U.S.-Russian relations offer one bright counter to the otherwise gloomy and complex set of issues facing American foreign policy makers after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to speak directly to President Bush to express his condolences and offer his support for the American response. He followed these rhetorical pledges with concrete policies, including military and humanitarian support to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and Russian acquiescence to American troops in Central Asia.

The improvement in Russian-American relations is one of the few positive factors in the muddled picture of international relations today. Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for the American struggle against international terrorism has elevated communications between two former enemies to a new level. The upcoming November summit will be yet another sign of this. Politicians on either sides of the ocean are even calling the US and Russia "allies." Noting the decisiveness with which President Putin supports the US and Washington's extremely positive reaction to this, many Russian politicians and public figures have began speaking openly of Russia's entry into Western organizations and unions. Membership in the World Trade Organization is discussed in Moscow as an obvious reward Russia should receive for supporting American military actions; entry into the European Union is brought up as a relatively near goal, and so forth. The hopes are great, but do they reflect reality? Inflated expectations and skewed assessments of the speed and character of Russia's integration into the West are dangerous.

From both the right and the left, critics of U.S. policy toward Russia have had a heyday in recent weeks asserting that the Clinton administration got Russia wrong. The refrains are by now familiar: "Clinton became too close to Yeltsin." "The IMF was naive." "The West funded crony capitalism." "Russians are not culturally predisposed to markets," etc. The policy conclusion from these observations is that the United States neither can nor should do anything more to aid Russia but instead should reconstruct a firewall around this basket case of a country and try once again to contain the Russian threat to markets and democracy around the world.

In the West, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov is often described as "wily," "pragmatic," and "a realist" who seeks to carve out a place for Russia as a major player in the global game of balance-of-power politics. Usually these descriptions point to the turn in Russian foreign policy away from the "naive," Western-oriented approach taken by his predecessor in the Foreign Ministry, Andrei Kozyrev. Expressed support for Serbia in the most recent NATO showdown with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic over Kosovo is presumably yet further evidence of these so-called clever foreign policy maneuvers.

Not since the August 1991 coup attempt has the future of Russian democracy been more uncertain than it is today. Ironically, at a time when Russian society has embraced individual liberties, a free press and competitive elections, the new leader of the Russian state, Acting President Vladimir Putin, has demonstrated real ambivalence toward democracy.

The second error of omission is a failure to acknowledge the real menu of choices foreign policymakers face, especially when dealing with a revolution in midstream such as Russia's in the '90s. The same Mikhail Gorbachev who let the Warsaw Pact fall apart and helped Germany reunite also let his government loot Soviet gold reserves and allowed his armed forces to kill innocent people in Georgia and the Baltic states. Was [George W. Bush] wrong to deal with such a leader? The same Boris Yeltsin who bombed his parliament in 1993, invaded Chechnya twice and allowed corruption to flourish also destroyed the Soviet empire, introduced markets and democracy to Russia, destroyed thousands of nuclear weapons, acquiesced to NATO expansion and cooperated with the United States to end the Kosovo war.

Well before George W. Bush finally won the U.S. presidency, Vladimir Putin and his surrogates made it clear that they hoped for a Republican victory. Putins team believes that the new Bush team for foreign policy will adopt a more realpolitik philosophy toward international affairs. In their view, this means less attention to pesky issues like human rights, corruption and the war in Chechnya, and more attention to traditional issues of foreign diplomacy such as arms control and great power regulation of regional conflicts.

Russia's state media openly championed the benefits of a George W. Bush victory for Russia. Under Bush, so [Putin]'s people believe, the United States will no longer care about domestic politics in Russia, such as human rights, independent media or the war in Chechnya. With Bush in power, so the thinking goes in Moscow, the Kremlin will have a free hand to roll back democracy in the name of restoring law and order.

Obviously, Putin and his people have a cartoonized understanding of the new Bush administration's foreign policy philosophy, a crude reading of how foreign policy is made in the United States and a flawed historical reading of Nixon's policy toward the Soviet Union. It is not the job of the new Bush team to give history lessons or civics courses about the U.S. policy process to its Russian counterpart. But it is imperative that the new Bush foreign policy team signal clearly and immediately to Moscow its true intentions regarding Russia, which above all else should reflect no nostalgia for the "good old days" of the Cold War era.