When George met Vladimir: Bush and Putin have given new impetus to an implausible goal: Russia's integration with Europe.

A murmur of voices foretelling Russia's eventual integration with Europe, including accession to the European Union and membership in NATO, is suddenly gaining volume. The new swell appeared on the horizon after the first two meetings between the United States and Russian presidents this summer. Whether that augurs a historical wave depends on the force and finesse with which policymakers in Washington, Moscow, and Brussels get down to solidifying a long-range strategy.

Greater public emphasis than ever was unleashed on this pivotal issue after President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin held their first summit. A link was established between the two leaders that no one expected. Since then, Western goals vis-a-vis Russia that often appeared unrealizable, or too remote to attract immediate focus, have come to stand at the center of attention among officials, journalists, and think tanks around the world. Convergence between the West and Russia on an economic and security vision for Europe and the world is becoming more a common objective to be actively pursued than merely a distant dream.

Bringing all of the former Soviet republics and East European countries into the Western democratic, free-market fold has been the object of concerted transatlantic policy moves since the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, when President George H. W. Bush occupied the White House. Full integration specifically of Russia into the key institutions of Europe and the West--the EU and NATO--and into the global economy at large, is seen as the best guarantee of strategic security and of that country's future economic and social development.

But taking aboard vast, chaotic, and formerly inimical Russia, as opposed to, say, Poland or Lithuania, has often appeared impossibly problematic. What has changed is that Putin apparently has come to see that Russia may have nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, it seems to have hit home for his U.S. counterpart, who at the start of his administration appeared to want to just ignore America's defeated Cold War foe, that he faces a real and unprecedented opening in Putin's policy toward the West.

The broad backdrop against which this new trend is emerging has three main dimensions. One is the ongoing membership enlargement of both the EU and NATO. The second is Russia's concomitant search for a new development model after seven disastrous decades of Soviet central planning laid waste to its economy. Third is the U.S. search for a solution to perhaps its most pressing foreign policy problem: helping Russia, which possesses enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, to develop the institutions it needs to become a normal, liberal state.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the now fifteen-member EU has sought to bring in the Eastbloc countries transitioning to market economies. Brussels now appears set to admit its first post-communist members from among ten central and East European formal applicants around 2004, with the Czech Republic and Estonia among the lead candidates. For these ten aspirants economic transition and integration with the EU are one and the same.

To date Russia has neither formally applied for membership nor declared explicit interest in joining the EU. In 1994, then-President Boris Yeltsin signed a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with the EU, and Moscow holds Russia-EU summit meetings every six months, implicitly toward eventual accession. But Russia lacks an association agreement, or so-called Europe agreement, which is the basis upon which its East European neighbors are negotiating accession.

Until recently, EU membership for Russia appeared impossible to many. Optimists viewed accession as no closer than fifteen to twenty years away. The fundamental obstacle is achieving a level of reform in Russia sufficient to meet the requirements of the Union's so-called Copenhagen criteria regarding free markets and democratic governance.

Another tall hurdle is Russia's continuing preoccupation with appearing to remain a world power on a par with the United States--despite the realities of a GDP the size of Denmark's and a primitive political system still struggling to emerge from the rubble of Soviet totalitarianism. Leaning westward while maintaining good relations with China is also a major complicating factor.

NATO enlargement has already begun with the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. The nineteen-country alliance has accepted ten additional applications for membership from former East-bloc countries, including the ex-U.S.S.R.'s three former Baltic republics. Decisions on accepting new members will be made at a NATO summit in Prague in November 2002.

At this stage, U.S. and European officials avoid naming favorites for next-round admission. This is due in large part to the need to navigate the anxieties over NATO expansion, particularly into former Soviet territory in the Baltics, which Russia, having seen the dissolution of its former countervailing Warsaw Pact military alliance, continues to show.

Yeltsin signed a cooperation agreement with the North-Atlantic alliance in 1997, and Russia is among the twenty-five Partnership for Peace countries with which NATO conducts mutual activities. Putin has stated argumentatively that as long as NATO continues to exist after the end of the Cold War, Russia should be permitted to join.

But continuing sharp political differences between Russia and NATO on evolving a new post-Cold War security structure for Europe make it difficult to project a timetable for Russian membership. Moreover, Russia remains very far from meeting the organization's membership standards, which include a stable democracy and civilian control over the military.

Today, any schedule for Russian integration with the EU and NATO needs to be looked at against the background of the surprisingly strong relationship developing between Bush and Putin. It is one that is driven by mutual recognition of their intersecting primary goals as the presidents of two great nations.

Bush needs to find a way to gradually and effectively help Russia develop the institutions of a modern, liberal state and neutralize the threat of its huge nuclear arsenal, while harnessing Russia's power for collective global problem-solving. Putin needs a model for economic and social development to guide his country away from the destitution and chaos left by a fallen empire and toward growth and prosperity for the Russian people.

The process of negotiating Russia into the principal institutions of Europe and the West, and bringing the Russian system institutionally into conformity with EU and NATO norms, is perhaps the best way for the American and Russian presidents to achieve their respective goals.

Bush appears to have warmed to this recognition during the summer, after a cold period of requisite election campaign rhetoric and early administration maneuvers aimed at distinguishing its Russia policy from that of former President Bill Clinton. The bolt struck in June in the course of his inaugural official visit to Europe, during which he held his first meeting with Putin in Slovenia after sessions with European allies. Bush emerged from his encounter with the Russian president telling the world, now famously, that he had looked the man in the eye, seen into his soul, and discovered straightforwardness and values he could rely on.

