Word: putin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Geopolitics is a chess game, and President Vladimir Putin is a considerably more formidable opponent than his predecessor was. That much was clear Monday when Putin left Moscow an hour before President Clinton to stake out the high ground on missile defense in Western Europe. Some of Washington's closest European allies had, last week, expressed grave misgivings about Clinton's proposed missile-defense system during the President's visit, and Putin moved to widen the gap by unveiling his own missile-defense proposals while on a visit to Italy and the Vatican. Putin proposed the joint development...
...deployed their decoys," says TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. "But conversely, you've got to know who all the bad guys are and have stationed interceptor systems in each of their immediate neighborhoods in order to make it work. More important, the Pentagon will argue, the system mooted by Putin can't be built quickly enough - it would take 10 years rather than the five envisaged by Washington to cope with the emergence of a potential North Korean threat." Then again, Putin's primary objective may be to outflank Washington's efforts to build an umbrella system Russia fears...
Ignore the spin - Bill Clinton's valedictory Moscow summit had all the warmth of a bargaining session between divorce lawyers. He and President Vladimir Putin failed to make any progress on the vexing question of missile defense, and the Russians signaled their displeasure with the U.S. president by failing to broadcast his speech to the Russian legislature on TV. "It was extremely important to the surviving pro-Western elements in Russia's political elite that Clinton get a chance to make the case for liberalization to the Russian public," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "That didn't happen because...
...More important than atmospherics, however, Clinton failed to persuade Putin to agree to the U.S.'s building a shield against missiles that might some day be fired by "rogue states." Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said Sunday that "President Putin made absolutely clear to President Clinton that Russia continues to oppose changes to the ABM treaty that the United States has proposed." In order to deploy the proposed missile-defense system, the U.S. would have to either convince Russia to amend the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids either side from adding to its missile-defense systems, or else...
...Putin's "nyet" has left Clinton little room to maneuver. The issue is coming to a head in a presidential election season, and the GOP has made the politically popular notion of missile defense a centerpiece of its challenge to the administration on defense and foreign policy. Candidate George W. Bush has, in fact, come out in favor of a full-blown missile shield designed to neutralize the deterrent value of the Russian missile fleet along with everyone else's. In order to proceed with building the system according to the timetable he set himself, President Clinton would have...