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Troubled International Waters
July 14, 2006
Today, President Bush arrives in Russia for this weekend's G-8 summit, an informal group of the world's leading industrialized nations. It will be the first time the annual meeting, which began in 1975, will be held in a country without a free press. Unlike recent summits, this year's summit will put aside long-term issues of global warming and poverty, and focus on hot-button issues such as North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East. "It's a crisis-ridden summit," said John Kirton, director of the University of Toronto's G-8 research group. This one promises to be big on promises and short on results.
- Freedom of the press in Russia has steadily gotten worse. "Five years ago, President Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and thought he got 'a sense of his soul.' But Putin turned out to be less a soul mate than a traditional autocratic Russian leader." For the past five years, Bush has largely turned a blind eye to Russia's increasingly anti-democratic trends and now has limited means to advance the "freedom agenda" that was to mark his second term. The 2006 annual report of the watchdog group, Reporters Without Borders, notes that conditions for journalists in Russia "continued to worsen alarmingly in 2005, with violence the most serious threat to press freedom. The government tightly controls distribution of state advertising, which amounts to blackmailing independent papers that dare to discuss the war in Chechnya."
- The U.S. reliance on Russia in international affairs is growing. With defiant uranium enrichment by Iran, recent missile tests by North Korea, increased tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, and surging sectarian violence in Iraq, this year's G-8 summit will likely focus on current foreign policy crises. The need for Russia's support on these fronts has already forced the Bush administration to accede to numerous Kremlin demands, including clearing the way "for Russia to get into the lucrative business of storing spent nuclear fuel, despite long-standing U.S. concerns about the safety of facilities in Russia." This reliance on Russia comes as the U.S.-Russia relationship is strained. "The U.S.-Russia relationship today is as bad as it's been at any point in the last 15 years," says Steven Pifer, who in 2004 stepped down as the State Department's top diplomat on Russia.
- This year’s G-8 summit will probably not deal with the un-kept promises of the 2005 G-8. The 2005 G-8 summit largely focused on the "urgent challenges of poverty and African development. The nations "agreed to cancel the debt owed by 35 of the world's poorest countries to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and African Development Fund. But "[h]igh crude oil prices will more than offset the benefits of debt relief the group of eight rich nations gave to poor countries last year," according to findings in a new report by the Jubilee USA Network. The summit's draft plan of action focuses "mostly on the challenges of developing supplies of energy in a volatile market, rather than tackling the threat of global warming posed by an increasing use of fossil fuels.
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