Russia's Power Couple

By IVAN KRASTEV

Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni have to concede. They're no longer the first presidential couple in the world. Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev are. Their relationship is obviously close but also mysterious, secretive, open to various and contradictory interpretations. The pundits and ordinary Russians are obsessed. Can the country's new and former president live together? Will this end well, or badly?

M.E. Cohen

After Mr. Medvedev's inauguration last week and his older, taller mentor's move into the prime minister's office at Moscow's White House, the optimists hope that this duality of power could lead to the emergence of checks and balances and greater pluralism in Russian politics. The pessimists fear intense conflict inside the ruling class that, maybe, could bring civil strife. In Mr. Putin's own words, "Centralized power is in Russia's DNA."

Though Russia's state emblem is a double-headed eagle, history has taught its people to view two-headed power as a monster. Most recently in the early 1990s Boris Yeltsin faced off against the parliament, and ended up shelling it into submission. Today the potential for trouble, in spite of protestations by the two men from St. Petersburg, is bound to grow with time.

The ruling elite has learned in the Putin era that it is easy to ban competition from outside. What's harder is to keep the elite itself under control. Elections are held every four years, but opinion polls all the time. The fight over polls will be more competitive than over votes. What will happen when President Medvedev's ratings surpass Prime Minister Putin's? It'll also be harder to control the media, which can easily be forced to stay loyal to a single czar, but two? Similarly, the oligarchs at the Kremlin -- in Russia the men who own the country happen to run it -- will now have more than one arbiter to settle their disputes. And what if Mr. Medvedev one day wishes to exercise his presidential powers, albeit bestowed on him by the grace of Putin? He can't do so if he is mere Mini-Me to the prime minister.

In short, mutual suspicions and intrigues between Medvedev's Kremlin and Putin's White House are inevitable -- and could turn out to be worse than between the Kremlin and Washington's White House. Messrs. Putin and Medvedev sound sincere today that a political war can be avoided. The war between their entourages has in fact already started.

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In planning this transition, the new prime minister -- and still the pre-eminent leader in the country -- succeeded in preserving political continuity in the short term. But he has manifestly failed to create a stable political system. In his years in power, the Russian state became richer (thanks to high oil prices), more repressive and more centralized; it didn't become better able to govern. It's one thing to curb dissent or put on huge military parades, another to rule properly this vast country.

The Putin system is a classical illustration of "the impotence of omnipotence." Today's Russia is a rising global power and at the same time a weak state with corrupt and inefficient institutions. Its army and educational system are straight out of the last century; its foreign and social policies out of the 19th century. Russia's economic growth is impressive but unsustainable. And this political regime, weighed down by so much ineffective authority centralized in the Kremlin, lacks the dynamism to push ahead Russia's transformation. Any shift in the power circles becomes a crisis. Any change of power brings about a brutal redistribution of property.

The inherent instability at the heart of Putinism helps account for the recent turns in its foreign policy. Moscow's aggressive stance toward the outside world, particularly the West, is needed to preserve the post-Putin regime's legitimacy. But that leads to a paradox: The Kremlin needs the West as a partner to develop Russia, but even more urgently the Kremlin needs the West as an enemy to keep its hold on power.

In looking at Russia, the West has held to a dangerous illusion that the power elite can be divided into two distinct factions: One liberal, pro-Western, Deep Purple fans like Mr. Medvedev; the other anti-Western and authoritarian, the KGB men (or "siloviky") around Vladimir Putin. In the West, the victory of liberals over authoritarians is what's seen as necessary to entrench democracy in Russia. We made the same mistaken judgment in the 1990s.

But the contradictory nature of the Russian regime is not the outcome of the unfinished war between "the liberals" and "siloviky." It is the result of the dual nature of Russian modernization. In the last decade Russia has become more Westernized but at the same time more anti-Western. It has become more open and at the same time more nationalistic. The Kremlin's new confrontational foreign policy is neither circumstantial in its nature nor can be analyzed as Mr. Putin's personal choice. It is the expression of the new foreign-policy consensus in the Russian elite but also in the Russian society at large.

The change of personalities in the Kremlin is unlikely to change this consensus. The hope that economic growth, the emergence of a more numerous middle class and the change of generations will tame Russia's anti-Westernism is false. Although young Russians have embraced lattes, iPods and other consumer goods enjoyed by the youth in Western countries, their political views tend to be nether pro-Western nor pro-democracy. Educated males living in Moscow make up, in fact, the most anti-American segment of the Russian population, according to a recent survey.

