Putin on the defensive

By Achin Vanaik

AT THE recent summit meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Russia's President, Mr. Vladimir Putin, said he saw the U.S. as a partner and did not see NATO as a threat. Appropriate noises were made about the NMD issue. All it amounted to on both sides was a stall. The two countries are still playing poker but with the Russians playing from a weaker hand. To say nice things about NATO when it is bent on further expansion eastwards is Moscow's signal to Washington that this expansionary dynamic will still not provoke it to react negatively though no serious analyst in either capital is in any doubt that the central purpose of this expansion is precisely to contain Russia. On the one hand, the Russians are backtracking on NATO, on the other, they are exploring possibilities of a closer tie-up with China, e.g., the Shanghai-5 summit (which preceded the Slovenian one) where the diplomatic centerpiece was a collective declaration of opposition to the NMD.

On NATO, the backtracking is steady and obvious. The former Soviet President, Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev, had extracted a verbal assurance of no NATO expansion whatsoever into Eastern Europe as the quid pro quo for Russian assent to German unification. He has ever since regretted not getting a formal treaty commitment to prevent the U.S.' subsequent betrayal of that pledge. The next Russian effort under Mr. Boris Yeltsin was to explore the possibility of joint Russian-U.S. participation in a European security arrangement either by Russia's joining NATO itself, thereby totally transforming its character, or some other arrangement transcending NATO. The U.S. determinedly trashed Russian hopes on this score giving Mr. Yeltsin only the face- saving comfort of ``consultative status'' for Russia as NATO went about the first stage of its expansion eastwards.

Now Mr. Putin simply seeks to hold the line at the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, while NATO can calmly proceed to the next stage of its expansion by considering the incorporation of all other East European states from Bulgaria to Albania to Macedonia, leaving consideration of the Baltic republics for later. In Ljubljana, Mr. Putin was reduced to disguising the failure of earlier aspirations through attempts at humour. In his international press conference he read out an `old' document which advocated that Russia join NATO, treating it as a joke.

On the NMD, neither side gave away much but once again, it was Mr. Putin somewhat on the defensive. Both the U.S. President, Mr. George W. Bush, and Mr. Putin declared they wanted a continuing dialogue on the issue. But what could a dialogue mean except to bring into question the ABM Treaty? Dialogue does not mean assured modification or agreed repudiation but it does mean giving ground to the U.S. in making the Treaty debatable and therefore opening it up for possible `modification'.

Modification, if it comes about, is simply a face-saving term for the Russians because the only modification acceptable to the U.S. is one which destroys the fundamental purpose of the Treaty - which was to deny either country the right to erect missile defence systems capable of protecting their national territories.

There is no indication that Mr. Putin will go so far. That is why the summit was on this count a stall, an exercise in buying time. But there will come a point when Mr. Putin no longer has this luxury but must decide whether to hold fast on the ABM Treaty and alienate the U.S. or backtrack by accepting treaty modifications. The big difference with this kind of backtracking and that on NATO expansion is that the building of a successful NMD is not as certain as NATO expansion and to that extent the U.S. `advantage' from going ahead with its Star Wars plans is much more problematic. However, if Russia even signals its willingness to consider modifications to the ABM Treaty, this will have serious international ramifications.

China will be gravely alarmed and adjust its nuclear preparations accordingly. European resistance to the NMD will wither not because the current opponents among the NATO allies stop seeing its negative longer-term consequences (exacerbating nuclear tensions between the U.S., Russia and China with its obvious fallout on Europe) but because they would have much less of a leg to stand on if Russia itself exhibits willingness to `accommodate'. In India, any such Russian `accommodation' will be immediately seized upon as justification for why India must not isolate itself by opposing the NMD and indeed why it should endorse this project more enthusiastically. Within the Indian pro-bomb community there are differences on how to react. But these differences should not be taken as intransigent or enduring because behind them are shared assumptions, beliefs and values pertaining to the relationship between nuclear weapons and matters pertaining to Indian security and foreign policy pursuit. It is these commonalities that make them, after all, part of the same pro-bomb community.

At the moment, a minority in this community pushes for a more enthusiastic endorsement of the NMD in the belief that by doing so India will seize the opportunity to dramatically improve its relationship with the U.S. and thus pursue much better its `national interest'. At the other end is a minority who thought Pokhran-II would enhance India's `strategic autonomy', including from the U.S., and are thus seriously disturbed by an unfolding foreign policy dynamic wherein this Indian Government seems ever more determined to pay whatever price required for becoming a U.S. ally. In between, is an essentially pragmatic majority, somewhat uncertain and uneasy about the wider ramifications of the NMD. This group would rather wait to see which way the larger and stronger geo-political winds blow before advocating that the Indian ship of state take this or that tack. If those winds seem to blow in the direction of Russian `accommodation' then the large bulk of the pro-bomb community, including most of its currently more severe critics, will fall in line with the more enthusiastic endorsers of the NMD project.

One of the most striking things about the pro-bomb critics of the NMD was that the thrust of their criticism was not on the horror, stupidity or dangers of the U.S. going in for an NMD, but on the insufficiently astute `diplomacy' shown by the Indian Government in its incautious and overly enthusiastic response to Mr. Bush's new policy direction. The nature of this criticism should occasion no surprise to nuclear opponents in India. For if the central preoccupation of nuclear disarmers everywhere is what dangers the NMD/TMD project represents and what damage its advent does to the prospect of moving towards global disarmament, that of India's pro-bomb `security managers' is something else altogether - how does India benefit or not benefit from supporting or opposing the NMD? And in this calculation of `benefit', the benefits of moving towards disarmament are precluded by the very nature of the nuclear mind-set.

It is not just psychologists who point out that there is something almost pathological about the nuclear mind-set which imprisons its bearers in its convoluted logic. In the name of the virtues of deterrence, the U.S. and Russia accumulated (and continue to have) stock- levels of weapons which are truly insane - the ability to blow themselves and the world up not merely once but many times over. How many pro- nuclearists were prepared to point out that this was an insanity perpetrated by sane people precisely because of the degenerative logic imposed by the `politics of nuclear security'.

Today, the U.S., the strongest and most secure country in the world, in the name of the deficiencies of deterrence, is committing yet another insanity - seeking to take the world to an even more absurd and dangerous level of nuclear development, deployment and arms racing. How many of our strategists are prepared to point out that this is indeed a pathological form of security thinking, to lay the finger of responsibility for this squarely on the U.S., to oppose it firmly and say, even as they support the `politics of nuclear security', that enough is enough? But then their `wisdom' demands that they have more important things to think about like how to promote India's effort at getting a permanent Security Council seat!

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