The Russia Conundrum
The corruption in Russia today is staggering. It took bribes to airline agents of only 2,000 and 3,000 rubles, or about $75 and $100, to allow a Chechen woman and an accomplice to board separate flights and blow them up. Ninety died. A raid on a school in Beslan was facilitated by a police officer who helped the terrorists get through checkpoints: Three hundred thirty-eight children and adults died.
Still, Russia's achievements are real. Private property is widely accepted, the Communist Party has no chance of returning to power, the bureaucracy has been cut, and military spending is down from about 30 percent of GNP to about 3 percent. If Putin looks at times like a czar incarnate, he also looks like a bold market reformer.
It is in foreign policy that the changes in Russia are most worrisome. Witness Putin's attempt to steal Ukraine's presidential election, his interference in Abkhazia and Moldova, his support for the dictatorship in Belarus, his sale to the extremist Iranian regime not only of a nuclear power plant but also of antiaircraft weapons that could be deployed against the West, his willingness to open a dialogue with Hamas terrorists when he stonewalled Chechen Islamic terrorists, and the anti-American rhetoric accompanying his missile testing.
Yet Putin is an intelligent and clear-minded leader with whom it is in our interest to have a dialogue. Russia is integral to defeating terrorism, achieving a non-nuclear Korean peninsula, stemming the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, enhancing our energy supply, and leaning on Iran.
President Bush once said he looked into Putin's eyes and saw "the man's soul," calling him a man he "could do business with." Many now look into Putin's soul and see a former KGB colonel who is a natural authoritarian. Let America beware of the latter but respond to the former.
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