The Putin-Medvedev regime comes onto an eerily familiar stage for Russia. In the last 150 years, Russia has implemented several liberal reforms that produced impressive economic growth, which were then followed by elite wars over the redistribution of power and wealth and the temptation to use the the newly acquired economic gains to achieve Russia's geopolitical ambitions. The unintended result was the escalation of social tensions, the end of reforms and social and political catastrophe at the end. The major objective of the West's policy toward Russia's new power couple should be in helping Moscow to avoid the repeat of such a scenario.

Mr. Krastev is chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Warming to McCain

Holman Jenkins

It's good to see a politician rewarded for a courageous and unpopular stand, as John McCain has been over Iraq. History will show he was as central to the battle of Washington as Gen. David Petraeus has been to the battle of Baghdad. Our enemies strategized that America lacks staying power. Mr. McCain's role deprived them of their plan for victory.

But honor, the value that underlined Mr. McCain's stand, is no use on an issue like global warming. Here, he could use a little more Mitt Romney, his vanquished nemesis whose name has now resurfaced in the veep sweepstakes.

Mr. Romney was tagged as a wonk because he "immerses himself in data." But one thing immersion can do that casual "gut" proceedings can't is let you know when the data don't provide an answer, even if people are telling you it does.

If the warming of the 1980s and 1990s were shown to be extraordinary, that would at least indicate something extraordinary is going on. If the pace of warming or the scale were correlated in some sensible fashion with the rise in atmospheric CO2, that might suggest cause – but such correlation is lacking.

It perhaps takes somebody steeped like Mr. Romney in real-world analytics to find a footing against the media tide. But the fact remains: The push toward warming that CO2 provides in theory is no reason to presume in confidence that CO2 is actually responsible for any observed warming in a system as complex and chaotic as our atmosphere.

In his climate speech on Monday, Mr. McCain exhibited (as the press usually does) a complete lack of consciousness of the fact that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming. Yet policy must be a matter of costs and benefits, adjusted for the uncertainties involved. Which brings us to today's irony: He who finds a six-figure earmark an affront to humanity is prepared to wave through a trillion-dollar climate bill without, as far as anyone can tell, a single systematic thought about costs and benefits.

He who sees "corruption" behind every campaign check goes all compliant when GE, DuPont and Ford chant that climate policy "will create more economic opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy."

Mr. McCain argues that green energy mandates will leave us better off whether or not man-made global warming is real. This is an error that Mr. Romney wouldn't make – and one Al Gore makes all the time. Yes, hole-digging can be profitable if government subsidizes hole-digging. For society, however, there is only cost – measured in the labor and resources diverted to hole-digging from activities that actually fulfill the wants and needs of people.

Let's see: An estimate by the International Energy Agency holds that, to ward off the worst of climate change, the world by 2030 must build 34 hydroelectric dams the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, 510 nuclear plants, 289,000 wind turbines, 6,800 biomass plants and 714 fossil fuel plants equipped with unproven CO2 capture technology.

None of this will happen; if it did, it would merely slow progress toward a more carbon-rich atmosphere; and (of course) any impact on climate would be purely speculative.

Then what, as a practical matter, would be the aim of global warming policy? Our political system permits only one answer: to please the special interests that even now are gathering at the trough for subsidies in the name of climate change.

Politics is often a business of adaptive dishonesty, and never more so than when dealing with an issue like climate change. Real solutions are lacking so politicians can only devote themselves to telling voters what they want to hear while dishing out favors to whatever lobbyists are handy (and Mr. McCain picked a venue to do both on Monday, a wind turbine factory in Oregon). But let's also concede: Nobody who seriously wants to be president in 2008 is going to question the "consensus" on global warming.

And yet every journalistic tendril senses that the fuss over warming is about to cool. Global mean temperatures have been flat for a decade. The biofuel folly has chased away any easy belief that we can centrally plan our way out of reliance on fossil fuels. Voters seem more concerned with high gas prices. Even the town criers of global warming acknowledge that we will be stuck adapting to whatever climate comes along.

Mr. McCain's virtues are many, but he's a politician. Yet, happily, the spheres are moving and whatever energy boondoggles are coming, they are likely to be less costly than the boondoggles that might have been enacted even a year or two ago when Al Gore was riding high. For this, we will be able to thank the climate gods and no one else.