July 23, 2007	Monday	Rajab 07, 1428

WASHINGTON: Barely three weeks have passed since the United States and Russia angled to patch up their differences at a “lobster summit” and already new strains have exploded into the open.

Since the meeting between presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, Russia has suspended a treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe while it is now locked in a diplomatic standoff with staunch US ally Britain.

And Moscow has issued a veiled threat to deploy rockets on the European Union's border in response to US missile defence plans, throwing oil on the fire of the biggest escalation in tensions since the Cold War.

For all the bonhomie he likes to project into his encounters with Putin, Bush stands accused of missing serial opportunities for better relations by unnecessarily antagonising Russia.“The Bush administration could have pursued quite similar policies yet not ended up with so much friction had its diplomacy been more tactful,” Georgetown University professor of international relations Charles Kupchan said.

“The Russians in many respects feel slighted, as if they have been ignored by the United States,” said Kupchan, who headed national security affairs for Europe in Bill Clinton's White House.

Putin was brushed aside when he rallied to the US cause after the September 11 attacks of 2001, pundits say. Weeks after those strikes, Bush announced that the United States was abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The US withdrawal from the ABM pact, a cornerstone of attempts to prevent the Cold War from turning hot, allowed Bush to press ahead with his anti-missile defence scheme — a decision that is now coming home to roost.

“It's been a propaganda windfall for Putin,” commented F. Stephen Larrabee, a Russia expert at the RAND Corp. security consultancy.

“The administration totally mishandled missile defence from the beginning and now they've backed themselves into a corner,” he said.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in on an acrimonious dispute between Russia and Britain over the murder of an ex-KGB agent in London that last week saw tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.

Rice demanded that Russia honour Britain's request to extradite the chief suspect over the radioactive poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, but insisted that the West did not now face a new Cold War with Moscow.

“Russia is not the Soviet Union,” she told Britain's Sky News television, as Moscow has promised cooperation on North Korea and there is some common ground on Iran's nuclear ambitions and even missile defence.

But there are also “some very, very deep troubles,” Rice said, detailing setbacks to democracy in Russia and concerns that Putin's government is using its vast energy resources “somehow as a political tool.” Some of those troubles were brushed over when Bush hosted Putin, in early July, to a summit heavy on seafood and symbolism at his parents' summer retreat at Kennebunkport in Maine.

“Relations have been on a downward trajectory for at least a year and the summit simply didn't do anything about it,” Larrabee said.

Flushed with cash from booming oil prices, Putin's government is seen as reasserting a muscular foreign policy after the ignominies of Russia's economic collapse in the 1990s.

Unable to put up much resistance to Nato’s eastwards expansion, Russia is now full of sound and fury over what it sees as Western incursions into its own backyard in places such as Georgia and Ukraine.

On hot-button issues like prospective independence for the Serbian province of Kosovo, Putin has stood firm against a US administration that looks enfeebled diplomatically as it battles to hold the line in Iraq.

“The most delicate issues on the table now are Kosovo and Iran, where Russian intransigence could be quite consequential,” Kupchan said.

A potential successor to Putin in elections next March, first deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov, accuses the United States of building a “new Berlin wall” with its planned missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“The Russian electoral calendar is playing a big role. Ivanov is a moderate nationalist very much in Putin's own mould. Both are appealing to Russian nationalism by standing tough against the West,” Larrabee said.—AFP