WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a man to wear his heart on his sleeve. He is matter of fact and businesslike, adept at concealing his emotions and sticking to the point. So the occasional touches of a rare warmth on display in his farewell news conference Sunday with his American counterpart, the man he calls "George," were noteworthy.
It is not as though this meeting was farewell. They will meet again at this year's Group of Eight summit in Japan, and though Bush departs public life next January, Putin will remain a major player as designated next prime minister.
But Putin could and perhaps should have been far more effusive and even grateful to his guest. Were there any justice in international affairs, the main squares of Russia would by now boast large and flattering statue of President Bush, in recognition of his central role in restoring Russia's status as a great power.
The key to this has been Bush's role in boosting the oil price to over $100 a barrel, both through his ill-starred invasion of Iraq and then through the warlike rhetoric against Iran. The oil price was around $20 a barrel at the end of 2001, and it began to climb to $30 as the Bush administration's rhetoric against Saddam Hussein became fiercer in 2002.
It jumped to $40 a barrel with the war and has risen pretty steadily since, as the wrecking of Iraq's infrastructure and the sabotage of Iraq's pipelines made a mockery of the neoconservative claims the Iraq war would be self-financing. There is no question other factors played an important role, like the growth in demand in China and India, but Bush's war kicked off the process of quadrupling the oil price and then sustained it through the fall of the dollar, whose decline symbolizes the quality of Bush's economic stewardship.
Russia has been a major beneficiary. The bankruptcy and near anarchy of the Boris Yeltsin years and the humiliating ruble default of 1998 have given way to a new arrogance in the Kremlin that comes from oil wealth. Russia is sitting on a pile of more than $500 billion in foreign exchange reserves and securities as the oil and gas and nickel and aluminum have rolled out and cash has rolled in.
The reversal in fortunes between the United States and Russia over the past seven years of the Bush presidency has been on the scale of a minor war, with Russia a winner and the United States a loser. The American economy is reeling and indebted, the country's credibility much weakened, its alliances frayed and its international image badly tarnished. Russia, by contrast, is looking prosperous, well-led and respected.
As a result, Russia is starting to get its way. Bush came to visit Putin at his summer vacation home at Sochi after crossing the Black Sea from last week's NATO summit in Bucharest. Russia there achieved one of its key strategic goals by preventing any formal invitation for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO.
Naturally, the NATO allies all chorused in agreement that this was not giving a veto to Russia over any more NATO enlargement. But that has been the effect of NATO's decision. Germany, highly dependent on Russia for gas exports, led the campaign to frustrate the requests of the Ukraine and Georgian governments for membership, saying this was not the right time to offend Russia, with a new president, Putin's chosen successor Dmitry Medvedev, about to take office.
In return for calling a halt to NATO enlargement, he did not even have to accept the installation of anti-missiles systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. The one concession he made was to offer more use of Russia's overland and logistics routes for NATO to get even more bogged down in Afghanistan than it is already. Given what Putin's generation of Russians learned about fighting Afghan guerrillas, this "concession" looks like a poisoned chalice. Either he is a very good bargainer or Bush is a bad one. Certainly Putin has increased the wealth and standing of Russia in the same measure that Bush has decreased those of the United States.
Putin has done little to deserve this strengthened new status. He has abused the tax system and the environmental laws to force Western oil companies to renegotiate contracts or to surrender the cream of their investments to Russia's state-owned energy giants. Putin's associates, mainly former KGB officials like himself, have been enriched by directorships in these companies, which have been used as an arm of the state to turn on and turn off the pipelines to bring pressure on former Soviet Republics like Ukraine and Georgia that are seeking NATO protection.
He has rolled back the liberties that were established by the free and independent media of the Yeltsin years, and Russia's TV channels have become so many mouthpieces for the Kremlin. Crusading journalists are murdered and nobody is brought to justice. Russian democracy may have been chaotic under Yeltsin, but it existed, and political opposition is now muted and marginalized and exists only under Kremlin sufferance.
Moreover, Putin has managed to do all this without paying any serious price. He may not be liked by his fellow leaders in the G8, but he is respected. And he looks likely be around for many years to come. The next U.S. president might take lessons from the current one in how not to deal with him.
