Bushspeak in Europe.(on the right)

NEW YORK, MAY 10

THE debate was quickly framed as follows: Did President Bush, by his remarks, contribute to the stability of democracy, or did he enhance the prospects of destabilization in Russia?

That criticism is serious and attracts immediate concern. A reductionist formulation of the criticism would remind us that territorial Russia stretches across eleven time zones and that however bedraggled the Russian military is at this point, Russia is still the second largest nuclear power in the world--by some reckonings, the premier nuclear power, since the old, wicked USSR hid and lied about its nuclear production. Add to this that democracy is not a fixed component of the Russian DNA, and we're left with the question: Did President Bush make a mistake in provoking Putin--and the Russian people?

It was a great weekend for major-power politics. On Sunday it was 60 Minutes, with Mike Wallace doing his unique act with a Putin who was driven, by Wallace's prosecutorial questioning, to demand, in effect, to know about the Negro situation in the South. Old cold warriors will remember that clich, of the '50s, when the Communist apologist would reply to the American who documented charges of Soviet aggression, imperialism, concentration camps, and genocide by denouncing the U.S. for Jim Crow. Mike Wallace observed that the Russian nomenklatura controls the media and that democratic accounting simply did not prevail, to which Putin replied (finding his Jim Crow) that it wasn't democracy but a judicial court that decided the U.S. election of 2000.

It transpires that Mr. Putin is diligently curious about world affairs and reads the foreign press diligently. But to hang in there with a non sequitur when replying to charges of non-democratic practices must have made him wistful for the old days, when simple assertions of Soviet rectitude were all that was needed.

What Bush did do was wonderfully bracing. To begin with, he apologized for our own complicity in postwar arrangements authorized at Yalta. When he spoke in Latvia, he made no attempt to elide the events of ...