Dealing With Putin

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"As long as they got along" with Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin or Putin, Western leaders "saw no reason to worry," Delpech writes. "We can now observe the results of that policy. Western influence on Russia is nonexistent."

Putin offers his own narrative to muddy the waters even more. It is a narrative of his regime rescuing the country from a chaos that was deliberately injected, like a virus, into Mother Russia by the West. His regime has turned its oil and gas reserves and its role as a monopoly energy supplier for much of Europe into real power that makes Russia invulnerable and gives it commanding status over a weakening West. It is in the name of Russia that his regime treats with open contempt Britain's extradition demands or Germany's attempts to negotiate a "strategic framework."

But that harsh narrative is beginning to backfire, as Blair's firm stand on the Litvinenko case suggests. So does the surprisingly sharp direct criticism of Putin at the May 18 European Union-Russia summit, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly dressed down Putin for suppressing dissent at home.

Merkel comes to her suspicion of Putin naturally. She grew up in the communist East German state, where the Russian leader served as a spy. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian aristocrat who fled communist rule, has replaced Chirac as president. Gordon Brown will inherit Blair's concern and resentment about the Litvinenko affair. Personal relations and experiences pull Europe's big three countries away from -- not toward -- Moscow now.

This presents an opportunity to close the transatlantic narrative gap and for Europe and North America to deal with Russia on a new, more realistic basis. We should work with Putin where possible and necessary, without ever paying the price of soft-pedaling his excesses or abuses at home and abroad.

"Americans have had a tendency to rely too much on hard power, and Europeans too much on soft power," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said during a visit to Washington last week. "It is time for each of us to borrow from the other and for both to become more effective, working together."

jimhoagland@washpost.com