Editorial: Russia: Dancing with the Bear.(Brief Article)(Editorial)

President Bush and President Vladimir Putin have looked into each other's soul, and admired what they have seen there. A love-in is replacing the more usual formalities of high diplomacy. A seismic event like September 11 can bring about unforeseeable consequences of this kind, and that is altogether to the good. But both presidents are very level-headed, and behind the lovey rhetoric is a community of interest. Islamic extremism in the Caucasus threatens the unity of the Russian Federation. Terrorists, presumed to be Chechens, have bombed apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere, with huge loss of life. Al-Qaeda and other networks spill across the borders to destabilize the Central Asian republics. When Putin says that he wants to see terrorism "destroyed, uprooted, liquidated," the verbs may sound Soviet, but they are to the point.

The former Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, believed that he could play Europe off against the United States. To that end, he kicked up a huge fuss about the admission to NATO of eastern European countries once in the Soviet empire and, prospectively, of the Baltic republics. Putin has been quick to perceive that the Europeans are absorbed in games of hide-and-seek in Brussels and have little or nothing to offer Russia. NATO has verbalized about Islamic terror, but has no effective role in Afghanistan. With the exception of Britain, the Europeans are happy to posture, and Putin is leaving them to it. Better, more productive, for him to turn to the United States, to declare a cost- free willingness to consider Russian membership in NATO and to negotiate new terms for nuclear-arms control and to allow for a missile defense that is going to be put in place anyhow.

Russia is not ...