Putin and Europe: A Media Sampler

Abstract

Not long after Russian president Vladimir Putin’s aggressive speech at the Munich security conference on February 10, I happened to be having lunch with a friend who is a veteran foreign correspondent and editor. “Of course he’s a shit,” she remarked, “but you have to agree with some of what he said.” In many ways, that sums up the European reaction to Putin’s admittedly provocative words. The Russian president was attending, for the first time, the NATO security conference in Munich, which used to be the sort of Western strategic get-together at which a Russian would no more be welcome than Osama bin Laden at the Council on Foreign Relations. As a guest, his manners were not good. He sharply criticized the George W. Bush administration for maintaining a “unipolar” view of the world and relying too much on force in international relations. He said that the Iraq war had nothing to do with democracy. In an interview with Al Jazeera, the Arab television service, he went further, and said that the United States had done more harm in Iraq than Saddam Hussein. He was particularly outspoken in his criticism of Washington’s plans to establish anti-ballistic missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. He said he did not understand why the United States needs to expand NATO in eastern Europe, when the real dangers to the world are terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, was sitting in the audience at the event in Munich, and passed the speech off diplomatically, remarking wryly that one Cold War was enough. But most American commentators, among them Charles Krauthammer, Anne Applebaum, and David Ignatius, all writing in the Washington Post, saw Putin’s attitude as mere chutzpah. “How dare the bully of Chechnya lecture us,” commented Ignatius, “about our efforts to bring democracy to the world?”