Putin strode into the conference hall armed with more than just the usual grievance cards. He began with a jocular warning to his audience:
This conference’s structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms. The format will allow me to say what I really think about international security problems. And if my comments seem unduly polemical, pointed or inexact to our colleagues, then I would ask you not to get angry with me. After all, this is only a conference. And I hope that after the first two or three minutes of my speech Mr Teltschik [the chairman] will not turn on the red light over there.
The audience was already bristling, as Putin launched a blistering attack on what he described as the USA’s attempt to rule the world as its ‘sole master’:
Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible. We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state – of course, first and foremost the United States – has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who can be happy about this?
The United States was guilty of ‘ideological stereotypes’ and ‘double standards.’ He accused the Americans of lecturing Russia about democracy, while invading other countries, flouting international law and causing an arms race. He suggested that the US, instead of destroying missiles intended for elimination under a recent arms treaty, might ‘hide them in a warehouse for a rainy day’. Referring to President Bush’s missile defence plans, Putin condemned the ‘militarisation of outer space’, and proposed a treaty to outlaw such weapons. The expansion of NATO, he said, was a ‘provocation’:
We have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: ‘The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?
Putin warned that a new iron curtain was descending across Europe – and his words seemed to ring with hurt, as he pointed out that Russia too – just like the East Europeans – had abandoned communism but was not getting any credit for it:
The stones and concrete blocks of the Berlin Wall have long been distributed as souvenirs. But we should not forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall was possible thanks to a historic choice – one that was also made by our people, the people of Russia – a choice in favour of democracy, freedom, openness and a sincere partnership with all the members of the big European family. And now they are trying to impose new dividing lines and walls on us – these walls may be virtual but they are nevertheless dividing, ones that cut through our continent.
Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was sitting in the front row, scribbling on a piece of paper throughout the speech. Afterwards, his aides, Dan Fata and Eric Edelman, rushed to ask him whether they could help him rewrite the speech he was due to give the next morning, in view of what they had just heard. Gates pulled out 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.