Our New Best Friend?

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ly 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, stood near a cocktail-party buffet table with a glass of white wine in her hand and 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-Sept. 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, reciprocating the hospitality Bush showed Putin at his Texas ranch last November. 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."

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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.

That would not be so surprising if foreign-policy savants 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. "The President and Condi didn't want anything to do with Russia when they came in," says a former top aide to the first President Bush. "They thought they knew who Putin was — a throwback to the old days — and they had no interest in finding out if they were right."

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, who feared Bush was swooning over Putin the way they had accused Clinton of falling for Yeltsin. Former Clintonites rolled their eyes at the irony. "I've known Putin for seven years," says Sandy Berger, who held Rice's job under Clinton. "I've looked him in the eye many times. And all I've ever seen is him looking back at me."

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. British Prime Minister Tony Blair personally urged Bush to tone down the rhetoric and engage with Putin. Others, including 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."