SERGEI GUNEYEV for TIME

TRY, TRY AGAIN: Making the case to Putin

Tony Blair's Next War
	It's a battle for the soul of Europe. Can the British leader — celebrating his 50th birthday — stop the alliance from splitting apart?
	By J.F.O. McALLISTER | London

Posted Sunday, May 12, 2003; 14:25 BST
Tony Blair walked into what one British official calls "an old-fashioned KGB-style ambush." After 90 minutes of cordial talk last Tuesday at Vladimir Putin's country house outside Moscow, the British Prime Minister and his host emerged for what Blair thought would be a routine press conference. Instead, he got a public flaying. The Russian President was defiant. He mocked Blair's oft-repeated claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He refused to accommodate the victors in Iraq by agreeing to jump-start its reconstruction. He dismissed Blair's idea of lifting sanctions quickly. And he made the dead-on-arrival suggestion that Russian troops be sent to Iraq as peacekeepers.

No wonder the British press described the summit as a body blow to Blair from "Vlad the Impaler," as the Mirror called Putin. Behind the scenes, things got even uglier. At a small dinner with Blair later that evening, sources tell TIME, Putin unleashed a full measure of pent-up fury. Over smoked fish with caviar and mushroom soup with croutons, he denounced Blair's ally George W. Bush for ignoring Russia, for not treating it like the great power it deserved to be, and for double standards. If Russia did in Chechnya and Georgia what the U.S. had done in Iraq, Putin fumed, it would never get away with it.

It was one more rivet busting out of the Atlantic alliance, and Blair — the alliance's self-appointed chief engineer — "is very worried," says a senior British official, about its coming apart. While Putin was venting in Moscow, the four European countries whose leaders were most opposed to the Iraq war — France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg — were holding what reporters dubbed the "Mini-Me summit" to announce they would create a headquarters for a non-NATO European military force. Though their communiqué was filled with fudges and the new force may not amount to much, the initiative was a deliberate thumb in the eye to NATO — and to American influence in Europe.

Spain, Britain, and other countries that backed Washington over the war weren't invited. A Dutch Foreign Ministry official derided the meeting in Brussels as "bad on timing, bad on content and bad on the participating states." Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told TIME that "these proposals are dangerous because they risk undermining NATO when we need to be strengthening it." Privately, British officials were scathing too, calling the new headquarters — which, deliciously, will overlook Burns' residence in a Brussels suburb — as "nonsense" and "ridiculous." One said the Germans had tried to temper France's passion to create an independent European force implicitly hostile to NATO, "but frankly, they failed."

Last month, many European foreign-policy experts were betting that the rancor generated by Bush and Blair's decision to fight in Iraq without a second U.N. resolution would soon dissipate, after opponents had a chance to absorb the reality of Saddam's quick defeat. Germany, Russia and France have made some initial moves to get along better with Washington, but for every step forward there have been at least as many back. So Blair is now moving urgently to try to shore things up.

1 | 2 | 3 | Next