Strongman, The

about Iran and North Korea, and why Russia felt threatened. 10
    Bush is said to have looked at him and said, ‘OK, I see this is really serious for you. Nobody advised me you treat this so seriously.’
    ‘We can’t sleep for thinking about this!’ said Putin.
    ‘Well, as your friend,’ said Bush, ‘I can promise that we’ll look into what you’ve said.’
    But Putin had a new and concrete proposal, designed to trump the American move – while simultaneously calling their bluff on whether the system was really aimed against Iran and not Russia, as Bush claimed. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I spoke to the president of Azerbaijan yesterday. We have a radar station there, in a place called Gabala. I’m willing to offer this to you. It’s closer to Iran. We can have a joint system. You use our radar in Azerbaijan, and there’ll be no need for one in the Czech Republic.’
    Putin had a stick as well as a carrot. Just days before the summit he had hinted darkly that if the Americans deployed their missile interceptors in Eastern Europe then Russia would have to retaliate by re-training Russian missiles on European targets. Now he offered to remove that threat if the Americans rethought their plans: ‘It would allow us to refrain from changing our position and retargeting our missiles. There would be no need to deploy our missile strike system in the immediate vicinity of our European borders, and no need to deploy the US missile strike system in outer space.’
    It was an opportunity the Americans could not ignore: for the first time, Putin was offering to drop his opposition to missile defence, under the condition that Russia would also be involved in it. Bush promised to talk to his military advisers about it.
    But within a month, sensing he had Bush’s ear, Putin was offering more. On 1 July he flew to Kennebunkport in the state of Maine for informal talks at the Bush family home at Walker’s Point, a little peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. He took a speedboat ride with George W. Bush and his father and ate a supper of lobster and swordfish with the family, together with the foreign ministers and national security advisers from each side – Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, and Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Prikhodko. ‘It was a very relaxed setting,’ says Rice. ‘We sat, I’ll never forget, in this lovely chintz-covered living room, with the ocean in the background.’ 11
    Next day they did a spot of fishing, and Putin pulled out more initiatives. Not only would he offer the Gabala radar in Azerbaijan but he would get it modernised. And then there was a brand-new radar the Russians were about to commission at Armavir in southern Russia. That could also be used. Together they would form a joint early-warning system for common missile defence involving not just the US and Russia but the whole of NATO. The NATO–Russia Council could finally have something concrete to work on. Putin offered to host an ‘information exchange centre’ in Moscow and proposed there could be a similar one in Brussels too. ‘This would be a self-contained system that would work in real time,’ Putin went on. ‘We believe that there would then be no need to install any more facilities in Europe – I mean those facilities proposed for the Czech Republic and the missile base in Poland.’
    Bush wasn’t too sure about the latter point, but the rest of Putin’s proposal made a lot of sense to him – especially as Putin seemed to place these specific missile defence proposals in the context of a whole new strategic alliance. As Sergei Lavrov recalled later: ‘Putin stressed that if we could work together on this, it would, to all intents and purposes, make us allies. The proposal was prompted by a wish to create an absolutely new relationship between us.’
    The talks ended, and the two leaders were about to go outside to brief the press. Stephen Hadley took President Bush aside for a moment: ‘That was a terrific statement, exactly what we’ve been looking for from Putin. Do you think he’d be willing to say that publicly?’
    ‘I don’t know. Let’s ask him,’ said Bush. He approached the Russian leader and told him he thought it would help accelerate progress between the two countries if he would repeat on camera what he had said privately. 12
    Putin was only too happy to oblige. ‘Such cooperation,’ he told the press, ‘would bring about a major change in Russian– American relations regarding