There’s no doubt who started that something. After September 11, both Putin and Bush proclaimed a new era in U.S.-Russian relations, ignoring or overriding the skeptics at home. And they continued to do so last week. Although they failed to hammer out a deal on missile defense, the two leaders couldn’t praise each other enough. “On our way here, we didn’t expect at all that things would be so warm and homely as they were at the ranch,” gushed Putin. Not to be outdone, Bush extolled Putin’s virtues as “a reformer, a man who loves his country as much as I love mine, a man who loves his wife as much as I love mine, a man who loves his daughters as much as I love my daughters and a man who’s going to make a huge difference in making the world more peaceful by working closely with the United States.”
Hokey it is, but such language is changing not just the tone of the bilateral relationship but the way Americans and Russians see each other. Call it trickle-down politics, a case of a warm and fuzzy glow at the top working its way downward. According to a CBS News poll last week, 25 percent of Americans now consider Russia an ally, and 55 percent consider it friendly–an 80 percent favorable view. By contrast, 58 percent held an unfavorable opinion of Russia in a 1999 poll. Russia has registered a similar trend, although not quite as strong. Most Russians viewed the United States as an “unfriendly power” before September 11, and a subsequent poll by the Public Opinion Foundation showed that a sizable minority–46 percent–continue to believe this. But 14 percent consider the United States an ally, putting it in first place on a list that it didn’t even appear on two years ago. And 69 percent now favor closer relations with Washington.
“This is a phenomenal result,” notes Alexander Oslon, the president of the Public Opinion Foundation, which works mainly for the Kremlin. He attributes these reversals to much more than Putin’s policies. What angered many Russians was the sense that Americans had emerged in the aftermath of the cold war as the sole superpower and often seemed to write Russia off altogether. Now the perception is that the United States is no longer invulnerable, and no longer as prone to unilateralism. “America looks a lot weaker than it seemed, and it’s reassessing its view of the world,” says Oslon. “That means that the mental distance between us has decreased.” And that Russians feel important again, which is exactly what Bush had in mind when he pronounced Putin “very trustworthy” at his first meeting with the Russian president in Slovenia last June.
The Russian leader proved equally adept at winning over ordinary Americans last week. Clark Moore, a math teacher and basketball coach at Crawford High School, remembers thinking of the Russians as the enemy. After seeing Bush and Putin field questions at the school gym, he takes a different view. “I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d be present for something like this,” he says, visibly impressed by Putin’s performance. “We can trust them a whole lot more now than in the past, that’s for sure.” The skeptics haven’t disappeared, but Bush and Putin no longer feel as lonely as they once did when they began proclaiming the dawn of a new age.
