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A SUMMIT OF OVERTURNED EXPECTATIONS

RIA Novosti

MOSCOW (Alexander Konovalov, president of the Institute of Strategic Assessment, for RIA Novosti) - The Bratislava meeting between the Russian and American presidents can be described as "the summit of overturned expectations."

Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin had never felt such powerful external and internal pressure from their political elites and public opinion at any of their previous meetings. The development trends in Russia-US relations, which appeared in 2004 and grew stronger in 2005, did not promise anything good for Bratislava summit.

The picture was surreal: the two leaders were still considered friends but contacts between them were clearly not enough and did not confirm any mutual empathy, whereas complaints, suspicion and disappointment had accumulated in the two countries' public minds. American and European newspapers published sharply critical articles about President Putin and his policy of backsliding from democracy to authoritarianism. The Russian media reflected a rising wave of anti-Western, in particular anti-American, sentiments.

The political elite of the US and other Western countries persistently called on President Bush to put forth all of his complaints to his Russian colleague. Shortly before the summit, Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain again demanded that their president initiate Russia's expulsion from the G8.

One of the central Russian newspapers published an article by political scientist Alexander Dugin, known for his Eurasian stand, right before the summit. The article headlined "Putin Will Return from Bratislava a Different Man" suggested that the Russian president could choose one of two strategies: Either act as a Russian patriot and hence accept an open conflict with the USA, or betray national interests and accept the full subordination of Russian policy to American dictate and "de-sovereignization."

Mr. Dugin implied that the latter was inevitable because the US would raise the issue of international control of Russia's nuclear technologies at the summit. He also assumed that Mr. Putin would act as a true patriot and not as a traitor.

Against this political background, most analysts expected the Bratislava summit to initiate an open confrontation between Russia and the US, and sharp debates on democracy and human rights. Nothing of the kind happened in Bratislava, which is probably one of its main positive results. The two presidents overcame the external and internal pressure and prevented a crisis in bilateral relations. Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush also approved the so-called Bratislava Initiatives, which concern mostly three issues: Russia's accelerated accession to the WTO, energy dialogue, and nuclear security.

The latter issue seems to be the most complicated and is probably the most important in view of the growing terrorist threat and nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. Many analysts predicted before the summit that Russia-Iran nuclear cooperation would be one of the most difficult problems in the Slovakian capital. Russia is proactively helping Iran build its nuclear power station in Bushehr. Many people in the US do not understand why Russia is doing this and why it cannot see the dangerous consequences, above all for itself, which may entail if Iran makes nuclear weapons. The two presidents clearly stated in Bratislava that they are against the emergence of nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran, but we know that they differ dramatically on the methods of preventing this possibility.

Russia's policy with regard to Iran and its nuclear program is based on rather complicated reasons. The first and most straightforward group of arguments states that Iran is a close neighbor of Russia and a major regional power with which Russia would like to have normal relations. Iran is an important market, including for high technologies and nuclear power engineering. Besides, many people in Russia are convinced that if the country terminates its nuclear cooperation with Iran, other contractors will build the Bushehr plant and the market will be lost.

But primitive economic interests cannot explain everything. There are enough specialists in Russia who see that the appearance of an "Islamic bomb" on Russia's southern borders would be a much bigger headache for Russia than for the US. Iran does not have any vehicles to deliver its hypothetical bomb to America, and will not do so any time soon, but its missiles can reach Russian territory today.

Russian policy vis-a-vis Iran has also political and psychological aspects, which some can describe as complexes. Russian politicians do not want to be accused of toeing the Washington line and yielding to US pressure.

The above factors are important but not crucial. The main difficulty in the Moscow-Washington dialogue on Iran is that the US administration was recently inclined to use tough measures, including military force, to terminate Iran's nuclear program. Moscow thought it would be better to help Iran build a nuclear power station using the limitations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, under strict international control stipulated in the non-proliferation regime. It also suggested using every possible political and economic lever to encourage Iran to terminate its nuclear weapons program.

Moscow proceeded from fairly self-evident considerations: The US would not be able to carry out an Iraq-type military operation against Iran in the foreseeable future, and not only because Iran is a much more difficult military target. The US is bogged down in Iraq and does not have the money and manpower for a new war. Over 70% of the US ground forces are fighting in Iraq, which means that the US can only resort to the tactic of pinpoint strikes at key targets of the Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

In other words, it could repeat the experience of Israel, which terminated Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in the early 1980s by bombing a nuclear reactor construction site one night. Some people suggest that Washington might delegate the new mission to Israel.

However, this raises questions about the feasibility and consequences of such plans. First, some analysts doubt that even very finely tuned conventional precision weapons will do the job. After all, conventional weapons proved impotent against Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan. Iran is a mountain country, too, and this may force Tel Aviv to recall the words of Prime Minister Golda Meir: "Israel does not have nuclear weapons, but it will not hesitate to use them if necessary."

And lastly, the most important argument: Iran has an arsenal of response measures if force is used against it. The main one is not the hypothetical nuclear threat but the country's real ability to paralyze the world's oil markets and provoke the collapse of the global oil industry. It would be enough for Tehran to sink, in reply to a threat of military force, a few oil tankers off Bandar Abbas, thereby closing the Gulf and access to the oil of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and the Arab Emirates. And then the scale of the catastrophe would be much larger than the potential Iranian nuclear threat.

Accordingly, Moscow's strategy with regard to Iran is preferable to America's. Moreover, Iran has a political opposition and so it would be better to invest in its political modernization rather than putting military pressure on it. The Iranian leadership may hypothetically withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and in so doing make the possibility of the bomb a reality. In this case, Moscow will have to make joint efforts with the global community to decide on sanctions and other possible measures against Iran.

Russian arguments seem to have carried the day in Bratislava. On February 27, Alexander Rumyantsev, the head of the Federal Agency for Nuclear Power, signed an agreement in Iran that committed Iran to return spent nuclear fuel from the Bushehr station to Russia for processing. This is a crucial argument, because spent fuel can potentially be used to create weapons-grade fissionable materials.

In general, the Bratislava summit passed off much better than predicted, but did not solve the main problem. Russia-US relations remain superficial, surviving mostly on the "personal chemistry" between the two leaders. And that is not a reliable foundation.