Decision Points

by George W. Bush

  (From left:) My niece Lauren, sister Doro, Barbara, Dad, Hu Jintao, Laura, brother Marvin, and sister-in-law Margaret. White House/Shealah Craighead

  The Beijing Olympics turned out to be a phenomenal success—and a lot of fun. We were at the Water Cube when the men’s swimming team staged a dramatic comeback to edge out France for the gold medal in the freestyle relay. I dropped by to watch the impressive team of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh practice for their beach volleyball match. I made international news by giving Misty a playful slap on the back—a little north of the traditional target. We visited the locker room before Team USA and China squared off in the most-watched basketball game in history. The players couldn’t have been more gracious or impressive. “Hey, Pops!” LeBron James called out when Dad entered the room.

  At the Beijing Olympics. White House/Eric Draper

  The Olympics gave the world a chance to see the beauty and creativity of China. My hope is that the Games also gave the Chinese people a glimpse of the wider world, including the possibility of an independent press, open Internet, and free speech. Time will tell what the long-term impact of the Beijing Olympics will be. But history shows that once people get a taste of freedom, they eventually want more.

  November 23, 2002, was a rainy, gray day in Bucharest. Yet tens of thousands had turned out in Revolution Square to mark Romania’s admission to NATO, a landmark development for a country that just fifteen years earlier was a Soviet satellite state and a member of the Warsaw Pact. As I approached the stage, I noticed a brightly lit balcony. “What is that?” I asked the advance man. He told me it was where Nicolai Ceausescu, the communist dictator of Romania, had given his last speech before he was overthrown in 1989.

  As President Ion Iliescu introduced me, the rain stopped and a full-spectrum rainbow appeared. It stretched across the sky and ended right behind the balcony that was lit as a memorial to freedom. It was a stunning moment. I ad-libbed: “God is smiling on us today.”

  Congratulating Romania on its admission into NATO. White House/Paul Morse

  Romania was not the only young democracy celebrating that day. I had also cast America’s vote to admit Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia into NATO. I viewed NATO expansion as a powerful tool to advance the freedom agenda. Because NATO requires nations to meet high standards for economic and political openness, the possibility of membership acts as an incentive for reform.

  A year after my speech in Bucharest, a charismatic young democrat named Mikheil Saakashvili burst into the opening session of parliament in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Speaking for thousands of Georgian demonstrators, he denounced the assembly as the illegitimate result of a corrupt election. President Eduard Shevardnadze felt the groundswell and resigned. The bloodless coup became known as the Rose Revolution. Six weeks later, the Georgian people went to the polls and chose Saakashvili to be their president.

  In November 2004, a similar wave of protests broke out after a fraudulent presidential election in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands braved freezing temperatures to demonstrate for opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko. At one point during the campaign, Yushchenko suffered a mysterious poisoning that disfigured his face. Yet he refused to drop out of the race. His supporters turned out every day clad in orange scarves and ribbons until the Ukrainian Supreme Court ordered a rerun of the tainted election. Yushchenko won and was sworn in on January 23, 2005, completing the Orange Revolution.

  At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, both Georgia and Ukraine applied for Membership Action Plans, MAPs, the final step before consideration for full membership. I was a strong supporter of their applications. But approval required unanimity, and both Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France, were skeptical. They knew Georgia and Ukraine had tense relationships with Moscow, and they worried NATO could get drawn into a war with Russia. They were also concerned about corruption.

  I thought the threat from Russia strengthened the case for extending MAPs to Georgia and Ukraine. Russia would be less likely to engage in aggression if these countries were on a path into NATO. As for the governance issues, a step toward membership would encourage them to clean up corruption. We agreed on a compromise: We would not grant Georgia and Ukraine MAPs in Bucharest, but we would issue a statement announcing that they were destined for future membership in NATO. At the end of the debate, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain leaned over to me and said, “We didn’t give them MAPs, but we may have just made them members!”

  The NATO debate over Georgia and Ukraine highlighted the influence of Russia. In my first meeting with Vladimir Putin in the spring of 2001, he complained that Russia was burdened by Soviet-era debt. At that point, oil was selling for $26 per barrel. By the time I saw Putin at the APEC summit in Sydney in September 2007, oil had reached $71—on its way to $137 in the summer of 2008. He leaned back in his chair and asked how were Russia’s mortgage-backed securities doing.

  The comment was vintage Putin. He was sometimes cocky, sometimes charming, always tough. Over my eight years as president, I met face to face with Vladimir more than forty times. Laura and I had wonderful visits with him and his wife, Lyudmilla, at our home in Crawford and his dacha outside Moscow, where he showed me his private chapel and let me drive his classic 1956 Volga. He took us on a beautiful boat ride through St. Petersburg during the White Nights Festival. I invited him to Kennebunkport, where we went fishing with Dad. I’ll never forget Putin’s reaction the first time he came into the Oval Office. It was early in the morning, and the light was streaming through the south windows. As he stepped through the door, he blurted out, “My God … This is beautiful!” It was quite a response for a former KGB agent from the atheist Soviet Union.

