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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
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Updated: July 13, 2006
The decision to hold the July 15-17 Group of Eight (G8) summit in St. Petersburg was meant to symbolize Russia's full integration into the club of the world's richest industrialized democracies. Instead, with U.S.-Russian relations at their lowest ebb since the collapse of the Soviet Union, mostly due to the Kremlin's rollback of democracy and its use of energy as a tool for foreign policy, a number of experts and politicians have said that Russia is not a suitable host for such a privileged club. Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried to shift the focus away from his domestic policies and toward issues such as energy security, infectious diseases, and global education. If the recent pre-meeting of the G8 foreign ministers is any indication, a number of external conflicts will also be on the agenda, including the Iran nuclear case, North Korea's missile tests, and the escalating conflict in the Middle East.
The two countervailing forces, Legvold says, are risk aversion by the Europeans, who are ever distrustful of Russia as a reliable energy partner, and the Kremlin's monopolistic tendencies, as highlighted by its heavy-handed approach to erecting pipelines and cutting gas subsidies to its former subjects. Energy also needs to be used more efficiently. CFR Senior Fellow Stephen Sestanovich recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if Russia used its vast reserves of natural gas as efficiently as Canada, it would save three times the amount it exports to Europe. "Russia is not just the world's greatest energy producer," he said. "It's the world's greatest energy waster."
Yes. Russia has moved in a far more illiberal direction, "something the West should be concerned about," Legvold says. "But whether it should move to the top of the agenda is another matter." He says it is "not just ineffective but counterproductive" if only a few U.S. senators, such as Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) or John McCain (R-AZ), harp against Russia's rollback of democracy. "Western leaders must disabuse themselves of the notion that by preaching values one can actually plant them," writes Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs. "Russia will continue to change, but at its own pace." U.S. leaders accuse the Kremlin of shrinking Russia's political space by consolidating power and wealth in the hands of the so-called siloviki, curbing the independence of the media, and clamping down on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—Putin opposes the foreign funding of domestic NGOs involved in political activity. "What opposition remains seems to do so only at the whim of the president," according to a recent Freedom House report. Some U.S. leaders had called on President Bush to boycott the G8 Summit to protest Russia's rollback of democracy. Yet many Russians dispute the Western-held notion that Putin's Russia is a more authoritarian place than it was previously. "I don't think there was ever democracy here in the 1990s," Kazin says. "There was oligarchic capitalism, very crude, very jungle-like. The situation now is not less democratic [than before] because it was never democratic."
Some experts say these summits are little more than pomp and ceremony and that many of the accomplishments made are less tangible than symbolic. CFR Senior Fellow Stephen Sestanovich, writing in the Washington Post, calls it "an annual fantasy camp of candlelit, head-table diplomacy," while others point out that G8 members have often failed to deliver on the agreements made at past summits. According to DATA, a poverty-relief organization founded by the Irish rock star Bono, G8 members collectively are $2 billion short on their pledge to double aid to Africa made at last year's summit. Nor is the G-8 summit likely to reverse Russia's course toward what Legvold calls "half-baked authoritarianism" and what the Financial Times labels a "managed democracy." Still, experts expect some small breakthroughs, including confidence building measures on energy security and increased dialogue on energy cooperation.
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