Decision Points

every day clad in orange scarves and ribbons until the Ukrainian Supreme Court ordered a rerun of the tainted election. Yushchenko won and was sworn in on January 23, 2005, completing the Orange Revolution.
    At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, both Georgia and Ukraine applied for Membership Action Plans, MAPs, the final step before consideration for full membership. I was a strong supporter of their applications. But approval required unanimity, and both Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy , the new president of France, were skeptical. They knewGeorgia and Ukraine had tense relationships with Moscow, and they worried NATO could get drawn into a war with Russia. They were also concerned about corruption.
    I thought the threat from Russia strengthened the case for extending MAPs to Georgia and Ukraine. Russia would be less likely to engage in aggression if these countries were on a path into NATO. As for the governance issues, a step toward membership would encourage them to clean up corruption. We agreed on a compromise: We would not grant Georgia and Ukraine MAPs in Bucharest, but we would issue a statement announcing that they were destined for future membership in NATO. At the end of the debate, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain leaned over to me and said, “We didn’t give them MAPs, but we may have just made them members!”

    The NATO debate over Georgia and Ukraine highlighted the influence of Russia. In my first meeting with Vladimir Putin in the spring of 2001, he complained that Russia was burdened by Soviet-era debt. At that point, oil was selling for $26 per barrel. By the time I saw Putin at the APEC summit in Sydney in September 2007, oil had reached $71—on its way to $137 in the summer of 2008. He leaned back in his chair and asked how were Russia’s mortgage-backed securities doing.
    The comment was vintage Putin. He was sometimes cocky, sometimes charming, always tough. Over my eight years as president, I met face to face with Vladimir more than forty times. Laura and I had wonderful visits with him and his wife, Lyudmilla, at our home in Crawford and his dacha outside Moscow, where he showed me his private chapel and let me drive his classic 1956 Volga. He took us on a beautiful boat ride through St. Petersburg during the White Nights Festival. I invited him to Kennebunkport, where we went fishing with Dad. I’ll never forget Putin’s reaction the first time he came into the Oval Office. It was early in the morning, and the light was streaming through the south windows. As he stepped through the door, he blurted out, “My God … This is beautiful!” It was quite a response for a former KGB agent from the atheist Soviet Union.
    Through all the ups and downs, Putin and I were candid with each other. We cooperated in some important areas, including fighting terrorism, removing the Taliban from Afghanistan, and securing nuclear materials.
    One of the biggest achievements emerged from our first meeting, in Slovenia in 2001. I told Vladimir I planned to give him the required six months’ notice that America would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, so that we could both develop effective missile defense systems. He made clear that this wouldn’t make me popular in Europe. I told him I had campaigned on the issue and the American people expected me to follow through. “The Cold War is over,” I told Putin. “We are no longer enemies.”
    I also informed him that America would unilaterally cut our arsenal of strategic nuclear warheads by two thirds. Putin agreed to match our reductions. Less than a year later, we signed the Moscow Treaty , which pledged our nations to shrink our number of deployed warheads from 6,600 weapons to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. The treaty amounted to one of the largest nuclear weapons cuts in history, and it happened without the endless negotiations that usually come with arms-control agreements .
    Over the course of eight years, Russia’s newfound wealth affected Putin. He became aggressive abroad and more defensive about his record at home. In our first one-on-one meeting of my second term, in Bratislava, I raised my concerns about Russia’s lack of progress on democracy. I was especially worried about his arrests of Russian businessmen and his crackdown on the free press. “Don’t lecture me about the free press,” he said, “not after you fired that reporter.”
    It dawned on me what he was referring to. “Vladimir, are you