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As they prepare for the event, curtain-raising commentary will obligingly create a litmus test to determine whether the two leaders will be able to reverse the open deterioration of ties between Washington and Moscow, set off largely by the arrest of Yukos oil company chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky in October 2003. Afterward, wrap-up reports will inevitably pronounce raised hopes for improvement until another move by Putin -- an intervention in a foreign election, an ill-advised arrest of a prominent citizen, a government appropriation of a private company, a bungled military operation like last year's Beslan siege operation or another crackdown against a democratic institution or the press -- sends correspondents scrambling to report yet another slip in relations and Putin's erstwhile Western allies scratching their heads over what went wrong yet again.
Relations should be a lot worse. As the sole superpower, the United States bears greater responsibility than any other Western state to pressure Russia to democratize its political system and criticize Putin's myriad moves in the opposite direction. In fact, beyond a pitifully minimal level of lip service, Washington will not do so under this administration.
That's no mere oversight -- although you wouldn't know it listening to White House rhetoric. During his first presidential election campaign in 2000, Bush spent a great deal of time lambasting the Clinton administration for its Russia policy, vowing to de-emphasize personal relations and strictly uphold American national security. The following year, U.S.-Russia relations nosedived with the arrest of FBI special agent and Moscow spy Robert Hanssen and Bush's retaliatory order removing 50 Russian diplomats from the United States. So when he first met Putin in Slovenia in June 2001, Bush shocked the world by saying he'd looked into his soul and liked what he saw. (Or was it that he only saw what he liked?) George and Volodya were declared the best of friends and the looming crisis in relations suddenly averted.
Bush's incredible announcement still serves as grist for countless jokes. But Bush wasn't kidding. He and Pootie-Poot, as he nicknamed his Russian counterpart, are indeed political soul mates. It's well known that Putin, a former KGB officer, has brought many Soviet sensibilities to his presidency, staffing his administration and numerous state agencies and enterprises with his intelligence-service cronies. Among many other moves, he has put an end to gubernatorial elections and an independent national media, exploited the court system to attack political rivals and overseen the transformation of parliament from an independent branch of government into a Kremlin tool.
But the U.S. president, who proclaims his desire to spread freedom around the world, is no less astute a student of the kinds of political lessons the Soviet Politburo was well-placed to teach. Like Putin, who began his war in Chechnya in 1999, Bush launched a campaign in Iraq he claimed was part of the war on terrorism. In fact, that abstract conflict is being exploited as a threat to silence critics of his ideologically driven changes to the political system. Two of those have been to cut Congress out of policy discussions to a degree not seen in recent history and to bar critical news media from the White House.
It's curious that the largest domestic policy battles that both countries' presidents now face are over cuts in welfare benefits. Bush is doing so with single-minded determination, partly by spreading disinformation about the U.S. social security system's weakness meant to help dismantle the New Deal.
In 2003, the White House sold the Iraq war to an ill-informed public by inventing a threat from weapons of mass destruction. Now it's using a cynically concocted fear -- social security's looming bankruptcy -- to threaten opponents of his unfolding strategy of cutting corporate-profit and personal-income taxes for the wealthiest Americans while racking up a record $427 billion federal deficit in order to starve government programs into oblivion. The administration's austere $2.57 trillion budget for 2006 would deeply slash Medicaid, housing, veterans' health care, scientific research, and environmental and law enforcement spending, while increasing funds for defense and simply leaving out many tens of billions that will be needed to foot the bill for the war in Iraq.
Like Putin, Bush's overarching goal has been to consolidate and preserve political power. The fact that most political commentators refuse to discuss Washington's radical swing to the right and merely evaluate the looming budget battle as if it were business as usual shows just how brilliant the White House strategy has been. The administration has already won: To many beltway pundits, the real merits of social security reform are apparently less important than simple speculation over the chances of getting it passed. So the horse trading continues as the White House pushes forward with steely determination.
With those kinds of priorities, don't expect any changes from the Slovakia summit. Putin will continue rolling back democratic institutions and waging his atrocious war in Chechnya. Don't even expect one of the most crucial tasks for U.S. national security -- securing Russia's aging nuclear and chemical weapons materials, such as the almost 2 million decaying shells in the Siberian town of Shchuchye -- to see any significant progress this month.
The White House may occasionally decry the erosion of democracy in Russia, but Bush will actually do nothing to stop it (even if his cheeky pal satisfies public opinion in his own country by railing against Washington's imperialist policies). Both heads of what have become eerily similar administrations understand each other as only true soul mates can.
Gregory Feifer, a former Moscow Times staff reporter who now lives in New York, contributed this piece to The Moscow Times. His book, "Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer, The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames" (with Victor Cherkashin), was published by Basic Books in January.
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