  Through all the ups and downs, Putin and I were candid with each other. We cooperated in some important areas, including fighting terrorism, removing the Taliban from Afghanistan, and securing nuclear materials.

  One of the biggest achievements emerged from our first meeting, in Slovenia in 2001. I told Vladimir I planned to give him the required six months’ notice that America would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, so that we could both develop effective missile defense systems. He made clear that this wouldn’t make me popular in Europe. I told him I had campaigned on the issue and the American people expected me to follow through. “The Cold War is over,” I told Putin. “We are no longer enemies.”

  I also informed him that America would unilaterally cut our arsenal of strategic nuclear warheads by two thirds. Putin agreed to match our reductions. Less than a year later, we signed the Moscow Treaty, which pledged our nations to shrink our number of deployed warheads from 6,600 weapons to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. The treaty amounted to one of the largest nuclear weapons cuts in history, and it happened without the endless negotiations that usually come with arms-control agreements.

  Over the course of eight years, Russia’s newfound wealth affected Putin. He became aggressive abroad and more defensive about his record at home. In our first one-on-one meeting of my second term, in Bratislava, I raised my concerns about Russia’s lack of progress on democracy. I was especially worried about his arrests of Russian businessmen and his crackdown on the free press. “Don’t lecture me about the free press,” he said, “not after you fired that reporter.”

  It dawned on me what he was referring to. “Vladimir, are you talking about Dan Rather?” I asked. He said he was. I said, “I strongly suggest you not say that in public. The American people will think you don’t understand our system.”

  At a joint press conference after the meeting, I called on two American reporters and Vladimir called on two Russian journalists. The last question came from Alexei Meshkov of the Interfax news agency. It was addressed to Putin. “President Bush recently stated that the press in Russia is not free,” he said. “What is this lack of freedom all about? … Why don’t you talk a lot about violations of the rights of journalists in the United States,
about the fact that some journalists have been fired?” What a coincidence. The so-called free press of Russia was parroting Vladimir’s line.

  Putin and I both loved physical fitness. Vladimir worked out hard, swam regularly, and practiced judo. We were both competitive people. On his visit to Camp David, I introduced Putin to our Scottish terrier, Barney. He wasn’t very impressed. On my next trip to Russia, Vladimir asked if I wanted to meet his dog, Koni. Sure, I said. As we walked the birch-lined grounds of his dacha, a big black Labrador came charging across the lawn. With a twinkle in his eye, Vladimir said, “Bigger, stronger, and faster than Barney.” I later told the story to my friend, Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada. “You’re lucky he only showed you his dog,” he replied.

  Taking my man Barney for a spin on the ranch, the only place the Secret Service let me drive. White House/Eric Draper

  The Barney story was instructive. Putin was a proud man who loved his country. He wanted Russia to have the stature of a great power again and was driven to expand Russia’s spheres of influence. He intimidated democracies on his borders and used energy as an economic weapon by cutting off natural gas to parts of Eastern Europe.

  Putin was wily. As a quid pro quo for supporting Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder in their efforts to counterbalance American influence, Putin convinced them to defend his consolidation of power in Russia. At a G-8 dinner in St. Petersburg, most of the leaders challenged Putin on his democratic record. Jacques Chirac did not. He announced that Putin was doing a fine job running Russia, and it was none of our business how he did it. That was nothing compared to what Gerhard Schroeder did. Shortly after the German chancellor stepped down from office, he became chairman of a company owned by Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy giant.

  Putin liked power, and the Russian people liked him. Huge oil-fed budget surpluses didn’t hurt. He used his stature to handpick his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Then he got himself appointed prime minister.

  The low point in our relationship came in August 2008, when Russia sent tanks across the border into Georgia to occupy South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two provinces that were part of Georgia but had close ties to Russia. I was in Beijing for the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games. Laura and I were standing in line to greet President Hu Jintao when Jim Jeffrey, my deputy national security adviser, whispered the news about Russia’s offensive. I looked a few places ahead of me in line. There was Vladimir. I decided the receiving line was not the appropriate place for heated diplomacy.

  I also thought it was important that I direct my concerns to President Medvedev. I didn’t know Medvedev well. In April 2008, just before the change of power, Vladimir had invited Medvedev to visit with us in Sochi, Russia’s equivalent of Camp David. The mood was festive. Putin hosted a nice dinner, followed by folk dancing. At one point, members of my delegation, including me, were plucked from our seats to take the stage. The dance felt like a combination of square dancing and the jitterbug. I’m sure I would have been more fluid if I’d had a little vodka in my system. Curiously enough, I rarely saw vodka on my trips to Russia, unlike in the old days of communism.

  I appreciated the chance to spend time with Medvedev, Russia’s first noncommunist leader since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He had given an impressive speech outlining his commitment to the rule of law, liberalizing the Russian economy, and reducing corruption. I told him I was looking forward to dealing with him president to president. The big question, of course, was whether he would actually run the country. As a way of testing, I asked Vladimir if he would still use the Sochi compound after Medvedev assumed office. “No,” he said without hesitation, “this is the summer palace of the president.”

