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Gushing Bush

B. S. Raghavan

THE US President, Mr. George W. Bush, has been drawing plenty of flak from even those members of the US Congress and the sections of the media normally friendly to him for the irrational exuberance with which he gushed about his meeting with the Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin, at Slovenia, in the beginning of this month. Appearing at a media conference along with Mr Putin at the conclusion of the meeting, Mr Bush laid it on thick by calling Mr Putin a `trustworthy' and strai ghtforward person he could do business with, into whose eyes he looked and took the sense of his soul. Watching the media coverage on the TV, it was clear that Mr Putin himself was uncomfortable and squirming at the ebullient encomium under w hich Mr Bush sought to submerge him.

The general opinion is that Mr Bush went overboard in giving a former apparatchik of the Communist Party and operative of the Soviet Intelligence who, in his impressionable years was shaped by the Cold War, an exaggerated buildup that was not justified. In any case, Mr Bush lays himself open to the charge of being impulsive and lacking in gravitas by indulging in unrestrained hyperbole after meeting a person for the first time and for a short duration of a little more than an hour. Ever since his return to the US, he has been the target of cartoons and lampoons, and tying himself into knots explaining away the euphoric adjectives he piled on Mr Putin. The general public too has taken a dim view of his overall performance on the job, as is evident from his going down by several notches in a recent poll.

Poor Mr Bush. He probably never bargained for all these brickbats when he was merely acting with the best of intentions. In his eagerness to get the support of Mr Putin for his pet proposal of missile defence, he must have thought that even some excessiv e `buttering' was not too much of a price to pay. Unfortunately, it has not worked out that way. Mr Putin rebuffed Mr Bush on the spot by throwing cold water on his scheme, opposing any attempt to go back on the old Anti-Ballistic Treaty (ABT), and cauti oning Mr Bush in effect against any further flaunting of unilateralism. For good measure, he threatened that Russia would have no option but to add to its stockpile of missiles if the ABT was tampered with in any manner.

Mr Bush must have also thought that he was after all following in the footsteps of Mr Ronald Reagan who too was euphoric about his meeting with Mr Mikhail Gorbachev and had talked of establishing a relationship of trust between the US and the then Soviet Union which he had condemned as the ``evil empire''. The similarity does not hold for the simple reason that Mr Reagan declared, right in front of Mr Gorbachev, his motto to be ``Trust, but verify''. Mr Bush says that when he certified Mr Putin to be tr ustworthy, he said to himself under his breath (a la Yudhishtira in the famous episode in the Mahabharat involving the killing of Ashwattama, the elephant!) ``until proved to the contrary'' but did not consider it necessary or proper to utter them aloud. The root of the contretemps beleaguering Mr Bush can be traced to the general approach of American leaders. They find the urge to win friends and influence people to be so overpowering that they compulsively burst out in a torrent of effusive eulogies at the first sight of other world leaders thinking that it would promote their country's interest. President Truman unsuccessfully tried to court Marshal Stalin at Potsdam in the same fashion hoping to make him loosen his stranglehold on Eastern Europe, bu t Stalin had no use for Truman, contemptuously telling his aides that he was ``worthless''.