By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 27, 2008

He glimpsed inside Vladimir Putin's soul and found something to his liking. He has also showed off his Texas ranch to Saudi King Abdullah, talked economics with Chinese President Hu Jintao and visited Graceland with then-Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

More than many of his predecessors, President Bush has invested heavily in trying to forge a strong bond with key foreign leaders. But as his term winds down, new crises in Georgia and Pakistan are underscoring the limits of Bush's personal diplomacy, as the president is receiving criticism for overpersonalizing relations with Putin, the Russian prime minister, and with Pervez Musharraf, who resigned as Pakistan's president last week.

Many Russia experts say Bush did not understand the true intentions and character of the Russian leader. "He misjudged Putin," said Stanford University professor Michael A. McFaul, who has been advising Sen. Barack Obama's campaign on Russia policy. From an early date, McFaul said, Putin has had a "very obvious grand strategy for rolling back democracy," but "when new evidence came in to suggest that his initial assessment of Putin was wrong, [Bush] tended to dismiss it."

A different example has emerged in Iraq, where Bush has spent enormous amounts of time with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, especially via videoconferences, trying to build him up into a true democratic leader, despite some Bush aides' belief that the attempt was a waste of time. The effort might be bearing fruit, to the point that Maliki's growing self-confidence is complicating Bush's efforts to secure a final deal over the future of U.S. military presence in Iraq.

"Maliki is proving to be a more significant leader than most people around Bush thought he could be," said Dennis Ross, a State Department official in the Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations who advises the Obama campaign. "Last year everyone I talked to in the administration thought that Maliki had to go. Bush didn't seem to buy off on what everyone else was saying."

White House aides say Bush has been aggressive but realistic in his dealings with world leaders. "While there are often policy issues that don't exactly go the way we want them to, the situation on the other hand could be much worse if the president did not have a decent working relationship with some of these leaders," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council.

Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger disagrees with the common perception that Bush mishandled Putin, saying the president was shrewd early on to give the Russian leader respect and try to draw his cooperation on a range of issues. But the two sides had deep differences on issues such as the U.S. desire to place a missile defense system in Eastern Europe and to expand NATO to Russia's borders.

"There is something that personal relations can add, but there are fundamental national interests that can't be escaped," Kissinger said in an interview. "I promise you, if you ask the Russians, they will give you a long litany of things where they think they have cooperated with us and we haven't given much in return."

Bush is hardly the first president who has sought to deploy his personal political skills to try to bond with foreign leaders and then endure criticism for substituting his personal rapport with them for a hard-headed analysis serving the national interest.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was deemed by adversaries to have been taken in by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, just as Bush's father was criticized for misreading Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping during the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989. Bill Clinton came to believe he was double-crossed by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Clinton's unsuccessful drive for a peace deal in the Middle East.

Such episodes notwithstanding, current and former aides said Bush appears to greatly enjoy his contact with foreign counterparts and devotes considerable attention to thinking about how best to connect with them. Perhaps the most successful, from his perspective, was the tie he forged with Tony Blair, who as Britain's prime minister delivered strong backing for the war in Iraq -- to his political detriment. Blair resigned last year.

With Hu, Bush tried early on to move this seemingly colorless Communist Party functionary off his talking points, asking him at one meeting what his biggest challenge was as China's leader, administration officials said. They said the president found Hu's answer sobering: creating 25 million jobs a year. The exchange gave Bush a more sympathetic view of Hu and helped strengthen their relationship, officials said.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in a recent interview that Bush's strategy of engaging the Chinese leadership more aggressively -- he has met 15 times with Hu or his predecessor -- had proved of great help, especially on diplomacy aimed at halting North Korea's nuclear weapons program. "His notion was, 'I am going to engage the leaders, I'm going to try and empower but also energize the leaders to take some responsibility," Hadley said. "And that's paid dividends, in terms of North Korea."

By many accounts, Bush has also grown close to Abdullah, rescuing a relationship with Saudi Arabia that got off to a tense start in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, largely over the Saudi leader's belief that Bush had abandoned any sense of balance in his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Relations were cool when Abdullah and his entourage arrived in Crawford, Tex., in April 2002 for a meeting at Bush's ranch. The first several hours of conversation did not go well, said Robert Jordan, who was the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time and had attended the meeting.

"After a while, we took a break, and the president said, "Why don't we go for a ride in my Jeep," Jordan recalled in an interview in May. Bush and Abdullah toured the ranch, accompanied by only a translator, Jordan added, and "when they came back, they acted like the best of friends. They were beaming."

How much this kind of personal warmth pays off for the United States is a matter of dispute: Some U.S. officials, for instance, remain disappointed with Saudi Arabia's performance in cracking down on the financing of jihadists around the world or with its unwillingness to offer stronger support for the government in Iraq.

Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Bush is more naive about personal relations with other leaders than past U.S. presidents, alluding to his meeting with Putin in 2001, after which Bush famously said he looked the Russian leader in the eye and got a "sense of his soul."

"The others were far more realistic," Gelb said. "This Bush thinks when he calls Putin, they are soul mates, and when he expresses a desire for Putin to do something, he will do it. [Putin] had other reasons for going into Georgia than the personal relations with the president of the United States."

Another case is Musharraf: Even officials in the administration thought Bush did not push the former president hard enough to crack down on radicals on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. "Musharraf is charming, funny, quick. . . . They had a great relationship," one former administration official said. "Bush is very good at establishing personal relations, but once he does, he tends to not be willing to take them on in a tough way."

Peter D. Feaver, a former National Security Council aide, dismissed such criticism. "My answer is: What is the alternative? What Pakistani leader was going to be a more reliable ally and better able to secure Pakistani nukes?" Feaver asked. "What we got from Musharraf was better than the Clinton team was able to get and likely better than the next team is likely to get."