Iran and Iraq loom larger than ever in Russian-American relations. At a time when the number of issues on which Moscow and Washington disagree is dwindling, these two are still contentious enough-despite Russia's "yes" vote in the un Security Council on November 8-that officials and commentators on each side regularly suspect the other of ill will and bad faith.
It's not a new problem. Long before President Bush found Iraq and Iran to be part of an "axis of evil", they were already the subject of acrimonious exchanges between Moscow and Washington. American policymakers have frequently asked their Russian counterparts how they can expect to maintain friendly relations with the United States and with states that support terrorism, threaten American friends, and violate their own international commitments by seeking weapons of mass destruction.
Worse, Americans accuse Russia of helping Iraq and Iran. When Russian diplomats shielded Iraq from international pressure in the late 1990s, Madeleine Albright used to call them "Saddam's lawyers." And the U.S. government continues to believe that Iran's effort to build nuclear weapons and long-range missiles gets a boost from Russian technology and expertise. This is no minor irritation: the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by regimes deeply hostile to our interests has become America's pre-eminent national security concern, and Russian policies that make it harder for the United States to address this concern are not easy to ignore.
