US-Russia: The Window on Putin's Soul Has Frosted Over

At their first meeting, in 2001 in Slovenia, US President George W. Bush was famously able to look Russian leader Vladimir Putin "in the eye" and "get a sense of his soul." Bush then pronounced Putin a man he could do business with. "And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship," Bush stated.

Flash forward almost seven years – to the last meeting the duo held while still heads of their respective states: The Bush-Putin partnership hasn't exactly turned out the way the US president predicted back then. If Bush, during his April 6 trek to Sochi, tried to peer into his special little peep hole on Putin's soul, he found that it had been patched up. The two tried in Sochi to settle the outstanding strategic issues dividing the two countries, but made little, if any progress.

A contributing factor in the failure of Bush's prognostication capability is the reversal of fortune that both the United States and Russia has experienced. In the spring of 2001, the United States was the world's unchallenged power, while Russia was still reeling from the Soviet collapse and Boris Yeltsin's booze-cruise leadership style. Today, it is the American economy that is teetering, while the Iraq War blows a gaping hole in Washington's budget, thereby threatening prosperity for future generations. The Kremlin, meanwhile, is flush with cash from skyrocketing energy prices, and the inside-the-ring-road crowd is now bursting with hubris.

The most significant stumbling block during the Sochi discussions was the US plan to install missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin has characterized the plan as hostile to Russia's interests, and has proposed that the two countries jointly operate an anti-missile station in Azerbaijan. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Team Bush has tried furiously in recent months to cajole the Kremlin into going along with the Polish-Czech option. But unlike his two predecessors in the Kremlin – Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev – Putin was in a position to keep on saying