When Vladimir Meets GeorgeWhat's on the agenda for this weekend's informal summit?

(Continued from page 1)

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Bush had just begun his second term as president and was declaring, over and over, that the spreading of democracy would be the central theme of his new foreign policy. Many Russians saw this, too, as part of an anti-Russia plan.

"It's hard to tell how much of this Putin believes and how much he's using it for political purposes," Sestanovich says. "But Russians started to see their neighbors' domestic policies as a potential threat to national security. The Ukrainian election hardened this worldview and really marked a parting of the ways. At that point, we were on the road to a confrontation."

An astute student of Russian history and politics—someone with the credentials of, say, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—should have anticipated this reaction and tried to mollify it. Russia, after all, has hardly regained the footing of an imperial power. Its military is still weak, its economy is a gas-and-oil monoculture. An administration that hadn't lost sight of how to deal with Russia could have found many opportunities—offered many lures—to keep Moscow pacified; if not revolving in our orbit, at least not colliding with it.

But Bush didn't offer Putin a deal, engage him in discussions, or seem even to recognize that a serious chat was in order. When Putin threw his fit about missile defenses in Europe, a "senior administration official" told the New York Times, "We were a little late to the game. We should have been out there … making the case more forcefully before people began framing the debate for us."

It was a jaw-dropping admission of diplomatic failure, along the lines of a homeowner forgetting to pay the monthly mortgage. Putin's protests were without substantive merit. A few anti-missile interceptors, assuming they worked (a dubious assumption), would be no counter to the Russians' vast missile arsenal. But Bush's failure to play "the game" gave Putin all the ammo he needed—to justify tight controls on the home front, revive paranoia about "USA imperialism," and sow divisions and fears about "a new Cold War" among America's European allies.

Philip Zelikow, a longtime friend of Rice's and her former counselor in the State Department, blames much of the current tension on Putin. But he adds, "That said, the U.S. hasn't had the time to have a Russia policy over the last two years."

Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff in Bush's first term, agrees. Even in Powell's day, he says, "Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea sucked all the energy out of the administration—including at State—and left little time or room for thinking about Russia." When Putin said or did something that couldn't be ignored, "U.S. policy," he adds, "was reaction, not planned. I don't think that, initially, anyone—including Condi—realized just how rapidly petrodollars and Putin's consolidation of power had put Russia back in a position of influence in the international community."

Distractions, though, are no excuse. One lesson learned by the previous post-Cold War presidents—Bill Clinton and Bush's father—was that, in farflung crises, a more influential Russia can be a more useful Russia.

In the 1998 Balkans war, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic finally surrendered after 79 days of NATO airstrikes not because the bombing had exhausted him (there's no evidence of that) or because he feared a ground invasion (no such assault was in the works), but rather because the Russians—his main ally—withdrew their support and joined the Atlantic Alliance's common front.

This didn't happen by chance. Strobe Talbott, Clinton's Russia specialist, took strenuous measures to persuade Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin not only to abandon Milosevic but to sit across the table from him—in clear assent to the West's position—while Talbott demanded that all Serbian forces leave Kosovo. Clinton also had long phone conversations with Yeltsin, with whom he'd cultivated a personal relationship.

Michael McFaul, a Russia scholar at Stanford (who chronicled this episode in his book Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War), says, "Flying to Moscow over and over, treating them as pivotal world actors, consulting with them privately—that's how things get done with the Russians. And that's what the Bush administration hasn't been doing."

The Russians won't always be on our side. And sometimes we'll have to confront them. But a key task of diplomacy is to persuade, cajole, or coerce them into seeing that taking our side is in their interest—or, if it's not, to offer them inducements to make it so.

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Fred Kaplan, Slate's "War Stories" columnist, was the Boston Globe's Moscow bureau chief from 1992 to '95.

Photograph of Bush and Putin by Astakhov Dmitry/AFP/Getty Images.

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