Strongman, The

the paper he had been writing on and said: ‘Well, tell me what you think about this?’
    Fata and Edelman listened, looked at each other, and said, ‘Sir, that’s fantastic!’
    ‘Well, it’s not my first rodeo,’ responded their boss. 7 Indeed, Robert Gates had many years of experience, not unlike Putin’s, having joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1966, rising to become its director under President George H.W. Bush. He referred to this when he rose to make a conciliatory response to Putin at the Munich Security Conference the next morning.
    ‘Many of you have backgrounds in diplomacy or politics,’ he said. ‘I have, like your second speaker yesterday, a starkly different background – a career in the spy business. And, I guess, old spies have a habit of blunt speaking. However, I have been to re-education camp, spending four and half years as a university president and dealing with faculty. And, as more than a few university presidents have learned in recent years, when it comes to faculty it is either “be nice” or “be gone.” The real world we inhabit is different and a much more complex world than that of 20 or 30 years ago. We all face many common problems and challenges that must be addressed in partnership with other countries, including Russia. One Cold War was quite enough.’
    The analyst Dmitry Trenin described Putin’s Munich speech as the start of a new phase in his thinking. If phase one was ‘rapprochement with Europe and the US’, and phase two (following the Iraq war) was ‘non-alignment, but reluctance to confront the West’, then phase three, after Munich, was one of ‘coerced partnership’. Trenin wrote: ‘Putin laid out conditions under which he expected to coerce America and Europe into partnership with Russia: accept us as we are, treat us as equals, and establish cooperation based on mutual interests.’ 8 In the end, Trenin wrote, the ‘coerced partnership’ never took place, because in 2008 and early 2009 Russia began moving towards increased isolation from its would-be partners.
    But during 2007, in the months following the Munich speech, President Putin did make one last attempt to reach an accommodation with the Americans over missile defence. Perhaps he hoped that the speech would shock them into cooperation. The two sides would come tantalisingly close to an agreement, and when the attempt failed, this time it would be as much the Americans’ fault as Putin’s.
    The threat from Iran … or Russia
    From the start of his presidency, George W. Bush had insisted that the planned national missile defence (NMD) system was intended to protect the United States from attack by ‘rogue states’ such as Iran and North Korea. Even if they did not have the capability yet, they appeared to be building medium and long-range systems that might one day reach America. The trajectory of Iranian missiles, it was argued, would pass over Eastern Europe, and so the European element of the NMD system would require a radar facility in the Czech Republic (to track missiles in the early stage of their flight) and interceptor missiles in Poland (to shoot them down).
    ‘From the very outset,’ Putin’s foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko recalls, ‘these plans were unacceptable to us.’ 9 The Russians rejected the idea on several grounds: Iran did not yet have the long-range missiles against which the NMD system was aimed and would not have them for many years; even if they did, Poland and the Czech Republic were not the best places to intercept them; and, crucially, the Czech radar would be able to spy on Russian facilities, while the Polish missiles would undermine Russia’s own nuclear deterrent.
    Until now, Russia had criticised the plans but offered no constructive alternative. But in June 2007 Putin came to a G8 summit in the German seaside resort of Heiligendamm with plans of his own. Apart from the main summit business Putin had a bilateral meeting with President Bush, for which he had prepared so thoroughly that it took the American by surprise. In the week before, he consulted military experts, and the night before, in his room, Putin sketched out maps of missile trajectories and other data. Now he placed them in front of Bush and expounded in great detail why the American plans were all wrong. According to an aide who was present, Putin ‘delivered a real thesis’, explaining where the radars needed to be, why Bush was being misled by his advisers