  With Dmitry Medvedev. White House/Chris Greenburg

  I called Medvedev when I got back to my hotel in Beijing. He was hot. So was I. “My strong advice is to start deescalating this thing now,” I said. “The disproportionality of your actions is going to turn the world against you. We’re going to be with them.”

  Medvedev told me Saakashvili was like Saddam Hussein. He claimed Saakashvili had launched an unprovoked “barbarian” attack that had killed more than fifteen hundred civilians.

  “I hope you’re not saying you’re going to kill fifteen hundred people in response,” I shot back. “You’ve made your point loud and clear,” I said. “I hope you consider what I’ve asked very seriously.”

  My biggest concern was that the Russians would storm all the way to Tbilisi and overthrow the democratically elected Saakashvili. It was clear the Russians couldn’t stand a democratic Georgia with a pro-Western president. I wondered if they would have been as aggressive if NATO had approved Georgia’s MAP application.

  I called Saakashvili next. He was understandably shaken. He described the Russian assault and urged me not to abandon Georgia. “I hear you,” I said. “We do not want Georgia to collapse.” In the coming days, I spoke out in defense of Georgia’s territorial integrity, worked with President Sarkozy—who was serving as president of the European Union—to rally nations to call on Russia to withdraw, dispatched relief supplies to Georgia aboard U.S. military aircraft, and promised to help rebuild the Georgian military.

  At the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, Laura and I were seated in the same row as Vladimir and his interpreter. This was the chance to have the conversation I had put off in the Great Hall. Laura and the man next to her, the king of Cambodia, shifted down a few seats. Putin slid in next to me.

  I knew the TV cameras would be on us, so I tried not to get overly animated. I told him he’d made a serious mistake and that Russia would isolate itself if it didn’t get out of Georgia. He said Saakashvili was a war criminal—the same term Medvedev had used—who had provoked Russia.

  “I’ve been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded,” I told Putin.

  “I’m hot-blooded, too,” Putin retorted.

  I stared back at him. “No, Vladimir,” I said. “You’re cold-blooded.”

  After a few weeks of intense diplomacy, Russia had withdrawn most of its invading troops, but they maintained an unlawful military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Vladimir Putin called me during my last week in office to wish me well, which was a thoughtful gesture. Still, given what I’d hoped Putin and I could accomplish in moving past the Cold War, Russia stands out as a disappointment in the freedom agenda.

  Russia was not the only one. I was hopeful that Egypt would be a leader for freedom and reform in the Arab world, just as it had been a leader for peace under Anwar Sadat a generation before. Unfortunately, after a promising presidential election in 2005 that included opposition candidates, the government cracked down during the legislative elections later that year, jailing dissidents and bloggers who advocated a democratic alternative.

  Venezuela also slid back from democracy. President Hugo Chavez polluted the airwaves with hard-core anti-American sermons while spreading a version of phony populism that he termed the Bolivarian Revolution. Sadly, he squandered the Venezuelan people’s money and is ruining their country. He is becoming the Robert Mugabe of South America. Regrettably, the leaders of Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador have followed his example.

  There are other isolated outposts of tyranny—places like Belarus, Burma, Cuba, and Sudan. My hope is that America will continue to stand with the dissidents and freedom advocates there. I met with more than a hundred dissidents over the course of my presidency. Their plight can look bleak, but it is not hopeless. As I said in my Second Inaugural Address, the freedom agenda demands “the concentrated work of generations.” Once change arrives, it often moves quickly, as the world saw in the European revolutions of 1989 and the rapid transformation of East Asia after World War II. When the people are finally set free, it is often the dissidents and the prisoners—people like Václav Havel and Nelson Mandela—who emerge as the leaders of their free countries.

  Despite the setbacks for the freedom agenda, there were many more examples of hope and progress. Georgians and Ukr
ainians joined the ranks of free peoples, Kosovo became an independent nation, and NATO expanded from nineteen members to twenty-six. Under the courageous leadership of President Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s democracy reclaimed its sovereign territory from narcoterrorists. With support from the United States, multiethnic democracies from India and Indonesia to Brazil and Chile became leaders in their regions and models for developing free societies around the world.

  Alvaro Uribe and his wife, Lina Moreno, arrive at the ranch in Crawford. White House/Paul Morse

  The most dramatic advances for freedom came in the Middle East. In 2001, the region saw terrorism on the rise, raging violence between Palestinians and Israelis, the destabilizing influence of Saddam Hussein, Libya developing weapons of mass destruction, tens of thousands of Syrian troops occupying Lebanon, Iran pressing ahead unopposed with a nuclear weapons program, widespread economic stagnation, and little progress toward political reform.

  By 2009, nations across the Middle East were actively fighting terrorism instead of looking the other way. Iraq was a multi-religious, multiethnic democracy and an ally of the United States. Libya had renounced its weapons of mass destruction and resumed normal relations with the world. The Lebanese people had kicked out Syrian troops and restored democracy. The Palestinian people had an increasingly peaceful government on the West Bank and momentum toward a democratic state that would live side by side with Israel in peace. And Iran’s freedom movement was active after the summer 2009 presidential election.