How Russia Viewed the Bush Presidency Term Paper

How Russia Viewed the Bush Presidency - Term Paper Example ning that main criterion in assessing the situation in Iraq should be the weapons inspectors findings, which must be presented to the United Nations Security Council. Russia, along with France and China, believed that the U.N. Resolution 1441 that created a new tough inspections regime, would be necessary for the United Russia had joined the coalition against terror, promising to share intelligence and offering political support to the US president. President Putin promised to increase the supply of weapons to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Russia had supplied the Northern Alliance with arms to be used in Afghanistan against Taliban. He also offered to open Russian airspace to US airplanes for humanitarian flights, and to participate in search and rescue operations. When the leaders of the Central Asian States offered bases to the coalition for the attack against Afghanistan, Putin announced that he had approved the offer. However, it is important that there were vast differences between the two countries in their perception of terrorism. In Russia the origins of the terrorist threat lay in the weakness of the state. Political instability, poverty and inequality in Russia in the 1990s provided a fertile climate for radical groups to attract followers and for foreign Islamic networks to penetrate the country. Russia and the United States are also dealing with different enemies. The United States’ chief enemy in the war against terrorism is al-Qaeda. In Russia, however, the terrorist threat originates primarily in Chechnya. Russia seemed to get very little benefit from its cooperation with the coalition against terrorism. As a realist and a pragmatist, Putin understood that Russia would become irrelevant if it did not cooperate in the coalition against terrorism, but he also believed that knowledge of the difficulties of fighting in Afghanistan, the intelligence that Russia had been gathering and its relationship with the Northern Alliance were assets