(HOST) Summer visitors to the coast of Maine don’t usually make the headlines – but commentator Olin Robison was still surprised that Vladimir Putin’s recent trip to Kennebunkport generated so few ripples in the news.
(ROBISON) It wasn’t so very long ago that any meeting between the President of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union or Russia was big news. When Reagan met with Gorbachev there was wall to wall news coverage; Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin got along so famously well that their frequent meetings came to be known in the press corps as the “Bill and Boris Show.” Today it is different. President Bush met a few days ago with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and there was more coverage of the event in Europe than there was here in the United States.
Right at the end of the Bush/Putin meeting the White House announced that President Bush had commuted the prison sentence of Scooter Libby, the former Chief of Staff to the Vice President; and that is the story that led in the news reports. On the Sunday morning of Putin’s arrival at the Bush family retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, the New York Times did not even have an article on the meeting on their web site as of ten am that morning.
Times have clearly changed.
The time was when Russia or the Soviet Union was the “other” superpower, and we seemed to be in a death struggle with them, always on the brink of something really terrible. Today, the Soviet Union is no more, and the status of Russia in the world is, to say the least, diminished.
Even so, Putin is riding high at home: press reports give him a seventy percent approval rating.
President Bush, on the other hand, is up to his waist in alligators. He seems to be besieged at every turn, both domestically and internationally.
This meeting was the first time in his presidency that he has invited any world leader to meet with him at the family retreat in Maine. He has not wanted to call attention to his patrician New England background, preferring instead to do the down-home-in-Texas bit. The Kennebunkport estate has been in the Bush family for over a hundred years. The most coveted invitation among foreign leaders in recent years has been an invitation to Mr. Bush’s place in Crawford, Texas.
Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Putin seemed given to a lot of diplomatic language recently. The Financial Times of London began an article about this summit meeting with this sentence: “Rarely, even in Soviet days, can a Moscow leader in the run-up to a summit with his US counterpart have been quite so rude about his hosts.” It would certainly appear that one reason for Mr. Putin’s high approval ratings at home is his bluster abroad. He seems intent on showing that Russia isn’t going to be pushed around by anyone.
Mr. Bush, on the other hand, seems more focused on his domestic problems than on anything else.
The announced agenda for the meeting was two fold: First there was the question of where a missile defense system should be located. The two leaders do not agree at all about this, and there doesn’t appear to have been any progress made. The second item was or is the US hope that Russia can be enlisted in the attempt to put more pressure on Iran, and, again, there was no announced progress on that front either.
So, it is perfectly appropriate to ask whether it really mattered that these two world leaders met a few days ago. And, sadly, the answer is probably “no,” it didn’t matter much at all. Things did not appear to move backwards. Nor did they appear to move forward.
Olin Robison is past president of both the Salzburg Seminar and Middlebury College. He now lives in Shelburne.