rogue missiles, was starting “a new arms race.”

At home, Putin has cracked down on the new freedoms without curbing the old corruption. Example of the rule of lawlessness: his Duma passed a bill last week to make Russia the world’s nuclear waste dump, generating $20 billion over the next decade.

That would be the most dangerous boondoggle in history, with little control over 2,000 tons of radioactive garbage yearly. “One hundred million Russian citizens are against it,” says Grigory Yavlinsky, one of the few reformers left standing in the Duma, “and only 500 people are for it 300 members sitting here and 200 bureaucrats who will be getting the money.” (Fortunately for the world, the U.S. won’t bury our nuclear waste in Russia, where it could be reprocessed and sold to Iran for weapons production.)

Well aware of the weakness of his hand, Putin is emulating Nixon strategy by playing the China card. Pointedly, just before meeting with Bush, Putin traveled to Shanghai to set up a regional cooperation semi-alliance with Jiang Zemin and some of his Asian fellow travelers.

That deft maneuver puts European leaders on notice that Russia despite all the talk of becoming a “partner” in Europe knows that the center of America’s strategic concern in the coming generation will be Asia.

Putin is signaling Bush: European leaders may resent your economic competition and appeal to their voters by complaining about pollution, but that’s merely bickering within the Western alliance. A future recombination of China and Russia, however, would challenge America’s status as the world’s sole superpower. Therefore, you’d better prop up our Russian economy with none of your human- rights lectures and expansion of NATO to our borders lest we undermine your hegemony with a Beijing- Moscow axis.

I wonder if Bush and his advisers are catching that signal. If so, they don’t seem to have let Putin’s China card affect U.S. policy. In a strong and thoughtful speech in Warsaw, Bush sent a signal of his own: “No more Munichs, no more Yaltas.”

That means no more appeasement of threats of aggression (as at Munich just before World War II, or about Taiwan today) and no more carving up of the world into spheres of influence (as at Yalta at that war’s end, or blocking the entry of the Baltic nations into NATO today). I read that to mean we will support the entry of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania vigorously, despite Putin’s phony worry about NATO being “a military organization . . . moving toward our border.”

With the strongest hand any American ever held, Bush comported himself well. But he should remember Reagan’s “trust but verify.” When the manipulative Russian comes to visit at the Texas ranch this fall, I would hate to hear “I like ol’ Vlad.”