Putin the Poker Player

Perhaps the only kind of Russian leader who can skillfully play diplomatic poker is an ex-KGB spy. Indeed, President Vladimir Putin shows as much mastery at international diplomacy as he does in handling Russian domestic affairs. Not since Gustav Stresemann, Weimar Germany’s foreign minister, played the Soviet Union and the West off against each other, has a leader with such a weak hand played his cards so effectively. Putin’s latest moves in North Korea, and his careful tap- dance over Iraq, are just the latest examples.

Diplomacy, in its traditional form, was never Russia’s strong suit. Under the tsars, Russia was often isolated. Even when part of alliances, such as the Triple Alliance with Bismarck’s Germany and the Habsburg Empire, or the Entente with France before the First World War, Russia was kept at a distance.

Russian leaders typically dealt with their fear of isolation and encirclemen by going out of their way to appear threatening. In the Soviet era, the distances between Russia and its neighbors became unbridgeable chasms, with the USSR ringed either by hostile states or weak, servile ones. For example, after Mao’s revolution of 1949, Stalin wasted no time in antagonizing Communist China.

Not until Boris Yeltsin did Russia take its first steps to bridge these divides. But he could never get over Russia’s lost superpower status. As a result, his periodic growls to assert Russia’s wounded pride ultimately made him seem unreliable. True, his democratic Russia was permitted some role in global diplomacy. In Yugoslavia, former Premier Victor Chernomyrdin joined Finnish President Matti Ahtissari in resolving the Kosovo crisis of 1999. But this hardly amounted to recognition of Russia’s indispensability. After all, NATO troops entered Kosovo without Russian consent.

A realist in his bones, Putin recognizes Russia’s changed status. But this recognition is not a confession of weakness. Instead, it reflects his clear-sighted analysis of Russia’s current predicament, and of the country’s need to create, recreate, and sustain friendly relations among all of its neighbors if lost influence is to be regained.

Since Putin took the reigns of power in 2000 he has become almost everybody’s best friend. Belarus’s lunatic strongman Aliaksandr Lukashenka, US President George W. Bush, Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi, and China’s Jiang Zemin all seem to be like him. Even North Korea’s erratic leader, the hermit Kim Jong Il, who almost never travels outside his country, has visited Putin twice in recent years.

In fact, North Korea provides a textbook example of Putin’s diplomatic method. He cultivated Kim when other leaders neglected him. In the summer of 2002, the North Korean leader visited Russia to learn about “non-intrusive,” or not entirely Western capitalism, while riding in an armored train on the Trans- Siberian railway.

Kim seemed to reason that, while Russia was no longer Soviet, it retained enough socialist overtones to work with his country. The benefit of this “educational experiment” was that Putin became one of the few people to whom Kim Jong Il listens.

But Putin’s method is to maintain warm relations with everyone. Even as he hosted Kim in Moscow, Russian diplomats in Pyongyang were helping to protect an American spy in North Korea. Previously spurned by America in its attempts to use its longstanding contacts in Asia, this assistance appears to have convinced America that Russia can be of real help in its diplomacy with North Korea.

Final negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions will undoubtedly need to take place between the US and Kim Jong Il. What Putin may be able to provide is the diplomatic cover Bush needs to maintain his pose of not negotiating directly with the North Koreans. The US president will avoid seeming to surrender to the threat of nuclear blackmail.

As a diplomatic practitioner, Putin has learned history’s lessons and is determined not to see his country ringed by enmity. Instead of Russia’s borders draining his country’s economy, he envisions Russia as a transit point between east and west. He also sees it as an engine of growth for countries in search of the heavy industrial equipment Russia makes. A rail link between South Korea and Siberia, to carry Korean and Japanese goods west and Russian resource exports east, may be but one positive result of any successful deal he may broker on the Korean peninsula.

Of course, some of the old suspicions about Russian motives linger in the West, most particularly over Iraq, where Lukoil, Russia’s biggest oil company, recently signed a new deal to develop Iraqi oil fields. But Putin’s interventions in the UN Security Council over Iraq have been far more moderate than those of France and Germany, two of America’s historic allies. Russia has vital national interests to protect in Iraq, including real fears about regional instability spreading into Russia’s south, with its millions of Muslim citizens.

For too long Russia practiced either the diplomacy of the thug or that of the Byzantine. The first made potential partners recoil in fear, the second made them shrink in confusion. But a spy’s stock-in- trade is recruiting and nurturing collaborators. Those skills are now being put on display by Russia’s spymaster president. No one there is complaining.

Nina KHRUSHCHEVA teaches international affairs at the New School University and Columbia University.

© : Project Syndicate, February 2003