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war stories: Military analysis.

How Putin Played Bush in KennebunkportAnd how Bush could still come out on top.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, July 5, 2007, at 6:36 PM ET

Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin emerged the clear winner of last weekend's Kennebunkport summit. The Russian president not only caught the only fish during a three-man boat ride (Bushes 41 and 43 came up empty-handed in their own pond), but also, jujitsu-style, turned a casual remark by his host into a stinging political trap.

The good news is that, perhaps more than Putin realized, the trap is one that an American president should welcome. George W. Bush should take the bait, in the interests of our national security.

The bad news is that he almost certainly won't, because his concept of national security is so skewed.

Putin dangled the bait at a joint press conference, when he proposed an alternative to President Bush's plan of installing missile-defense batteries in the Czech Republic and Poland. Putin's opposition to this plan, two months earlier, set off the fiercest rhetorical exchanges between Russian and U.S. officials since the Cold War. Both leaders scheduled the holiday summit mainly to calm the storm.

Putin's proposal was to put the missile-defense system in Azerbaijan, a former republic of the Soviet Union, whose leaders (this must certainly be no coincidence) are much closer to Moscow, in geography and in politics, than are the Czechs' or Poles'.

When Putin advanced a similar idea at the G-8 summit a few weeks earlier, U.S. officials noted that the radar currently operating in Azerbaijan—which he'd proposed using for missile defense—wasn't sophisticated enough for the task. It could detect the launching of missiles, but it could not track them in flight.

At Kennebunkport, Putin said: OK, then, let's modernize the radar, or, if that's too hard, build a new one, either in Azerbaijan or in southern Russia.

Bush—like Ronald Reagan in the 1980s—had occasionally proposed that the United States and Russia share command of a missile-defense system. Mikhail Gorbachev never took the idea seriously; nor did any U.S. officials (except, perhaps, Reagan himself). But now Putin called Bush's bluff, suggesting that the system—wherever it's located—be put under the NATO-Russia Council's control, with joint early warning centers in Moscow and Brussels.

Putin added, "There will be no need to place any more facilities in Europe"—that is, in either Poland or the Czech Republic—and U.S.-Russian relations will be elevated to a new level, a genuine "strategic partnership."

Bush, reportedly caught by surprise but wishing to remain polite, called Putin's move "very constructive and bold. … I think it's innovative, I think it's strategic. But … I think that the Czech Republic and Poland need to be an integral part of the system."

Putin left it to Sergei Ivanov—first deputy prime minister, former defense minister, and the man most likely to win Putin's endorsement in Russia's presidential election next March—to lay down the threat. If the United States does not go along with Putin's "compromise," Ivanov said, Moscow will be forced to conclude that the missile-defense system is actually aimed at Russia and, therefore, to deploy new offensive nuclear missiles on the western borders and to aim them at Europe, in order to offset the system's "destabilizing" effect.

This is political gamesmanship of a very high order, and Putin made no bones about it. "The deck has been dealt, and we are here to play," he said at the Kennebunkport press conference. "And I would very much hope that we are playing one and the same game."

At this point, let's back up and review a few basic facts.

First, Iran does not yet have long-range missiles, nuclear weapons, or the ability to miniaturize the latter in order to fit them on the former. True, it might have such weapons by 2011, the year when the missile-defense system is scheduled to be up and running. Or it might not.

Second, the missile-defense system in question has not yet been remotely proved to work. This is the same system as the one under construction in Alaska, except that the rocket booster will have an additional stage. The program's test record is mixed; its successful tests have been carefully planned set pieces that bear little resemblance to an actual attack; and it has undergone no tests—nor are any such tests planned—against an attack by more than one missile at a time or by a missile that releases decoys as well as warheads (an easy task).