Our New Best Friend?

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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.

What Putin achieved in Slovenia he cemented on Sept. 11, when he was the first foreign leader to call the White House after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. With the President circling 35,000 ft. above Florida aboard Air Force One, Rice took the call. Putin said he knew U.S. forces were being placed on high alert but that he would order his own military to stand down a break from cold war tradition, when any escalation of military activity by one side was seen as a potentially hostile move by the other. "It was a metaphor for the changed nature of the relationship," says Rice. "For the next several days, it was one of the first things the President mentioned in conversation." A few months later, Putin made an extraordinary concession when he agreed to the stationing of American troops in some former Soviet republics in central Asia to facilitate the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Cozying up to America poses risks for Putin. His embrace of the West has critics in the military and elsewhere quietly grumbling that he has been "Gorbachevized," that he's selling Russia out in exchange for a pat on the head from the U.S. President. In a poll of Russians published last week in Izvestia, 52% of the respondents said they still view NATO as a threat to Moscow, while a newspaper sourly announced the arms accord with the headline Russia has lost the nuclear war. Still, Putin has kept his generals happy by waging an aggressive and often brutal war in the renegade Chechen republic. And despite some reservations about his foreign policy, Putin remains popular with the Russian people for bringing some order back to society.

He did manage to convince Bush that any nuclear-arms accord should be enshrined in a new treaty, something the U.S. President had insisted was unnecessary. But the treaty itself is a flimsy document. Its three pages include no timetable for the reduction of warheads, just a promise to have it all done by 2012, when it expires, and no formula for establishing compliance. It doesn't require any warheads to be dismantled or destroyed, meaning they can and will be stored for possible use in the future. U.S. insistence on this point was particularly troubling to the Russians, but Putin, who can't afford to maintain a large strategic arsenal in any case, acceded to it in the end. "There's no actual reduction," complains Jim Steinberg, a top foreign-policy adviser to Clinton. "It's just an agreement on the deployment of forces. You can't even call it an arms-control treaty."

But Putin can argue that there are other benefits to his rapprochement with Washington. While previous arms-control treaties have painstakingly dictated force structures, this one gives Russia's generals maximum flexibility in the way they deploy nuclear missiles. Even if full membership in NATO remains, as a Bush Administration official puts it, "a long way off" for Russia, the new accord gives Moscow a seat at the table with the alliance's 19 full-fledged members for discussions on fighting terrorism and arms control. There also remains what Coit Blacker, a Stanford professor and close friend of Rice's, calls "the elusive promise of economic cooperation." Putin is beginning to allow foreign access to Russia's vast petroleum reserves, but trade and investment in other sectors will lag as long as the nation's business laws remain inscrutably complex and arbitrarily enforced.

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 Bush Administration downgraded Chechnya as a point of contention, and that disposition only hardened after Sept. 11. "Putin wants us to legitimate what he's doing in Chechnya, to equate it with the war on terrorism," says Michael McFaul, another former colleague from Rice's days as a professor and provost at Stanford. "He wants Bush to come to Moscow and say, 'We're in this war together.'"