Vlad the Blackmailer

‘We will have to get new targets in Europe,’ Vladimir Putin said in an interview last week. ‘Which weapons will be used …ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or some completely new systems — that’s a technical matter.’ The apparent purpose of this outburst was geopolitical blackmail. Ostensibly at least, the Russian President was warning George W. Bush of terrible consequences should the US pursue its plan to station anti-missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. Not quite Khrushchev banging his shoe, but the closest that Mr Putin has come to such tactics.

Speaking in advance of the G8 summit in Germany, President Bush parried with an attack on Mr Putin’s human rights record. ‘In Russia, reforms that once promised to empower citizens have been derailed, with troubling implications for democratic development,’ Mr Bush said at a conference in Prague. ‘If standing for liberty in the world makes me a dissident, then I’ll wear the title with pride.’

The remark echoed Ronald Reagan’s proud declaration during the Nicaraguan proxy war: ‘I am a contra.’ Yet all this Cold War rhetoric is deceptive. It has been imported to a geopolitical context that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, in which the glacial certainties of Mutually Assured Destruction and straightforward ideological confrontation have been replaced by resurgent nationalisms, the threat of global Islamism, unprecedented population mobility, and the challenge of climate change.

Mr Bush has no desire for this escalation to be more than rhetorical, and has pointedly invited his friend ‘Vladimir’ to a Bush family gathering in Maine in July. Mr Putin, for his part, agreed explicitly to co-operate with a shared anti-missile system seven years ago, and knows that the interception technology is still in development and US Congressional funding far from certain.