Understanding the G8

Well, it's another G8 summit. I started covering them when they were G7s which is making me an old fart at 44. This time I didn't go and mercifully don't have to sit in some filing center with thousands of the reporters watching it on TV.

I remember sitting in the filing center in Tokyo desperately trying to smuggle a few anecdotes out of the conference for that week's U.S. News & World Report where I was the White House correspondent. There was no website to post things on, of course.

So you had to hope, as a newsweekly writer, that you could clutch your little gets and try to get them into print. Of course, in a web and blog age, those get posted right away. But I digress....

Presidents usually do a pretty good job of managing expectations at these things, setting extremely modest goals so that when they're achieved, the press corps can declare the summit a success or at least not a frickin' disaster.

For instance at that 1993 summit, the Clinton White House went out of its way to lower expectations about getting a bilateral trade framework with the Japanese. Not a trade agreement with the Japanese, just a bilateral framework. They waxed pessimistic the whole meeting and then finally announced one on, I recall, the last day, making everyone feel like something oh-so-big was accomplished.

(My U.S. News colleague who was traveling with me treated it like the biggest diplomatic achievement since the Congress of Vienna.

This G8, now going on in Germany, feels like more of a highwire act than most and not just because thousands of protestors are descending on the site, trying to bust the seven-mile perimeter.

First, I don't think anyone really thought things between Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush would get this bad, this quickly.

Sure, Russia's become a moneyed, authoritarian, oil rich nation in the years since Bush infamously announced that Putin had a good soul. I guess it was easier to do back when it was more democratic and poor.

We sat more or less silent while the Russian president continued to rock Chechnya and objected not a whit when we helped launch the Afghan invasion, in part, from former Soviet states.

Even as journalists were murdered and foreign assets seized, things between the U.S. and Russia never really felt like they were spinning out of control. After all, we both were on the warpath against Islamic terror.

(I think the Beslan massacre, the horrible carnage at that Russian school, in September 2004 did a lot to help reelect Bush.)

Now things are different and the phrase New Cold War doesn't seem hyperbolic.

At issue: Bush is still pressing ahead with the missile defense plan which involves sticking facilities increasingly close to Russia. I confess to having forgotten about Bush's obsession with missile defense which, if you'll recall, was the centerpiece of Bush's defense policy before 9/11.

Donald Rumsfeld had overseen the dismantle tingling of America's Antiballistic Missile or ABM program when he was in charge of the Pentagon during the Ford administration. Just as Cheney, once Gerry Ford's wunderkind, moderate, chief of staff transformed into the prince of darkness over the next three decades so too did Rumsfeld, who went from abandoning missile defense to being one of its leading champions.

Remember when Richard Clarke and others were trying to warn the Bushies about terror in 2001? Missile defense is what was so on their minds that the National Security Council never bothered to have a terror meeting until 9/11.

Now that Iraq is a quagmire and Iran's Holocaust denying leader seems determined to build a nuke, we're just as determined to pursue missile defense and not without reason.

Missile defense technology has become a bipartisan cause. Bill Clinton funded it. Democrats keep voting to fund it, too, because the system is now less of a Quixotic, Star Wars fantasy than it was in Ronald Reagan's day.

Gone is the idea of dozens of satellites blasting thousands of incoming Soviet missiles out of the sky with lasers. (Kind of amazing Reagan and Gorbachev thought such a system was possible back when PCs ran on DOS.)

Now it's a more limited and technologically feasible proposal to take out a small number of missiles launched by a rogue state. It's not a crazy idea, so long as it doesn't start a new Cold War -- which it seems to be doing.

I don't know how this conflict is going to play out between Putin and Bush but I don't understand why we can't just bring the Russians under the shield as Reagan proposed to do with the original Star Wars concept in the 80s.

Gorbachev dramatically rejected that idea at their famed Iceland summit in 1986, when our 40th president proposed essentially eliminating all nuclear weapons if the Russians would do the same and embrace Star Wars.

It didn't work then, of course. The gambit was too big. Maybe something more modest could work now.

Meanwhile, if that wasn't bad enough, Bush will manage to piss off Europe's new moderate, right-tilting governments in France and Germany by blowing off Angela Merkel's climate change proposals.

They'll fudge a compromise but I would think with France and Germany moving right, Bush would have given them more. Everybody's going green. Seems crazy for Bush not to hop in the Prius and join the rest of the world, especially since no one takes these G8 statements of goals very seriously anyway.