Should Putin host the G8?

05 July 2006

By allowing Russia to stage the summit we have accepted her as one of us, says Anne Applebaum. This G8 will give its tacit approval to the theft of private assets, the destruction of the rule of law and the violation of human rights

All of these changes at home have, of course, coincided with Putin’s use of gas-pipeline blackmail in what Russia calls ‘the near abroad’ (and by extension Western Europe); his attempts to undermine the governments of Georgia and Ukraine and his increasingly ambiguous role in Iranian nuclear and Middle East peace negotiations. Yet none of these changes has prevented Bush, Blair and everyone else heading for St Petersburg, where the leader of the ‘oil and gas superpower’ with a ‘sovereign democracy’ and ‘free-market principles’ will welcome them with open arms.

And here is the real crux of the matter: it’s not the meeting itself that counts; it’s the context. President Putin has met with Western statesmen many times, and rightly so. Indeed, advocates of realpolitik are absolutely right to argue that we should have normal relations with Russia, that President Putin is a potential ally on many issues, that Russia is not North Korea. But a G8 summit is not a normal, bilateral meeting. The G8 is an informal gathering of the world’s largest industrial democracies. By allowing Russia to head it, we have accepted Russia as one of us.

And after everyone goes home? The Kremlin — along with Venezuelans, Iranians, Arab leaders and other oil tyrannies — will sit back, laugh and agree that the leaders of the so-called West merely pay lip service to the ideals of freedom and democracy; they don’t really believe in them. If you have enough oil, they’ll let you into their fancy clubs anyway. As Putin’s defence minister recently put it, ‘In the contemporary world, only power is respected.’ As Putin’s adviser recently put it, ‘They [the West] talk about democracy but they’re thinking about our natural resources.’