(2 of 5)
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."