Taming the bear

I wanted to talk about Chechnya. Nobody has been able to affect the Russians' actions there. It seems as though Bush will not push for much change there either. Why is this such a difficult and untouchable conflict?

There are three reasons. First of all, Chechnya is part of Russia. Nobody disputes Russia's claim to sovereignty over Chechnya. So it's not like Russia muscling Georgia, which is an independent country. Second, Chechnya is a murderous mess. Nobody can claim that the Chechens are bucolic, peaceful mountain people if only the Russians would just leave them alone. It's a massively corrupt, criminalized, violent non-country. That makes it a lot harder to defend the Chechens when the Russians get tough with them, though I think we should.

And third, there's Sept. 11. There's no question that there's a lot of world-class terrorists, including the Saudis and others, operating inside of Chechnya. They've been there for a long time. There's no question that there are elements in Chechnya that are closely associated with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. The corollary to that is that when President Bush declares a global war on terrorism and Putin says, "I'm with you, pal. I'll support you against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, you gotta support me against the others in Chechnya who are committing terrorist acts against Russia," President Bush basically says, "OK. I get it."

The flip side of that is that Chechnya is a mess largely because Moscow's made it a mess, going back 150 years, but certainly over the recent decades. Moscow's brutal tactics have radicalized the republic and somehow the vicious cycle has to be broken and reversed. It's largely up to Moscow to do that.

So Bush doesn't make a distinction between the war in Afghanistan and the war in Chechnya?

Not so far. He's basically given Putin a pass on this. Our administration didn't succeed in getting the Russians to greatly ameliorate what they were doing in Chechnya. We had a little bit of success; we got them to cooperate more with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and at least open Chechnya provisionally to some international monitoring and that kind of thing. But I can't sit here and claim to you that we solved that problem any more than we solved the problem of Russian technology going to Iran. But we had something going in the right direction. When the Bush administration came in, even though they criticized us during the campaign for letting the Russians get away with murder in Chechnya, they then immediately let the Russians get away with murder in Chechnya.

Would it completely jeopardize our relationship with Russia if we exerted real pressure on them?

No, it would not and that goes to my view of Putin. I reacted quite skeptically to him in my own first encounters, but Putin's turned out to be a lot better than many of us expected. One way that I think Putin has a good chance of succeeding is that he really is determined to modernize Russia and do so in a way that aligns Russia more with the West and puts Russia in the mainstream of international life as defined by the G-8 and the community of nations that the United States is part of.

But that means that he's got to accept certain standards before admission to that circle. We're the keeper of those standards. If we make more of an issue out of his treatment of ethnic minorities and religious minorities in Russia, it will have some effect on him because he really wants the membership. But if we're going to give him a pass on all that stuff, he will be very grateful and won't feel under any pressure to change.

Is this true for his treatment of the press, too?

The same is true with regard to his treatment of the free media, which is not as free as it used to be. He's been closing down independent outlets, intimidating journalists and using his own considerable levers of power to move newspapers and television stations in from the category of independent media into state-controlled media.

How much is Putin slipping away from democracy in general? Could he move more toward a dictatorship?

Whether dictatorship is the word, at least in the Russian-Soviet context or a more authoritarian form of governance, we're saying the same thing, and the answer is yes, there is a danger. But we can minimize that danger if we make an issue out of it. Part of the problem with the Bush administration is that they have taken a kind of traditionally realpolitik attitude towards Russia and indeed other countries as well.

To them, real men, or in the case of Condi, real women, don't do internal politics of other countries. They worry about international behavior of countries, they worry about the disposition of weaponry, particularly nuclear weaponry. It's only squishy-soft liberals and Democrats who make a big deal out of human rights and minority rights and free media and that kind of thing. I'm oversimplifying, obviously, but there is definitely a tilt in that direction and it partly explains, at least in my mind, why the Bush administration has left largely unattended the domestic agenda in Russia.

How will we monitor Russia's reduction of weapons?

Both in the area of strategic nuclear weaponry and also chemical and biological, the United States will continue to rely on verification. The issue there is to what extent does the United States want there to be treaties to regulate these things. The answer is not anywhere near the same extent now that George Bush is in the White House. His administration has shown a basic bias against legally binding, ratified, verifiable treaties with other countries -- the Kyoto climate change convention, the International Criminal Court, land mines, the ABM treaty, chemical and biological weapons conventions. The list goes on and on. They've kind of made an exception with regard to START and they've done so largely to accommodate Putin.

How dangerous is this? Will anyone pressure Bush on this?

I hope so. START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] is the exception to the rule at the moment.

What about Russia's relationship with Iran? Will that be a major issue between them?

It has been, is now and will continue to be. It was a big theme in our administration. There were some moments when we thought we'd finally gotten a handle on the problem of Russian nuclear and ballistic technology going to Iran. And then there would be an upheaval of Russian politics and we'd lose our partner, whether it was Viktor Chernomyrdin or Andrei Kokoshin or anybody else. At the end of the administration, we basically passed this along to our successors as unfinished business, and the Bush administration has not had much success there.

And it's really stupid on Russia's part. For them to be hastening the day when Iran is going to be a nuclear armed ballistic missile country is the height of strategic foolishness because Iran is much closer to Russia than it is to the United States, it's closer to Russia than it is to Israel. It could well be a hotbed of Islamic extremism for a very long time to come. Russia has its own indigenous problem with Islamic extremism. This is just mind-boggling.

Why do you think it continues?

A combination of things, including filthy lucre, which is to say money. People in Russia, particularly in the old military industrial complex, are making out like bandits. There's some simpleminded old thing going on about the Great Game: Russia believes it can buy goodwill -- if not the friendship then at least the susceptibility to Russian influence -- by arming the Iranians and therefore hedging against the day when Iran and the United States make up. Again, I'm not making apologies for it; quite the contrary, I'm trying to point out that it's very shortsighted.

It seems remarkable that Putin has been conciliatory about our expansion of military power in Asia and Georgia since Sept. 11, but how much do the Russians still resent us for our status as the world's sole superpower? Have they recovered psychologically from their fall from the role of a major superpower?

Much as we may tell them and much as some of them believe that they, the Russians, were victors in the Cold War and helped bring the system that had oppressed them more than anybody else, there's still a widespread and understandable sentiment that 15 years ago they were a superpower sharing mastery of the universe with the United States of America and now they're just a great big messy country that's got a GDP behind South Korea's and Portugal's.

Do you believe that Putin wants Russia to be a superpower?

No, I don't. I think he's realistic enough to know that that's defining the problem in a way that guarantees failure. He wants Russia to be a normal, modern country that has as much influence as its giant size -- the fact that it strides two continents -- indicates it should have. It should be a major regional power, with some global interest, but that doesn't attempt to compete with the United States on a global basis.

Do you believe that Putin is Western-minded? We hear that a lot. Given the problems that Russia has had with Western institutions in the past, how will he manage?

Only over a very long haul. His rhetoric is more pro-Western even than Yeltsin's. But his instincts are emphatically not. One example: We say rule of law and he says dictatorship of laws. I think he still has a lot of the old commandant mentality in his software.

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