Putin, Absent at the G-8 and NATO Summits

On May 4, just three days after his inauguration in the Kremlin, Putin met behind closed doors at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside of Moscow, with Tom Donilon, White House National Security Advisor, who had the task of transmitting Barack Obama’s determination to strengthen cooperation with Russia. Donilon returned from that trip knowing that Putin would not attend the G-8 Summit, today and on Saturday at Camp David, nor the NATO summit taking place on May 20 and 21 in Chicago. He would not attend despite the gesture that was made to change the location of the G-8 so that Russia would feel more comfortable.

In this way, what was going to be the first meeting between Obama and Putin, as president, has been postponed until the G-20 in Los Cabos (Mexico), scheduled for June 18 and 19. And the rumors have not waited long to arise.

Some have pointed to the newly emerging tensions between Russia and the U.S. for Putin’s response to protests by the opposition. Others have pointed out more reasons related to internal tensions and power struggles.

Anyway, there is no doubt that the next two summits scheduled for this month will greatly affect the relationship between the two countries. The first summit is for matters of global security; the second concerns the need to accommodate Russia’s participation in building the missile shield of NATO.

Regarding global security, two issues are particularly important for the G-8 (besides the economy). First, the Iranian nuclear proliferation program, whose round of negotiations resumed again in April after more than a year of blockade and with a positive assessment by the leaders at the end of the first day. Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council, participates in these negotiations and their cooperation is essential in solving one of the main problems of this time.

The same can be said, by maintaining the strategic relationship the two countries have since the Cold War, of Russia’s role in resolving the crisis in Syria — a country whose situation is deteriorating every day and where the possibility of failure of the Kofi Annan plan and the outbreak of war continues to grow.

On the other hand, it is also central to the NATO summit in Russia for positions closer to the system for anti-missile shields. The main objective of this defensive system is to protect Europe and the U.S. from possible ballistic missiles of short and medium range from Iran and North Korea. But Russia is skeptical of the true ends of a shield it believes violates its own safety.

In 2009, the “adaptive phased approach (EPAA)” released by Obama appeared to placate the tensions generated by both countries and allowed the “New START” treaty to be signed, where Russia and the United States did a strategic jump to combat the proliferation of atomic weapons. In late 2010 during the Lisbon Summit, the Russians agreed to explore possible cooperation in defense of anti-missile NATO.

However, the Russians’ distrust has started to reappear, in part, due to Washington’s inability to provide legal (and not exclusively political) guarantees that the construction of the anti-missile system in Europe will not hinder any potential strategies of Russia.

So much so that recently the boss of the Russian state, Nikolai Makarov, affirmed that Russia is not discarding the ability to authorize preemptive strikes to destroy the missile shield deployed in European territory if their safety is threatened.

Among the main arguments used, on one side, is the uncertainty of the threat that Russia may be in the later stages of the EPAA for strategic ballistic missiles, and the opposition to military infrastructure deployment of the U.S. in the territory of countries that were incorporated into NATO after 1999, as Steven Pifer reflects in a recently published article by Brookings Institute.

Given the matters that will be discussed at the two summits and their severity, it would have been desirable to have the presence of the President of the Russian Federation. Apart from their value in themselves, we cannot forget that relations between Russia and the United States are now indispensable — especially when the negotiation of the issues under discussion will be extended in time and its solution cannot be considered separately, but as a succession.

There is a possible acceptable solution to these problems.

We must do everything possible to make the proposal that led to the Putin-Donilon meeting materialize. That would be the time when President Barack Obama might deservingly enjoy the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 2009.