Our New Best Friend?
George Bush heads to Moscow to complete an arms deal. The inside story of how he decided Vladimir Putin was his kind of guy

Early in his presidential campaign, George W. Bush was on a four-mile run with a reporter when he began ruminating on the nature of Vladimir Putin, the former kgb lieutenant colonel who had become Russia's President. "Anyone who tells you they've figured Putin out," Bush said, "is just blowing smoke." Months later, on the eve of Bush's inauguration, his soon-to-be National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, predicted a gloomy future for U.S.-Russian relations. "There are a lot of bad things happening in Russia now," she said. "We don't have any reason to trust Putin."

So much for history. This week, as Bush and Rice escape the din of post-September 11 questions and recriminations and arrive in Moscow for what will be his first-ever visit to Russia, the President will hail the leader he once viewed with so much suspicion as a trusted friend—and Russia as a close American ally. He and Putin will sign a treaty committing both nations to slash their strategic nuclear arsenals from 6,000 warheads to a maximum of 2,200. Then the Russian President will give his American buddy a tour of St. Petersburg, Putin's hometown. The following week they will be together again, this time in Rome, where they are expected to sign an agreement giving Russia a kind of junior partnership in nato, the cold war military alliance created to confront the Soviet threat. Rice, who shares her boss's newfound optimism about Russia and its leader, fairly gushes when she describes the transformation. "To see the kind of relationship that Presidents Bush and Putin have developed and to see Russia firmly anchored in the West," she told TIME last week, "that's really a dream of 300 years, not just of the post-cold war era."

That dream, if it comes true, holds great promise for both countries. Warmer ties have already given the Bush Administration more freedom to pursue missile defense, a partner in its war on terrorism and the possibility that Russia will go along with Bush's plan to try to topple Saddam Hussein. Washington also hopes that Russia, which produces 10% of the world's oil, can help ease U.S. dependence on Middle East supplies. Russia in turn has won not only closer ties to nato but also tacit acceptance of its war on the rebel Chechen republic and the promise of greater economic integration with the West. Disputes remain between Moscow and Washington—chief among them, Russia's alleged aid to Iran's nuclear-weapons program—but relations are better now than at almost any other time since World War II.

WHAT DO WE WANT FROM THEM?
OIL Russia produces 10% of the world's oil, and its reserves could help reduce U.S. dependence on the Middle East.
IRAQ The Soviets tacitly backed the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf War. Now Bush wants Putin's blessing on efforts to topple Saddam Hussein.
TERRORISM Washington hopes to build on Moscow's help with the war in Afghanistan. Russia provided intelligence and acquiesced to U.S. troops in its backyard.

WHAT DO THEY WANT FROM US?
NATO Cooperation with the Western alliance brings acceptance in other international groups. Long-term possibility: full NATO membership.
CHECHNYA Moscow sees its struggle to suppress the secessionists as part of the war on terrorism and wants that view legitimized by Washington.
INVESTMENT To save Russia's economy, Putin believes he must integrate with the Western world.

That would not be so surprising if foreign-policy experts in the U.S. and Europe had not been warning as recently as a year ago that Bush's policies were destined to provoke another arms race and launch a new cold war. When Bush began his campaign in 1999, his views on Russia were drawn mainly from Rice, a Sovietologist who worked in his father's White House and who served as the Texas Governor's foreign-policy tutor. Bush shared Rice's pessimism about Russia's progress in the 1990s and echoed her critique of Bill Clinton's overly "romantic" image of Boris Yeltsin as the embodiment of democratic reform. Rice even suggested in 1999 that U.S. policy should seek to "contain" and "quarantine" Russia.

Bush's advisers say the key to his attitude adjustment regarding Putin was the two leaders' first encounter, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, last June; Bush decided within two hours of meeting him that Putin was a man he could trust. Bush's remarks—"I looked the man in the eye," he said, and "I was able to get a sense of his soul"—elicited snickers from journalists and grimaces from his advisers.

Bush's effusions notwithstanding, the lovefest in Ljubljana was more a product of strategy than chemistry. At a White House briefing with outside experts before the summit, Bush telegraphed an intense desire for his first encounter with Putin to go smoothly. In the first few months after taking office, Bush was under constant assault by European allies for his unilateralist foreign policy, including his snubbing of Moscow. Among the signs of disrespect: the ouster from the U.S. of 50 alleged Russian diplomat-spies in March 2001, the five-month delay before setting a first Bush-Putin meeting, and the threat, since carried out, to withdraw unilaterally from the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Antiballistic Missile Treaty in order to build a national missile-defense system. Some veterans of the senior Bush's Administration lectured the President and his advisers that Russia still mattered and should not be ignored. By June, says a current adviser, "it was beginning to sink in."

Putin had his own agenda. Not long after he took over from Yeltsin in late 1999, the new Russian President began making overtures to the West, first to Blair and then to nato. Faced with an economic crisis, Putin believed he had no choice but to speed Russia's integration into the world economy. To succeed, he would have to win over the leader of the world's only "hyperpower," as the U.S. is sometimes called in Russia. Before Ljubljana, says a former aide, Putin "devoured an enormous amount of information on Bush and everything related to him." He knew that Bush put great stock in his ability to judge people face to face and that charming Bush would pay diplomatic dividends. Like the former spy he is, Putin set out for Slovenia determined, it seems, to play the character his mission required.

Another thing Putin wanted—America's acquiescence to his military campaign in Chechnya—in many ways has already been received. Because of Rice's conviction that U.S.-Russian relations should focus on strategic issues instead of internal affairs, the Administration downgraded Chechnya as a point of contention. "Putin wants us to legitimate what he's doing in Chechnya, to equate it with the war on terrorism," says another colleague from Rice's days at Stanford. "He wants Bush to come to Moscow and say, 'We're in this war together.'"

Questions

1. What is Bush's view of Vladimir Putin? What is the basis for this view?

2. What changes in U.S.-Russian relations have come about in recent months?