It is not yet clear how the Iraq crisis will end. But it's already clear what it has exposed - the serious tensions just beneath the surface of the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Last Friday night, I found myself in Moscow watching a CNN report from the White House that some U.S. officials suspect that the Russians and Iraqis may have cooked up the whole Iraq crisis in order to help Baghdad escape U.N. sanctions.Wow. That's a serious charge. We haven't heard that kind of conspiracy talk since Khrushchev was pounding his shoe at the United Nations. But after meeting here with Russian officials and analysts I can report that such charges certainly reflect the prevailing mood of U.S.-Russian ties.
The U.S.-Russia relationship has gone in the past seven years from a strategic partnership, to a pragmatic partnership, to a relationship of benign neglect, to a relationship heading for malign neglect.
Several factors are combining to push Russo-American relations downhill. One is a global phenomenon: There is a growing backlash against America's overwhelming economic and military superiority.
Do you know what Iran calls America today? Not "the Great Satan." Iran calls America "the Capital of Global Arrogance." Unfortunately, that's also what the French, the Malaysians, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Germans call Washington behind its back.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is tapping into this undercurrent of resentment against the United States. In the 1990 Persian Gulf War, Saddam played the Arab Robin Hood, stealing from the Arab rich, Kuwait, to give to the Arab poor. This time he's playing Luke Skywalker standing up to the American Evil Empire.
The sense that America wants to decide everything but pay for nothing resonates far and wide. Russian commentator Aleksei Pushkov said that "the attitude here now is that Russia should be a balancing force to correct situations where America gets infatuated with its own power."
It's not that France, Russia or Malaysia wants to confront America. They just want to irritate it - even though they know they need America to deal with the world's bad guys, indeed BECAUSE they need America.
At the same time, the termites have been eating away at the core U.S.-Russia relationship. Arnold Horelick, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment, remarked that in America "Russia is viewed more and more as a problem and less and less as an opportunity" - a problem because of its loose nukes, mafia crime and all-too-free market for arms buyers. The growing attitude in Washington is that Russia's elites are not entirely competent to manage their own affairs.
From the Russian side, there is still resentment at the way NATO expansion is being shoved down their throats - a brain-dead Clinton move that has put the most pro-American Russians on the defensive.
Yes, there still are cushions. Yeltsin still believes in the U.S.-Russia relationship and still delivers in the crunch. And there is now a web of economic ties between Russia and America, which is the largest foreign investor in Russia. Still, if the relationship doesn't become more positive soon, it will become more negative, and as Russia recovers its strength, it will become more difficult.
Now is precisely the time when the United States should be taking advantage of Yeltsin's continued leadership to set a new course in the relationship.
New York Times News Service