Strongman (28 page)

The audience was already bristling, as Putin launched a blistering attack on what he described as the USA’s attempt to rule the world as its ‘sole master’:

The United States was guilty of ‘ideological stereotypes’ and ‘double standards.’ He accused the Americans of lecturing Russia about democracy, while invading other
countries, flouting international law and causing an arms race. He suggested that the US, instead of destroying missiles intended for elimination under a recent arms treaty, might ‘hide them
in a warehouse for a rainy day’. Referring to President Bush’s missile defence plans, Putin condemned the ‘militarisation of outer space’, and proposed a treaty to outlaw
such weapons. The expansion of NATO, he said, was a ‘provocation’:

Putin warned that a new iron curtain was descending across Europe – and his words seemed to ring with hurt, as he pointed out that Russia too – just like the East Europeans –
had abandoned communism but was not getting any credit for it:

Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was sitting in the front row, scribbling on a piece of paper throughout the speech. Afterwards, his aides, Dan Fata and Eric Edelman, rushed to ask
him whether they could help him rewrite the speech he was due to give the next morning, in view of what they had just heard. Gates pulled out the paper he had been writing on and said: ‘Well,
tell me what you think about this?’

Fata and Edelman listened, looked at each other, and said, ‘Sir, that’s fantastic!’

‘Well, it’s not my first rodeo,’ responded their boss.
⁷
Indeed, Robert Gates had many years of experience, not unlike Putin’s,
having joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1966, rising to become its director under President George H.W. Bush. He referred to this when he rose to make a conciliatory response to Putin at
the Munich Security Conference the next morning.

‘Many of you have backgrounds in diplomacy or politics,’ he said. ‘I have, like your second speaker yesterday, a starkly different background – a career in the spy
business. And, I guess, old spies have a habit of blunt speaking. However, I have been to re-education camp, spending four and half years as a university president and dealing with faculty. And, as
more than a few university presidents have learned in recent years, when it comes to faculty it is either “be nice” or “be gone.” The real world we inhabit is different and
a much more complex world than that of 20 or 30 years ago. We all face many common problems and challenges that must be addressed in partnership with other countries, including Russia. One Cold War
was quite enough.’

The analyst Dmitry Trenin described Putin’s Munich speech as the start of a new phase in his thinking. If phase one was ‘rapprochement with Europe and the US’, and phase two
(following the Iraq war) was ‘non-alignment, but reluctance to confront the West’, then phase three, after Munich, was one of ‘coerced partnership’. Trenin wrote:
‘Putin laid out conditions under which he expected to coerce America and Europe into partnership with Russia: accept us as we are, treat us as equals, and establish cooperation based on
mutual interests.’
⁸
In the end, Trenin wrote, the ‘coerced partnership’ never took place, because in 2008 and early 2009 Russia began
moving towards increased isolation from its would-be partners.

But during 2007, in the months following the Munich speech, President Putin did make one last attempt to reach an accommodation with the Americans over missile defence. Perhaps he hoped that the
speech would shock them into cooperation. The two sides would come tantalisingly close to an agreement, and when the attempt failed, this time it would be as much the Americans’ fault as
Putin’s.

The threat from Iran … or Russia

From the start of his presidency, George W. Bush had insisted that the planned national missile defence (NMD) system was intended to protect the United States from attack by
‘rogue states’ such as Iran and North Korea. Even if they did not have the capability yet, they appeared to be building medium and long-range systems that might one day reach America.
The trajectory of Iranian missiles, it was argued, would pass over Eastern Europe, and so the European element of the NMD system would require a radar facility in the Czech Republic (to track
missiles in the early stage of their flight) and interceptor missiles in Poland (to shoot them down).

‘From the very outset,’ Putin’s foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko recalls, ‘these plans were unacceptable to us.’
⁹
The Russians rejected the idea on several grounds: Iran did not yet have the long-range missiles against which the NMD system was aimed and would not have them for many years; even if they did,
Poland and the Czech Republic were not the best places to intercept them; and, crucially, the Czech radar would be able to spy on Russian facilities, while the Polish missiles would undermine
Russia’s own nuclear deterrent.

Until now, Russia had criticised the plans but offered no constructive alternative. But in June 2007 Putin came to a G8 summit in the German seaside resort of Heiligendamm with plans of his own.
Apart from the main summit business Putin had a bilateral meeting with President Bush, for which he had prepared so thoroughly that it took the American by surprise. In the week before, he
consulted military experts, and the night before, in his room, Putin sketched out maps of missile trajectories and other data. Now he placed them in front of Bush and expounded in great detail why
the American plans were all wrong. According to an aide who was present, Putin ‘delivered a real thesis’, explaining where the radars needed to be, why Bush was being misled by his
advisers about Iran and North Korea, and why Russia felt threatened.
¹⁰

Bush is said to have looked at him and said, ‘OK, I see this is really serious for you. Nobody advised me you treat this so seriously.’

‘We can’t sleep for thinking about this!’ said Putin.

