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#4
Newsweek
November 26, 2001
Now, Yalta on the Fly
In a star turn, Dubya dances with old enemies, defeats new ones and mulls his next steps
By Howard Fineman and Martha Brant

The news could not have been better as George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin began their chat in the Oval Office. The Taliban, under attack by tribal fighters and American bombs, had collapsed. But the president of Russia, who had first warned Bush about the dangers of Osama bin Laden six months ago, saw no reason to celebrate. Instead he expressed concern. The world now might conclude that the war against terrorism had been won. In fact, it had just begun. It was crucial to finish the job. Bush agreed, vowing to pursue bin Laden “north, south, east or west,” and to hunt down his terrorist network. “Until Al Qaeda is brought to justice,” Bush told Putin later that day, “we’re not leaving.”

AS A BLACK BELT IN JUDO, Putin knows this rule of combat—and politics: you are most vulnerable when you think you’ve got everything under control. On many fronts—from Kabul to Congress, from global trade talks to Florida recounts—Bush has added luster to the leaderly standing he acquired after September 11. Hollywood would veto some of the script as implausibly perfect. In the midst of dinner with Putin at the Texas ranch, Bush got word that American aid workers, former students at a nearby college, had been freed in Afghanistan. Toasts followed. He even took time for a bipartisan flourish, telling Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy he would name Justice Department headquarters for her late husband. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, Bush registered an 85 percent approval rating—lengthening an already impressive run of stratospheric popularity.

But, as Bush’s father learned, wartime support can be as evanescent as the contrail of a fighter jet. Last week there were unsettling reminders of our vulnerability: a still-unexplained airliner crash at JFK airport in New York, the discovery of a fourth anthrax letter from Trenton, N.J., scribbles in an abandoned Al Qaeda hideout about nuclear weapons. Bush’s decision to establish a secret military tribunal for terrorist suspects drew the first heavy political fire since 9-11, and he was bogged down in a battle over legislation to spur the economy. Most important, he had yet to articulate a vision for the world that he’s shaping with Putin and Britain’s Tony Blair. What does this alliance—a Yalta on the fly—think the century should look like?

In the meantime, Congress was problematic enough. At his weekly breakfast with Hill leaders, Bush urged passage of an air-travel-security bill, offering to bring negotiators to the White House to knock heads. Thus armed, Vice President Dick Cheney and Senate Republican leader Trent Lott spearheaded a deal. Baggage screeners would be “federalized,” but airports could eventually “opt out” and rehire private firms. The measure is unlikely to soothe the public in time for the holidays; most of its provisions won’t be in place for a year.

Bush also has the prosaic but vital details of world trade to worry about. In Qatar, his negotiators spurred a new round of tariff reduction by making concessions to developing countries in the World Trade Organization. The aim was to avoid another breakdown like the one at the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle—and show the United States’ devotion to expanding opportunity.

In politics, good news can be the absence of bad news, and Bush got the latter from Florida in the final journalistic re-examination of the recount. It found that Democrat Al Gore might have won the 2000 race there under the most expansive conceivable divination of “voter intent.” But it also found that Bush would have won the recounts that Gore and the state court had asked for.

In normal times the first visit of a new Russian leader would have dominated the news. It didn’t. Putin’s trip to Washington, Texas and New York nevertheless was a fascinating—and largely successful—exercise. There were no negotiating breakthroughs. Administration officials had tried hard in the weeks leading up to the trip to prepare the ground for a deal that would allow the United States to go ahead with testing a new missile-defense shield. But the Russians signaled “no deal” a week ahead of time, and Bush’s unilateral promise to reduce missile stockpiles didn’t prompt one. Still, Putin was more than upbeat. “At the end of the day,” he said in a call-in show on NPR, “we will be able to arrive at a solution that will be acceptable for everyone involved.”

For Bush, the key to Putin’s visit lay in how he handled himself. Bush, after all, placed an enormous bet on his putative soulmate. So far, it looks like a good bet. The Russian’s attire was pure “bada-bing”; his rhetoric was pure Boy Scout. He praised the dissidence of Andrei Sakharov, the virtues of the press, the power of market economics. Appearing at Rice University in Houston (where he was introduced by Bush I), he touted a new Russian “flat tax,” claiming cutting taxes had increased revenues—a theory “Ol’ 41” had dismissed as “voodoo economics.” Russia, Putin noted, is pumping oil at a furious rate, helping the world economy by undermining OPEC’s effort to raise prices.

Putin was “good folks” off-stage, too, and, to Bushes, that matters. Dinner in the breezeway of the Prairie Chapel Ranch was pleasant, guests said, but the real deal was the next morning. In the living room, Bush sat for his national-security briefing with CIA Director George Tenet. Bush asked his pal “Vladimir”—who’d spent 16 years in the KGB—to sit in. In the best good-ole-boy fashion, they used some off-color language to describe the terrorists. They also discussed “mutual interests of the 21st century,” said chief of staff Andy Card. The historical echoes had to be deafening: the son of a CIA director surveying the world with a former Russian spy. We can only hope they let the rest of us in on the discussion.

With Tamara Lipper and T. Trent Gegax

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