China's Hu Jintao, the heir apparent to Jiang Zemin, was in Moscow last week to plead the case that America's missile defence plans would upset the nuclear balance in Asia.
But his pleadings fell on deaf ears. Mr Vladimir Putin has set his cap to woo America and is not going to be deflected.
The affair will be consummated - or the advances spurned - at Crawford in deepest Texas next week where the US President will host his counterpart in a summit meeting that some feel may herald the dawn of a qualitatively new relationship.
Russian support for some form of US missile defence testing may be the sexiest story to emerge from the Texas dust, but in reality, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies and history at New York University, argues the meeting is a historic second chance for the US to redeem the wasted opportunities in its relations with Russia in the 1990s. As one columnist points out, the economic advice given by the Clinton administration and its dire effects were so bad that polls show 81 per cent of Russians now believe it was done deliberately to ensure Russia's status as a second rank power.
What marks the summit apart is September 11th and the new opportunity it gave Mr Putin. It was one he seized with enthusiasm. Russia was needed. Russia delivered. An outspoken endorsement of the war against terrorism was followed by access to valuable intelligence and then even to airbases on Afghanistan's border, courtesy of client state Tajikistan.
With Russia already softening its line on the Bush obsession over missile defence and the Pentagon concluding that it shares an interest in offensive missile reductions, Mr Bush had a potentially winning formula. A missile deal, effectively, though not officially, trading defensive missile testing for reductions in offensive capabilities is certainly expected.
Ten years ago this week the US and the then Soviet Union signed the first strategic arms control agreement. At that time, both countries deployed some 10,000 strategic nuclear weapons. And they agreed in the START I agreement to reduce that force by about 40 per cent to 6,000 on each side by the end of this year, December 2001.
Since then we had START II and, in March of 1997, President Clinton and President Yeltsin agreed to a framework for a START III, which would reduce offensive weapons to 2,000 or to anywhere between 2,000 and 2,500 weapons by the end of 2010.
But today the US still deploys more than 7,000 strategic nuclear forces, Russia about 6,000, and between them they have an estimated 6,000 tactical warheads for use in short-range battlefield systems.
But the latter can't afford to support more than 2,000 missiles, a figure close to what a US reassessment of its own real strategic needs are.
So both will "unilaterally" declare their intention to reduce the stockpiles to that sort of level.
And, it appears likely, instead of renegotiating the treaty, Mr Putin will agree a new interpretation of their joint Anti-Ballistic Missile agreement (ABM) that will allow the US to continue testing its controversial missile defence system, ostensibly for use against threats from rogue and terrorist states, European and Asian objections notwithstanding.
But analysts in Russia have been pressing Mr Putin to bring a significantly longer shopping list with him. To date Mr Putin has, however, been coy about linking issues such as his support for the war on terrorism to domestic preoccupations - serious relief on the $165 billion national debt, rapid Russian accession to the World Trade Organisation, a US investment programme, or the final removal of residual economic sanctions from the Soviet era (the Jackson-Vanik amendment, passed in 1974 to pressurise Moscow into allowing the emigration of religious minorities).
The latter are on the wishlist of the prestigious Foreign and Defence Council whose luminaries include a key Putin adviser, the former prime minister, Yevgeni Primakov, and the former ambassador to the US, Vladimir Lukin. Others want him to press for NATO membership, seen on both sides as unrealistic, and Mr Putin has already signalled his grudging acceptance of a NATO enlargement to include at least one of the Baltic states. Predicting how far Mr Bush is willing to go is difficult on such issues.
There has been loose talk from administration officials suggesting a general belief that "Russia doesn't matter any more". The early months of the presidency were notable for the number of issues on which the US was simply willing to ignore the Russian view and proceed unilaterally - from ABM to NATO expansion. Coalition-building is the order of the day and there is a price.
Paradoxically, the ease with which Mr Putin has been able to accomplish his political shift towards the US will only reinforce the sense from polls, which show huge levels of popularity, that he does not need to be helped.
What is more, as Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution suggests, "Russia's long-term goal is no longer to be a military superpower, it's to be an energy superpower. And the future for Russia's new energy power play is obviously in Europe and Asia, not so much in the United States." In the short term, however, Mr Bush has plenty he can offer.
Whether he does may well be a test of the extent to which September 11th has changed him.
psmyth@irish-times.ie