‘Well, as your friend,’ said Bush, ‘I can promise that we’ll look into what you’ve said.’

But Putin had a new and concrete proposal, designed to trump the American move – while simultaneously calling their bluff on whether the system was really aimed against Iran and not
Russia, as Bush claimed. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I spoke to the president of Azerbaijan yesterday. We have a radar station there, in a place called Gabala. I’m willing to offer
this to you. It’s closer to Iran. We can have a joint system. You use our radar in Azerbaijan, and there’ll be no need for one in the Czech Republic.’

Putin had a stick as well as a carrot. Just days before the summit he had hinted darkly that if the Americans deployed their missile interceptors in Eastern Europe then Russia would have to
retaliate by re-training Russian missiles on European targets. Now he offered to remove that threat if the Americans rethought their plans: ‘It would allow us to refrain from changing our
position and retargeting our missiles. There would be no need to deploy our missile strike system in the immediate vicinity of our European borders, and no need to deploy the US missile strike
system in outer space.’

It was an opportunity the Americans could not ignore: for the first time, Putin was offering to drop his opposition to missile defence, under the condition that Russia would also be involved in
it. Bush promised to talk to his military advisers about it.

But within a month, sensing he had Bush’s ear, Putin was offering more. On 1 July he flew to Kennebunkport in the state of Maine for informal talks at the Bush family home at
Walker’s Point, a little peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. He took a speedboat ride with George W. Bush and his father and ate a supper of lobster and swordfish with the family,
together with the foreign ministers and national security advisers from each side – Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, and Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Prikhodko. ‘It was a very relaxed
setting,’ says Rice. ‘We sat, I’ll never forget, in this lovely chintz-covered living room, with the ocean in the background.’
¹¹

Next day they did a spot of fishing, and Putin pulled out more initiatives. Not only would he offer the Gabala radar in Azerbaijan but he would get it modernised. And then there was a brand-new
radar the Russians were about to commission at Armavir in southern Russia. That could also be used. Together they would form a joint early-warning system for common missile defence involving not
just the US and Russia but the whole of NATO. The NATO–Russia Council could finally have something concrete to work on. Putin offered to host an ‘information exchange centre’ in
Moscow and proposed there could be a similar one in Brussels too. ‘This would be a self-contained system that would work in real time,’ Putin went on. ‘We believe that there would
then be no need to install any more facilities in Europe – I mean those facilities proposed for the Czech Republic and the missile base in Poland.’

Bush wasn’t too sure about the latter point, but the rest of Putin’s proposal made a lot of sense to him – especially as Putin seemed to place these specific missile defence
proposals in the context of a whole new strategic alliance. As Sergei Lavrov recalled later: ‘Putin stressed that if we could work together on this, it would, to all intents and purposes,
make us allies. The proposal was prompted by a wish to create an absolutely new relationship between us.’

The talks ended, and the two leaders were about to go outside to brief the press. Stephen Hadley took President Bush aside for a moment: ‘That was a terrific statement, exactly what
we’ve been looking for from Putin. Do you think he’d be willing to say that publicly?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s ask him,’ said Bush. He approached the Russian leader and told him he thought it would help accelerate progress between the two countries if he would
repeat on camera what he had said privately.
¹²

Putin was only too happy to oblige. ‘Such cooperation,’ he told the press, ‘would bring about a major change in Russian– American relations regarding security. In fact,
this would lead to the gradual development of a strategic partnership in the area of security.’

So far, so good, but the Americans had yet to see what kind of facility Putin was offering. The neo-cons in the defence establishment were highly sceptical, and saw the move as a ploy to drive a
wedge between the US and the Poles and Czechs. Under-secretary of defence Eric Edelman recalls: ‘I was doubtful that this actually indicated a Russian desire to cooperate on missile defence.
My view was that a lot of what they were doing was tactically aimed at preventing us moving forward on missile defence by drawing us into unproductive discussions or into other
issues.’
¹³

In September a team of experts led by the director of the Missile Defence Agency, General Patrick O’Reilly, flew out to Azerbaijan to inspect the Gabala radar station. They were not
impressed by what turned out to be an ageing Soviet installation. The neo-cons were not unhappy to have their suspicions confirmed. According to Edelman, ‘What [O’Reilly] said was that
this was a radar that had some capability. That it could be useful. But that it was also quite old. That it needed major upgrade. And that in order in the future to really play a role it was going
to need some considerable expenditure and work.’

The team concluded that Putin’s offer could help only to monitor the threat of a missile attack. But the American vision was of a system that could defend against it – and for that
they would still need other sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The more Russia-friendly axis in the administration accepted this, but did not want to throw away an olive branch they had not even expected to see, after Putin’s Munich speech.
Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates met alone in the defence secretary’s office at the Pentagon. Rice recalls: ‘We’re both Russianists, and we said: what we have to do is, we have
to break the code somehow, we have to find a way to scratch the itch that the Russians have about being left out of this, about it being in the Czech Republic and Poland, which was obviously a lot
of the problem. And are there some things we can do as confidence-building measures?’