The weighty pronouncements of the Russian tsar of gas and oil, Vladimir Putin, at the international Munich Conference on Security Policy, which caught the world’s elite statesmen, diplomats, economists, and political scientists unawares, are being discussed all over the world. None of the participants gathered in the ballroom of the old Munich Hotel Bayerischer Hof, surrounded by police like a stronghold, was ready for such a surprise. Some people from the hand-picked public, particularly elder spokesmen, felt a familiar whiff of the Cold War.
The elderly man sitting next to me said that, like Khrushchev, all Putin had to do was smash his shoe on the table. He was wrong. I was present in the conference hall of the United Nations in October 1960. Khrushchev’s boorish gesture was not directed against the United States; it was a defensive attack against the Philippines’ representative, who was shouting and pointing at Nikita: “What right does the bloody butcher of Ukraine have to sit among us?”
However, the difference between Khrushchev and Putin lies in something else. Khrushchev was yelling like at a marketplace, whereas Putin speaks quietly, like at a KGB investigation, and looks at the public in the same manner as his great and minor predecessors. I saw the same look in Kuchma’s eyes after his second presidential elections. Putin, as though searching for a suitable object on which to focus his gaze in the hall, found me among the crowd of guests, as if led by instinct to an “enemy of the people.” In connection with this, I recall the famous self-delusion of President Bush, who looked into Putin’s eyes and saw a noble soul. German ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said approximately the same thing when he declared that “Putin is a pure democrat, like crystal.”
When Putin finished his speech in Munich, which was reminiscent of the statements of Stalin-era public prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky during the Moscow trials of the 1930s, only the members of the Russian delegation and a few Germans applauded. Nobody from the Western world, the post-Soviet republics, or the countries of Central and Eastern Europe supported him.
Provoked by the aggressive polemics, the Americans responded to the aggressor in different ways. Republican Senator John McCain condemned Putin as an anti-democrat. The representative of Bush’s government, Minister of Defense Robert Gates, used irony as his weapon of choice. The former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said: “Old spies have a habit of blunt speaking.” As I found out later, not all the politicians in Washington were pleased with this remark, and some of my colleagues called it simply stupid. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer gave a critical response to Putin.
Everyone was expecting that the Germans would issue a clear response, but something else happened. The Germans were disoriented and inwardly unprepared to give a reply, which finally came from the conference organizers, primarily the host of the Munich meeting, Professor Horst Teltschik, incidentally, a former student of mine at the University of Berlin, who attended my courses in Political Science and Comparative History of East European Countries. On the eve of the meeting he stated that now would be the right time to give full NATO membership to Russia. After Putin left, however, NATO generals told Teltschik that NATO is not a “discussion club,” unlike his Munich conferences, but a military alliance that champions concrete values, like freedom of the individual and of nations, and Russia is not mature enough for this.
However, the Germans’ disorientation was so profound that the government elite, including Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Minister of Defense Dr. Franz Joseph Jung, did not give any response to Putin’s anti-American tirade. Some German public figures, such as Kurt Becker, leader of the Social Democratic Party, thanked the Russian leader for his courage and acute ideas.
Other German statesmen played the same tune. All those speeches are vivid proof of the devastation in the ranks of the European, primarily German, political elite, caused by the American war in Iraq, weakening of the US’s former leading role in the Western world, and Germany’s dependence on Russian oil and gas.
Several years ago, when a sharp confrontation at the Munich Conference broke out between the Russian delegation and Borys Tarasiuk, the then head of the Ukrainian delegation, most of the people in the audience applauded the Ukrainian minister. This time the most courageous speech was made by the Czech Republic’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Karel Schwarzenberg, who comes from a princely family of the Austro-Czech aristocracy. He said that Putin’s speech is proof that NATO should expand to the East.
The meetings in Munich are quite a new phenomenon in international politics. They started during the Cold War and were sponsored by the Association of Military Studies. The debates took place within a circle of politicians and diplomats, mostly from the West, and were rather boring. They altered completely when Dr. Horst Teltschik took over the leadership. He is a former German deportee from Czechoslovakia, one of many who were settled in Bavaria. One of his daughters works at the Substance Abuse and AIDS Charity Mission in Odesa. After completing his studies, Teltschik found a job in the Chancellery under Helmut Kohl. Afterwards he became the chief lobbyist of the BMW Group, and later the spokesman of the American aircraft company Boeing. After he took over the leadership of the Munich Conferences, these meetings have become more influential and meaningful, although they remain an informal place for discussions.
Sometimes these conferences have been symbols of changes in international life, for example, the statement by US Minister of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the “new” and the “old” Europe, which was correct, on the one hand, and caused many problems, on the other. This time, all the preparation for the conference was subordinated to the conflict with Iran in connection with the issue of nuclear weapons. That is why many public figures from Western Europe did not come to Munich. They find the meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) more interesting.
The role of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko at the Munich Conference was also rather uncertain. Earlier, he met Chancellor Merkel and had a rather successful visit in Berlin. Unfortunately, Yushchenko’s speech at the conference was so uninteresting and hackneyed that all the European mass media was silent about his speech. Yushchenko made one more mistake: like Putin, he left the conference before it ended. That is why there were rumors behind the scenes that this had been coordinated with the Russian leader.
It should be admitted that Russian diplomats gave Putin good advice when they told him to attend the Munich Conference. There is a vacuum in the Western world now, caused not only by the lack of a European Constitution but other reasons. France is in the throes of the presidential election struggle. Great Britain is waiting for Tony Blair’s cabinet to fall. Italy and Spain are exclusively preoccupied with their own domestic affairs, and two Eastern European countries, almost equal to them — Poland and Ukraine — are experiencing their own crises and have lost their former rating.
But the main thing is the weakening of the US role by President George Bush’s adventurist politics. Putin has taken into account all these factors in his strategy and launched an aggressive foreign policy. In Europe and North America debates have begun about the Russian leader’s chances of splitting the Western world.
at the University of Berlin.
