US and Russia: damage wreaked by the arrogance of power

NEXT week’s G-8 summit will probably be the last such meeting for Presidents George W Bush and Vladimir Putin.

Six years ago, at their first meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and somehow spotted the soul of a Christian gentleman, not that of a secret policeman. Next week, they shouldn’t be surprised if they see a mirror of each other, because both men have exemplified the arrogance of power.

Bush and Putin both came to power in 2000, a year when their countries were scrambling to regain international respect — Russia from the chaos of the Yeltsin years and the United States from the failed impeachment of President Clinton. Each country thought it was getting an unthreatening mediocrity. But both men, on finding themselves in positions of authority, ruled from their default positions: Bush as an evangelical convinced that God was on America’s side, and Putin as a KGB graduate convinced that all power comes from intimidation and threats.

And what was the result?

In America, Bush undermined the rule of law with warrantless domestic surveillance, erosion of due process and defence of torture, in addition to misleading the public and refusing to heed expert advice or recognise facts on the ground. From the tax cuts in 2001 to the war in Iraq, Bush’s self-righteous certitude led him to believe he could say and do anything to get his way.

The damage Bush’s self-confidence and self-delusion has inflicted was magnified by his gross overestimation of America’s power. Quite simply, he thought that America could go it alone in pursuing his foreign policy because no one could stop him. Unlike his father, he thought that allies were more of a hindrance than a help; except for Tony Blair. Four years later, Bush’s arrogance and mendacity have been exposed for the entire world, and the American public.

Putin also succumbed to the same arrogance of power. Buoyed by high oil prices, he now seeks to bestride the world as if the social calamities that bedevil Russia — a collapsing population, a spiralling AIDS and tuberculosis crisis, corruption mushrooming to levels unimagined by Yeltsin — do not matter. At a high-level security meeting in Munich last February, Putin, who usually draws on the secretive, manipulative and confrontational Cold War paradigm of what constitutes Russian diplomacy lashed out at the United States with the sort of language unheard of since Khrushchev said, “We will bury you”. American actions were “unilateral”, “illegitimate”, and had forged a “hotbed of further conflicts”.

Putin’s assessment of US unilateralism (if stripped of its overheated rhetoric) may be correct; the trouble is that he lacks credibility to extol moderation in foreign policy. High oil prices have helped him rebuild and centralise the “strong state”. But his recent attempts to use Russia’s energy resources for political coercion in Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus and elsewhere have exposed Russia as an unreliable partner, unnerving even the Chinese, who do not wish to see a reconstituted Russian empire on their border.

In addition, Putin’s monomaniacal drive to centralise power is driving out the very expertise that the country needs to flourish. Shell and BP are being expelled from the oil industry at the very moment that Russian oil production is declining dramatically. His embittered attempts to counter American power are equally short-sighted: helping Iran develop its nuclear program and selling high-tech weapons to China are hardly in Russia’s long-term interest.

Everyone can now see the gross and historic failures of the Bush presidency. Indeed, the American people have preempted the historians, rebuking Bush by electing a Democratic Congress in November 2006.

Unlike America, however, Russia’s people have not yet understood the price of arrogant power run amuck.

Nina Khrushcheva teaches international affairs at The New School in New York.