Remember the good ‘ole times from back in the summer of 2006?  Russia was about to host the G8 Summit, Anna Politkovskaya and Stanislav Markelov were still alive and working hard, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky had only been in the gulag 2.5 years and undergone only one show trial.  Earlier that spring, the Council on Foreign Relations also published quite a critical paper entitled “Russia’s Wrong Direction” which ruffled some feathers, but would later of course turn out to be quite prescient.

The report was chaired by former Congressman Jack Kemp, who expressed optimism that the G8 Summit to be held in St. Petersburg that summer could be a useful forum to get things back on track and enlist Russia’s help on a number of important global issues: “The G8 summit may be a watershed on many of these issues–Iran and energy in particular. It’s a real opportunity to lock in more helpful Russian policies. But if we don’t see progress, people are going to ask what Russia is doing in the G8 in the first place.”

My, how things have changed.  It’s now been three years, and rule of law has, well, imploded, democracy – not even Gerhard Schröder is selling that one anymore, while in terms of Iran, the Kremlin is actually boasting about defending the ayatollahs from criticism.  Back in St. Petersburg that year, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Junichiro Koizumi, Romano Prodi, and the rest hobnobbed with Vladimir Putin and did their best to imagine that Russia was fulfilling the minimum required standards for G8 membership (funny how out of that list, only one leader is still in power).

Yet despite all this, no one seems to be asking Jack Kemp’s question this year.