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Russia, US Remain Divided as Ever Despite Cozy Summit: Analysis
The United States and Russia remain far apart on such major issues as missile defense, NATO expansion and espionage war despite the coziness US President George W. Bush rendered to his first summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Slovenia about two weeks ago.
After the make-acquaintance rendezvous, President Bush spared no efforts to hype up results of the meeting, giving out an air that a new US-Russian rapport has been achieved on a newfound ground of trust.
However, the US media have not appeared as euphoric as President Bush, and they pointed out that mistrust is still in existence between the two sides and no substantive progress has been made toward settling thorny security issues concerned by both sides, missile defenses in particular.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said recently that "I don't trust Mr. Putin., hopefully the president was being stylistic rather than substantive."
"I can understand the strategy on rapport, but it went too far, " and "I think there is plenty of good reasons not to trust President Putin," said Michael A. McFaul, a senior research fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was invited to brief President Bush on Russia before his European trip.
As a matter of fact, despite Bush's image-oriented hullabaloo on the summit, discord started to emerge in public at the very moment when the two leaders walked out of the meeting hall, analysts here said.
Russian President Putin, speaking at the post-summit press conference, voiced his strong opposition to America's bid to get rid of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty to facilitate an almighty missile defense program.
Just on the next day, the same day when President Bush was returning home from Europe, US Secretary of State Colin Powell reiterated US stance on missile defenses, insisting that Washington would go ahead with a National Missile Defense (NMD) with or without Russia's support.
Powell also indicated that the United States will break free from the ABM treaty, which bans national defensive missile systems, at certain point when it feels the treaty may hinder the development of the missile shield.
"At that point we're going to have to find a way to remove that prohibition, remove that constraint. And it may involve removing the treaty as an obstacle to development (of NMD)," Powell said.
Apparently in response to the US "soft blackmail," Russian President Putin, who described the ABM treaty as the "cornerstone" of a new international security structure, put out harsh countermeasures at a meeting with a group of American journalists in Kremlin just two days after he came back from the Slovenia summit.
Putin warned that if the United States continues its missile defense program to the ignorance of Russia's considerations, Moscow would be forced to upgrade its strategic arsenals by mounting multi-warheads onto its nuclear missiles.
He also threatened to scrub START-I and START-II, the two most important arms control regimes achieved by the two countries, if Washington dared to abandon the ABM treaty unilaterally.
Putin's warning was substantiated one week later. Last Wednesday, Russia's strategic missile troops successfully test- fired an improved type of SS-19 inter-continental ballistic missile, which has the capability of carrying six nuclear warheads.
Russian experts said the test showed that Russia's strategic missiles are capable of breaking through the missile shield and prove "effective" in a real war.
Meanwhile, according to Itar-Tass reports, two Russian military businesses also announced Wednesday that they will complete the first phase of test of the C-400 land-to-air anti-missile system, which is believed to be more advanced than the US-made Patriot- III and can easily shoot down on-coming Tomahawk missiles.
Moscow's offensive and defensive missile tests seemed to be well-timed to encounter the US defense ministry's call for an increase of 2.2 billion dollars in Congressional funding for missile defense research and test in fiscal year 2002, analysts said.
The yawning gap also can be found on NATO expansion. During his European trip, President Bush was quite vocal in supporting the extension of NATO membership, declaring that the "new democracies, from the Baltic to the Black Sea and all that lie between" should have the same chance to "join the institutions of Europe."
Bush's declaration, however, got a counter-attack from Putin, who expressed a strong antagonism against the aggressive NATO. At the news conference after the summit, Putin lashed out at NATO and vented his worry about the imminent threat of NATO expansion.
"Look, this is a military organization. It's moving toward our border. Why?" Putin said at the press conference.
Skirmish on espionage charges, another nightmare that has haunted US-Russian relations for decades, broke out again merely 10 days following the Slovenia summit.
Last Tuesday, a retired US army colonel was convicted of "selling military secrets to the Soviet Union for 25 years."
On the same day, Russian authorities retaliated by raising new allegations that a jailed American student named John Tobin had worked as a secret agent of the United States and suggested that he would be charged with espionage activities.
Earlier in the spring, the United States made public the sensational Hanssen espionage case, followed up by the expelling of 50 Russian diplomats on security reasons. The Russian government later kicked away the same number of US diplomats in a tit-for-tat action. The espionage war seriously undermined ties between Washington and Moscow.
The Slovenia summit succeeded in bringing the ties to normal and opening the door for further dialogue and cooperation, yet there seems to be no sign of anything close to a genuine rapprochement between the two great powers, while friction, or even confrontation, may pop up in the future due to some insurmountable differences in national interests of the two Cold War foes.
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