Word: putin
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...Given Russia's cooperation so far in the U.S. war in Afghanistan, including its sharing intelligence about al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Bush is apt to comply. He is also expected to gloss over Putin's authoritarian crackdown on his country's fledgling independent media, as well as his making the national legislature, the Duma, a totally servile body. "The things about Putin that Bush and Condi criticized during the campaign have only gotten worse in the past two years," says McFaul. "It's not like Putin's suddenly changed his ways at home...
...President is reading it now, but whether a novel about human weakness and the power of guilt will give him any clues on how to deal with his Russian counterpart isn't clear. More than likely, Bush will rely on the same instincts that told him in Slovenia that Putin was a man he could trust. After the visit, Bush aides expect the relationship between the two to grow stronger. Rice goes to great lengths to emphasize that Bush is not basing his Russia policy on his personal chemistry with Putin. But the distinction is hard to discern. After...