Oil and Russian hubris

Thomas Oliphant -- WASHINGTON

IT IS time for Americans to pay less attention to words and more attention to the ugly realities of a misbehaving nation with nuclear weapons and disturbing intentions.

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Condoleezza Rice expressed ‘‘concerns’’ about Russia when she went to Europe in advance of President Bush’s journey last week. Bush himself expressed more ‘‘concerns’’ while he was there, including to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face. Big deal.

The most important reality right now as far as Russia is concerned can be expressed in one number — $50. With the price of a barrel of crude oil still hovering around that preposterous figure – up basically 50 percent from a year ago – Russia is becoming a dangerous country that acts domestically and internationally with self-supplied impunity.

With the price below $20 – as it was when Putin was a rookie – Russia was a slowly reforming democracy with an internationalist, cooperative foreign policy gloss. Bush’s big mistake then was when he claimed to have received a sense of Putin’s ‘‘soul’’ and liked what he saw.

It is now dawning even on the president that at $50, Russia has the kind of leadership that suppresses human rights, threatens its neighbors, sells dangerous arms including missiles to bad actors like Syria, plays kissy-face with Iran, and isn’t the least bit sorry.

It’s that last bit that Americans got to see when Bush was asked some hostile questions about his alleged control of the American media from Putin plants in the Russian press corps at the meeting in Slovakia. Those questions were a manifestation of Russian truculence at official levels. That’s $50 oil talking.

The Russians these days like to belittle US concerns about democracy and human rights by saying we’re making a tempest about oil business maneuvers, government control of the broadcast media, and some centralization of political power like the appointing of provincial governors from Moscow instead of at the local level. They make it sound bureaucratic.

Baloney. Putin is politicizing the administration of justice in Russia to make authoritarian thuggery easier, and countries that misbehave internally are the ones that do so internationally. In front of Bush he gave the expected lip service to a ‘‘commitment’’ to democracy and to the impossibility of reinstalling a totalitarian state in Moscow. But it is what is happening between those poles that should worry us. Putin also claimed to join Bush in opposing nuclear arsenals in both Iran and North Korea, but his recent actions leave some room for doubt.

What the two presidents did last week was try to put human rights in perspective, if not in second place, by elevating concerns about the danger of nuclear proliferation.

This was a very big deal. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, last week was the first time presidents of Russia and the United States have taken personal responsibility for securing so-called ‘‘loose nukes’’ from both internal and international terrorist hands.

The danger, however, is that this vital task will put human rights and foreign policy misbehavior on a back burner, much as Putin’s supposed cooperation in fighting terrorism after 9/11 turned official US eyes blind in Bush’s first term. The nuclear card also bolsters the argument of some Americans and Russian diplomats who regularly claim that the real internal threat to Putin is not starry-eyed democratic idealists but hard-line nationalists.

These are valid points, but the best response is Ronald Reagan’s Gorbachev-era vow to trust but constantly verify intentions. An even better response was the blunt talk delivered to top Russians at a recent conference in Germany by a bipartisan collection of senators – Republicans John McCain and Lindsay Graham and Democrats Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton.

They think the United States needs to set up some standards in considering Russia’s foreign policy desires.

Obviously, Putin will get Bush to Moscow this spring for the 60th anniversary of the Nazi collapse. But Russia also wants to join the World Trade Organization and the European Union and to host next year’s gathering of the Group of Eight industrialized countries. We should not be so quickly supportive; the time to set clear behavioral benchmarks is at hand.

We forget too easily. At a low oil price, Boris Yeltsin was a corrupt, ineffectual drunk and Russia’s collapsing ruble in 1998 destabilized the world. Even Putin had to wrestle with serious oil woes after taking office.

At $50, however, Putin and Russia are different. Parts of Moscow may look like Las Vegas now, but it is a darker reality that Americans need to face. So far, Bush is doing a poor job of it.

Thomas Oliphant’s e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.