Putin Edges In on NATO Talks

Peter Baker
Washington Post
Saturday, April 5, 2008

The presidents and prime ministers and their spouses had gathered at the Athenee Palace Hilton hotel for a gala dinner on the final night of the NATO summit when suddenly an unexpected visitor crashed the party -- Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Although Russia does not belong to the alliance, and Putin had not been invited to the dinner, he showed up anyway, to everyone's surprise. The NATO leaders politely made room for him -- as it happened, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had backed out at the last minute, leaving an open seat -- but they were all buzzing at the breach of protocol and its larger meaning.

Putin is the man who came to dinner in more ways than one. Putin's Russia loomed over the summit that ended Friday much as it increasingly looms over Europe these days, an inescapable force that may not be as menacing as during the Cold War but is no longer the docile international welfare recipient of the 1990s either. The Russia he built during an eight-year presidency ending next month has forced its way to the table of European politics, even if uninvited, and competes for influence with the United States.

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Russia succeeded this week in staring down NATO on where it should expand next, persuading Europeans dependent on its plentiful energy supplies to defy President Bush and refuse membership road maps to the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. Anxious about the U.S.-Russia dispute over missile defense, NATO endorsed Bush's system but appealed to him to cut a deal with Putin to avert a new arms race.

"Russia is stronger than it used to be," said Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If Russia objects and is alienated by NATO enlargement, the cost to the West potentially grows higher. . . . We should not allow such objections to dictate NATO policies. On the other hand, to proceed with a plan for European security that doesn't take into account Russian positions would be shortsighted."

Full article here.

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