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A white folks' club?
By MARTIN WALKER (MWalker@upi.com)
Chief International Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (UPI) — The new Russian-American friendship is beginning to look like a done deal.
The latest flurry of meetings, with the Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Washington and the Pentagon's Donald Rumsfeld in Moscow, appears to be paving the way to a historic encounter at President George's Bush's Texan ranch next weekend.
The prize is glittering, but don't be fooled by the headlines. They will focus on an expected Russian acceptance of an “amendment” to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that will permit testing and development (although not deployment) of a missile defense system. The headlines will also stress the agreement to cut each side's nuclear arsenal to around 2,000 strategic nuclear warheads and their delivery systems.
The real significance reaches far beyond these nuts and bolts of an anachronistic relationship of two nuclear powers. The decision by President Vladimir Putin to commit Russia to the West is epochal, if he can overcome the doubts of his generals to make it stick, and if the West clearly understands what obligations this could entail.
The West is a vague concept, but as it has developed since the end of World War II, it has come to depend on a security club based on NATO, and a prosperity club based on market economies. The West, as a financial system, rests on institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, global financial markets and the World Trade Organization.
Russia is already well on its way into the economic club. Under Putin, it has installed a flat tax system and has just passed a land reform law that establishes the principle of private property. It attends the G8 summits of leading industrial powers (and note that China does not). Both Europe and America have promised their help to steer Russia into the WTO.
The great question that is coming onto the table is whether Russia becomes so aligned with the West that it becomes a member of NATO. This is not an outlandish prospect. President Clinton, speaking in Aachen, Germany, in June 2000, had suggested that both the EU and NATO should "keep the door open" for eventual Russian and Ukrainian membership. President Bush used a similarly vague formula of eventual welcome at his meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia. But in light of Russian support for the war on terrorism, the prospect of a historic Russian turn to the West, and eventual membership of NATO, looked far more serious.
The European allies have begun to think what this means, and are not entirely sure they like it. Poland and Hungary and the Czechs did not join the NATO alliance in order to climb into bed with the Russians, but to keep them outside the bedroom.
More than that, remember that NATO is at its base a military alliance that requires members to defend one another. Bringing Russia into NATO means giving an open-ended guarantee to the sanctity of Russia's Siberian frontiers, against any putative Chinese or Islamic threats. Americans have lived for over 50 years with a commitment to send their troops to die on the Rhine to defend Western Europe. A commitment to send them — as well as British, French and German soldiers — to die on the banks of the Amur River in order to defend Siberia is quite a stretch.
Assume that the treaty of Crawford Ranch is a big success, and that Russia starts the long process of signing up to the West's key institutions, from NATO to the World Trade Organization, from the IMF to the European Union. Now consider how this new alliance of Russia, Europe and North America is going to others.
To generals sitting in Beijing, it will appear that the American encirclement of China is becoming complete, stretching from Japan and Korea in the north and east to the Russian frontier on China's western borders.
To Ayatollahs and Mullahs and Muftis in their mosques throughout the Islamic world, still pondering Osama bin Laden's impassioned denunciations of “the new Crusaders,” an enlarged NATO that includes Russia could well look like Christendom in arms. Whether Protestants, Catholics, Lutheran or Greek and Russian Orthodox, they all look like Christianity to Islam.
To Africans and Asians, and to those who have read Samuel Huntingdon's ominous book “The Clash of Civilizations” about the future of the world after the Cold War, the new alliance of the northern hemisphere, stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostock, will look like the white folks' club.
This may be a good idea. Russian raw materials, from oil and gas to the mineral wealth of Siberia, could be essential to Western prosperity if Islamic fundamentalists interrupt the oil supplies from the Persian Gulf. Russia's 140 million consumers, at last beginning to clamber up the prosperity ladder, offer tempting new markets. And if Samuel Huntingdon is right and the 21st century is to be defined by the anti-Western resentments of Chinese and Islamic civilizations, then better to have Russia on the Western side than aligning with the others.
But the stakes are awesome, the risks are high and there are no guarantees of Russian stability or Putin's survival.
This is a debate that needs to get out of the diplomatic chambers, the think tanks and the barbecue deck of Bush’s Crawford, Texas, ranch and into the parliaments and Congresses and talk shows of the West. Do we want the Russians in NATO or not?
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