At Crux of Summit: Can the U.S. and Russia Be Friends?

For all the frantic, down-to-the-wire negotiations involving nuclear warheads and how many each country should keep, the U.S.-Russian summit this week at heart poses this question: Can the former foes, whose bitter rivalry divided the world for half a century, truly be friends?

The premise of the summit, which follows three earlier meetings between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, is that they can.

The two unlikely new political pals--a toughened former KGB spy and a blueblood Texas oilman, son of a former president--intend to put on a demonstration of their nations’ new bonds, complete with an overnight stay by Putin at the Bush ranch in Texas, an honor bestowed to date on no other head of state.

“The most important part of this summit for Putin is positioning Russia as America’s junior partner,” said Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank that is co-hosting a Putin speech in Washington on Tuesday. “Putin understands Russia can’t be equal. Its resources and capabilities are entirely different. But he wants to be treated as a partner. And if that happens, all other elements will fall into place.”

One of the two high-profile summit issues is the future of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the cornerstone of modern arms agreements. Putin backs the pact, while Bush wants to end or amend it in order to pursue a controversial missile defense program.

Negotiators for the two countries have been seeking an agreement under which the United States would remain committed to the ABM treaty while Russia would tolerate more “robust” testing of technology for the proposed missile shield--as long as it was kept informed of such efforts.

The other key issue on the summit table is whether to slash both countries’ nuclear arsenals by up to two-thirds over the next decade as a symbol of their new trust.

In part because of squabbling among U.S. officials over how much the Pentagon is willing to cut, the White House has tried to lower expectations about a major agreement on either front.

A long-awaited U.S. strategic review, which has finally been completed, calls for a reduction of the 7,000 U.S. warheads to between 1,800 and 2,300. However, a senior Bush administration official said the Pentagon is “not entirely relaxed” about the figures. Russia, which can no longer afford to maintain its stock of about 6,000 warheads, would prefer that the lower end of the range be 1,500.

“I wouldn’t expect any particular arrangements to come out of any particular meeting,” Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice cautioned late last week. “Not every meeting has to be accompanied like the old summits were with the Soviet Union by arms control agreements.”

But Washington and Moscow are now sufficiently in sync with each other’s thinking and needs that diplomats from both capitals are comparatively calm as they discuss what they claim is inevitable agreement on both issues. Whether they get it this time or the next doesn’t seem to affect the broader process.

“The president has been saying since he first started that [the evolving U.S.-Russian relationship] is larger than the security relationship. And so economic relations are important, political relations are important. This is a very different relationship now,” Rice told reporters.

The Sept. 11 attacks on the United States are partly responsible, Rice said, because they created new opportunities for U.S.-Russian cooperation and gave a “new impetus” to reconciliation efforts.

The terrorism jolted Moscow because of Russia’s past and current problems with Islamic extremism. Indeed, Putin recently said he agonized immediately after the attacks about whether he had done enough to warn the United States about terrorist dangers emanating from Afghanistan. He was the first foreign leader to call Bush on Sept. 11--and the first to offer assistance.

Putin quickly signed on to the U.S.-led counter-terrorism coalition because it addressed an issue dear to his heart: collective security.

The Bush administration, in its scramble to forge an international response to terrorism, was in turn forced to adopt a less unilateral approach to the rest of the world.

The attacks also gave Putin “political cover” for pursuing an agenda he already had in place to strengthen Russia’s ties with the West, and particularly the U.S., said Andrew Kuchins of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

A host of other issues are just as important to the Russian leader as arms control in removing remnants of the Cold War and building the foundation for a future strategic alliance, envoys say.

For instance, the two nations are making progress on redefining Russia’s relationship with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“Talk of Russia joining NATO is, at best, many years premature,” said Antony Blinken, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But enhancing cooperation between Russia and NATO is overdue. Counter-terrorism, maritime security, theater missile defense, securing and destroying stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and [achieving political stability in] the Balkans are all areas that would benefit from Russia and NATO working more closely together.”

Expediting Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization is another area where many officials expect progress. Moscow’s membership in the WTO would encourage economic reform, Rice said.

Another issue concerns the repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which places limits on U.S.-Russian trade because of Soviet-era restrictions on Jewish emigration. The administration has been negotiating with Congress to rescind it.

“Putin is looking for a whole bunch of signs, not to convince him, but to convince the folks back home--the military, the former Communists who want to play Russia’s cards in other directions--that the United States now thinks of Russia as a Western country,” said the senior State Department official.

“And we understand too that the more we show Russia’s future is in the West, the more it will head in that direction--and embrace the kind of democratic and economic reforms that will show it is one of us.”