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President George W. Bush summed up his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the end of their summit in late September as “a good fellow to spend quality time with.” It was vintage Bush – always ready to personalize meetings with foreign leaders.
Not that he has been the only president to stress the personal – his predecessor, Bill Clinton, tended to highlight his private rapport with foreign counterparts and to see personal chemistry between leaders as an important ingredient of diplomacy.
But how far does personal friendship between leaders go when it comes to international relations? Is it a crucial element in negotiations and shaping agreements? Bush’s personality-driven, foreign-policy approach has proved successful in many ways, according to diplomats, but there are limitations to it and the danger that sometimes too much is invested in a personal relationship that can’t produce desired results.
Even so, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher certainly showed that a strong friendship between leaders can be translated into effective cooperation. The extraordinary friendship between the two reinvigorated the flagging Anglo-American “special relationship” with far-reaching consequences. As far as Reagan was concerned their strong tie was evidence of divine intervention, according to a letter he wrote to Thatcher in 1994, days after she delivered a speech in Washington at a formal 83rd birthday tribute for the retired U.S. president.
“Throughout my life, I’ve always believed that life’s path is determined by a Force more powerful than fate. I feel the Lord has brought us together for a profound purpose, and that I have been richly blessed for having known you,” he wrote.
Bush hasn’t suggested that his foreign friendships are a result of divine intervention, but he and his advisers are astute students of Reagan and, like Reagan, the current president sees diplomacy and trust in intensely personal terms, say White House aides. As with Clinton, that approach fits well in a confessional era of tell-all, an era when politicians are meant to display their feelings and not to be buttoned up.
And several foreign leaders have been ready to reciprocate in emphasizing the personal. Britain’s Tony Blair, like Bush and Clinton, always has been keen to be overtly chummy with counterparts; his initial coupling with Putin upon the latter’s election appeared to be a courtship that would end in authentic intimacy. But disagreement over Iraq has strained that relationship, an example of where policy dispute and national interests limit the power of friendships among international leaders.
The Blair-Bush friendship, though, just keeps redoubling in strength, say insiders, despite some tactical differences over diplomacy in the run-up to the Iraq war, a different perspective on the U.N. role in post-Saddam Iraq and disagreement over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both leaders have stressed time and again their deep personal friendship, with Bush early on calling Blair a “charming guy.” The Briton is no less forthcoming. “We are allies and we are friends,” he says.
At times the public bonhomie between the two has reached what some regard as slightly absurd lengths, as in February 2001 when Bush revealed he uses the same brand of Colgate toothpaste as Blair. Even the informal Blair was a little taken aback and, when asked if they had anything else in common, the British prime minister said Bush’s list – it included the fact that they have “great” wives and children – was perhaps long enough to satisfy media curiosity.
The chumminess that developed between Blair and Bush at first also took aback many British politicians and commentators. They had predicted the relationship between the two would be frosty – that Bush would keep Blair at arms’ length in much the same way Clinton did with Blair’s predecessor, the Conservative John Major, and for the same offense – namely, too great a closeness with political opponents. Major attempted to help George H.W. Bush in the run-up to the 1992 election, allowing a search to be done in British-government files for any embarrassing tidbits they may contain on Clinton during his Rhodes scholarship days at Oxford University. Likewise, Blair and his aides made little pretense of their preference for an Al Gore victory in the 2000 presidential election. Blair’s support of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal also prompted warnings from British diplomats and journalists alike that Britain would pay the consequences if the Republicans won the next White House race.
The GOP victory made London nervous about whether Blair and Bush would get along.
“A lot of people on both sides of the Atlantic were worried that this relationship wasn’t going to work. Blair had got on extremely well with Clinton, [but] here was a new American president belonging to a different party, after a controversial election,” said former British ambassador Christopher Meyer. But in a recent TV interview Meyer said that he had a feeling before the two met that the chemistry would work well between the American and Briton.
“My hunch was that there was a kind of no-nonsense quality and informality to the two of them, which would enable them to at least start bonding very, very quickly,” he says. That is what happened at Blair’s first meeting with Bush at Camp David, the president’s Maryland retreat, a few months before 9/11. “We were there for 24 hours and it warmed up rapidly over that very brief period of time.”
The two were comfortable with one another. Meyer says the relationship was “warming up nicely as we went along, but Sept. 11 was the great accelerator in that relationship.” Since that time, when it comes to foreign leaders, the U.S. president tends to reserve his warmest remarks for Blair. The Iraq war consecrated the friendship, bonding the two.
“They have prayed together,” noted a White House source. He adds: “They have a strong Christian connection.” Blair’s aides are far less ready to stress that side of the friendship – the British public tends to squirm when politicians start talking about God and religion and faith. During a taped TV interview being conducted with Blair in the winter, the prime minister’s then-communications director Alastair Campbell warned a journalist off the subject of Christianity and that part of the friendship between Blair and Bush. But while Meyer puts the emphasis for the good relationship between Bush and Blair on their informality and lack of pomposity, he notes that “notions of faith must have helped the two of them get on.”
Others place a much greater stress on the strong religious convictions of the two in defining their special relationship.
