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WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (AP): The world seemed to hang in the balance when American and Russian leaders met at a summit. Fears of nuclear war were in the air. But no more.
Russia is no longer a superpower, as the Soviet Union was, and world peace rests as much in the hands of tyrants and terrorists as in the actions of George W Bush and Vladimir Putin.
This is not to minimise their agenda for Thursday's meeting in Slovakia. Iran's nuclear ambitions alone make their meeting in Bratislava significant.
But no historic pacts will emerge. Nor are they antagonists. To the contrary, complex and careful pacts to control nuclear bombs and missiles hammered out by foreign ministers and negotiators over the years are being consigned to the dustbin of history in a new era of trust and virtual alliance between Washington and Moscow.
Bush and Putin are committed to countering international terror.
They are co-operating to keep nuclear arsenals under lock and key, beyond the reach of terrorists.
Where Bush will lean on Putin is to try to discourage Soviet sales of missile technology to Syria and Iran.
Every American president since Franklin D Roosevelt in 1943 has met with the leader of the Soviet Union or Russia. Long before nuclear weapons cast a dark shadow, Roosevelt, then Harry Truman, were arranging with Josef Stalin to conclude World War II and launch a divided Europe to postwar peace.
Crises in the Middle East and Far East dominated summits in the1960s. Summits became so commonplace that President George HW Bush met 11 times with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and President Clinton had 26 meetings with Yeltsin and Putin, not all of them full-dress summits.
The Clinton-Yeltsin meeting in Paris in 1997 quietly set the two countries on the course of friendship. The two leaders signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act in which they stated they no longer considered each other as adversaries.
Clinton's meeting with Yeltsin in 1995 at Roosevelt's Hyde Park, NY, home produced a pledge to safeguard nuclear weapon stockpiles.
It is probably best remembered, however, for the American president's guiding of an apparently unsteady and sometimes nearly incoherent Yeltsin through their joint public appearances with good humour.
Similarly, the human touch was evident in Vienna in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter steadied a faltering Leonid Brezhnev as they emerged from an Austrian palace. Even with aides guiding him, Brezhnev was unable to maintain his footing, and Carter quickly put his arm under Brezhnev's left shoulder to keep him from falling.
Meanwhile, AFP says: US and Russian Presidents George W Bush and Vladimir Putin hold a tightly guarded summit here Thursday, beset by new strains over Moscow's autocratic reforms and its nuclear cooperation with Iran.
The two leaders were scheduled to hold talks for 90 minutes in the Slovak capital, the final stop on a transatlantic visit which Bush hope will banish lingering bitterness among European allies over the war in Iraq.
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