So much for the high profile Bush-Putin fence-mending fishing trip to Kennebunkport a fortnight ago. The Kremlin yesterday gave formal notice that in 150 days it will suspend its participation in the key post-Cold War arms control treaty that has underpinned European security arrangements for the last 17 years. Pulling out of the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) is unlikely to have any short-term military consequences. However, it sends the very clearest signal that President Putin is not going to tolerate the establishment of a US anti-missile screen in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly but unconvincingly claimed to stop rocket attacks on Europe from Iran and North Korea. The Russians very reasonably view this as a further step in Washington’s attempt to surround them militarily. The Americans have wavered over the offer to use a Russian base in Azerbaijan, which would certainly be more appropriate to intercept any attack on Europe from Iran. This has convinced the Kremlin of President Bush’s bad faith and so yet another article of the blundering Bush foreign policy has proved a failure.

The White House has simply pushed the Russians too far, almost certainly because here as in Iraq, it has completely misread and misunderstood the realities and simply plowed on with its own simplistic and confrontational initiatives. It may even be that the nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea will actually prove groundless. Only this week Pyongyang appears to be stopping its own proven program in exchange for economic help from the outside world while Iran, though refusing to stop uranium enrichment, has reached an inspection deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Thus President Bush has damaged relations, perhaps seriously, with Putin’s Russia for no good purpose at all.

There is, however, another disturbing element to Putin’s CFE announcement. Russia it seems is playing a narrow game. Its president understandably wants to restore the national prestige and confidence that was so damaged by the humiliating break-up of the Soviet Union and the economic and military collapse of a onetime superpower. This cannot, however, merely be achieved by facing down one of America’s most inept and shortsighted presidents in generations. Russia has a role to play in the world. The vacuum left by the abject failure of Bush’s foreign policy ought to be filled now by Russian statesmen and diplomats. Russia is for instance a key member of the Quartet charged with finding a just peace for the Palestinians. Yet there are no initiatives from the Kremlin, no obvious urge to drive forward the peace process on something other than the pro-Israeli terms of Washington.

Putin has chosen to assert Russian influence either through bullying tactics over the supply of its oil and gas to Europe or by simply rejecting the wilder foreign policy flights of the Bush presidency. The former tactic may prove a mistake for Russia, while the latter, although welcome, is no substitute for a vigorously active foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.