The London Sunday Telegraph’s well-connected deputy editor Matthew d’Ancona argues: “Blair’s entire political behavior has to be linked to his private religious beliefs. He doesn’t talk about his religious beliefs very much, but they are fundamental to anything and everything that he does. I am sure that in an unspoken way it contributed to a certain affinity between Bush and Blair. I’m sure that the fact that they’re both religious people, they’re people to whom prayer and reading the Gospels matter a great deal, in a way that was probably never articulated, never actually spoken, mattered a great deal.”
According to aides to both men, their friendship now is as special as the one between Thatcher and Reagan, despite the fact they are not ideological soul mates. It has been tested and steeled by the international and domestic opposition they faced in taking their two countries to war.
Certainly the friendship has paid off for Washington, but the British prime minister is not alone in receiving from Bush the accolade “friend.” Bush has accorded that title to several other leaders during his time in office, including Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Spain’s leader Jose Maria Aznar and Mexico’s President Vicente Fox. But one of those friendships hasn’t been so useful for Washington.
Friendships can wane as policy differences come to the fore and expectations are not met, as the case of Fox illustrates. The Mexican president was the first foreign leader to enjoy a meeting with the newly elected Bush, and the warmth on display in their initial get-together indicated the determination of both leaders to use their personal chemistry to change the terms of the relationship between the United States and Mexico. As a former governor of Texas, Bush was well-acquainted with the troubles between the two countries. He made relations with Fox and Mexico a centerpiece of his early foreign policy, a move with potential to help him later with the critical Hispanic vote in the United States.
At subsequent meetings the two leaders pressed their vision for a stronger U.S.-Mexican partnership, touting the contributions of immigrants and the benefits of free trade. In a speech in September 2001, Fox remarked: “I am aware that for many Americans, and for many Mexicans, the idea of trusting their neighbor may seem risky, perhaps even unwise. But circumstances have changed. We are now bound closely together.”
But relations since have chilled dramatically, with both men feeling seriously let down by the other. Sources within the Mexican government say Fox became frustrated with the failure of the White House to push visa reforms that would have helped Mexican migrant workers, among other issues. And as Bush courted allies to prosecute the war on terrorism he prompted public complaints from Fox, who grumbled that the United States was putting too much pressure on Mexico to use its vote on the U.N. Security Council in favor of Washington.
The nadir of their relationship came in August when Fox snubbed Bush by canceling a scheduled visit to four Texas cities and to the president’s Crawford ranch in protest of the execution in Texas of convicted cop killer Javier Suarez Medina. Whether relations can be mended remains in doubt, despite the insistence of White House insiders that there still is a good friendship between the two leaders.
Even when friendships remain intact there clearly are limits to how much personal rapport can be translated into effective cooperation – already illustrated by the Bush-Putin connection. With the Russian, Bush was quick again to operate a personality-driven policy, noting after he first met Putin that he looked deeply into his soul and found a man he could trust. But the bilateral partnership has been much stronger on symbols than on substance. The biggest payoff for Washington came in the form of Russia’s participation in the antiterrorist coalition in 2001 and the giving of the green light by the Kremlin for U.S. troops to use the former Soviet republics of Central Asia in the Afghanistan campaign. But tensions have arisen, notably over the Iraq war, an issue that found Moscow siding with Paris and Berlin.
Both Putin and Bush have taken care not to allow the Iraq issue to derail U.S.-Russian relations. The effort, though, has caused much grumbling among their aides. In the Kremlin there are complaints that Russia has not received the kind of rewards it deserves for opening up Central Asia to the U.S. military. In Washington, some in the administration and on Capitol Hill maintain that Bush is making the same mistake that Clinton did with Boris Yeltsin – overinvesting in the personal relationship with the Russian leader while ignoring negative developments.
“The way Bush sees Russia is through the eyes of Putin, and he has not invested much time in seeing other perspectives – or other Russians for that matter,” says Michael McFaul, a Russia specialist at the Hoover Institution. Like other Russia experts, McFaul worries that Washington is soft-pedaling on increasing U.S. concerns about political freedom and human rights in Russia.
Critics point to the Russian government’s takeover of independent TV networks and its bullying of newspapers. There also are serious concerns about human-rights violations in Chechnya and in Moscow’s handling of terrorist threats. In many ways there is a mismatch of expectations and abilities involved in the relationship. While the Russians complain that Washington has not done enough to encourage Western investment, the Russian government has not fully provided the stable investment climate and rule of law sought by foreign investors.
Thus it is that “Bush-Putin summits are like vacation getaways taken by couples seeking to reignite the spark in their marriage. But a few romantic days on the beach in Acapulco cannot solve deeper problems of spousal infidelity or a troubled family life,” wrote Nikolas Gvosdev, a senior fellow at the Nixon Center, in the Moscow Times.
Common ground on issues ranging from combating international terrorism to stopping nuclear proliferation continues to elude Bush and Putin, endangering their personal rapport. Where their friendship will be in months to come is hard to say. Will it go the way of Fox or continue to strengthen as the Blair friendship appears to do?
Jamie Dettmer is a senior editor for Insight.
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