His reaction to Putin was puzzling to many. It drew catcalls of naivete from some pundits, who alluded to the Russian president's history as a KGB operative, his present backtracking on democracy, and the continued bloodletting in Chechnya. The likely answer to the mystery is that what Bush saw when he first probed Putin was, in fact, a profound confluence of purpose which had not dawned upon him until then and which could drive their relationship, and relations between their two countries, for years to come.

Following their second tete-a-tete, after the G8 meeting in Genoa in July, the 55-year-old American went further to align his political fate with the 48-year-old Russian president. "We're young leaders who are interested in forging a more peaceful world," he told reporters after the pair's two-hour talk. "Both of us want to seize the moment and lead."

The moment to be seized by Bush and Putin is defined by two factors: In the end of ends, Russia has nowhere else to turn but Europe, and Putin has begun to acknowledge that reality in public, leaving an unprecedented opening for the West.

Russia can no longer rely on the U.S. aid and billions in IMF loans that were aimed at igniting its economic transition. On its own, the country woefully lacks the social and economic basis to develop toward a stable and prosperous democracy. Russia must look outside for models it can adopt and for sources of energy it can tap to draw it into the future. The alternative is to risk reverting all too easily to the dysfunctional authoritarianism of Russia's tragic and horrific past.

The early 1990's proved that mimicking American capitalism, with its vastly different historical context, will not work for Russia. And it is too late to look toward China's phased model of putting economic reform ahead of political liberalization; that genie is already out of the bottle in Russia.

The Russian leader evidently sees the bigger geopolitical picture the same way. Under Putin, the Soviet era of Europe policy, which mostly sought opportunities to drive a wedge between the United States and its transatlantic allies, is finally coming to an end.

Putin, who spent 1985 to 1990 in then-East Germany as a KGB agent and speaks fluent German, is an unambiguous Europeanist. Since taking office in the spring of 2000, he has consistently underlined what he called at his first EU-Russia summit his country's "European vocation."

A pragmatist, the Russian president grasps that once the EU admits Moscow's former East European satellites, the Union will be the market for about 70 percent of Russian exports. Politically, failure to focus on Russia's European future risks leaving the limping giant isolated on the periphery of a huge new power, the EU, and not necessarily as a friend.

Any genuine alliance with China as an alternative would be historically unnatural and culturally impossible, whatever symbolic gestures Putin may make toward his country's powerful eastern neighbor. And trying to restore superpower status, or reunite the former Soviet republics into a new union, is simply beyond the country's economic and political means.

Integration with Europe, which will enable Russia to develop the economic, political, and social institutions of a modern, civilized state, is Russia's only internal development and geopolitical option.

Upon taking office Putin quickly got down to reinvigorating the structures of cooperation with the EU, in which Yeltsin never showed much interest. He has given that dialogue a priority and directedness no one anticipated, accelerating progress beyond all expectations on most EU-Russia fronts. Most importantly, Putin is bearing down precisely on those areas of domestic reform necessary to eventually close the political, institutional, and cultural gap still yawning between Russia and EU membership.

So far Bush is doing all the right things to encourage Russia in the proper direction. First and foremost, he is developing a close personal relationship with Putin that can vastly improve the prospects for and accelerate the pace of integration.

By publicly placing his imprimatur on Russia's leader, and linking his own future legacy to Putin's, Bush has strengthened Putin at home to pursue the painful structural reforms necessary for eventual integration with the West. The example of Bush's father placing himself on the line for former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who guided his country through the fall of communism into a new era, is apt.

Bush's proclamation in a speech in Warsaw prior to his first meeting with Putin that the new Europe evolving from EU and NATO enlargement must also be "open to" Russia was also the right message to send. So was honestly proclaiming that the United States is not the enemy of Russia. Now Bush needs to take it to the next level and elaborate a long-range strategy with allied leaders to bring Russia into the West.

A key initial measure in such a strategy is an explicit and unequivocal statement by American and European leaders that it is their objective to have Russia join the principal institutions of the West. While the actual prospect of entry will remain years distant, the force of the long-term message will remain strong.

Enlargement negotiations to date have proven that aspirant countries need a clear vision of membership in sight for their parliaments and publics to accept crucial but painful policy choices necessary for eventual qualification. This is one factor that distinguishes Russia from the countries of central and Eastern Europe; it does not yet have this vision in front of it.

An explicit American declaration of the objective to have Russia join the West could be timed in conjunction with the next planned meetings between Bush and Putin, which will be in October at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Shanghai and in November at Bush's Texas ranch.

While the more complicated process of integration with the EU proceeds, Russia's bid for entry into NATO should be advanced immediately as a means of quickening momentum for membership in the Western club. As the alliance's post-cold war raison d'etre evolves into a pan-European security organization, logic dictates the inclusion of Russia. A plan can be offered at the Prague NATO summit in November 2002 with a two- to three- year aspirational timetable for completion of the process.

Meanwhile, no mollification of Russia on the Baltics' early entry should be proffered, as it will hamper the disciplined approach necessary to move Russia toward meeting membership standards. Ultimately Russia's best choice will be to comply. NATO is the only security model Europe will accept for the imaginable future. And Russia cannot build accord with the EU if it has poor relations with NATO.

In the same vein, Bush should not give in to pressures to appease Putin by softening his administration's plan to develop a national missile defense (NMD). Thus far, the U.S. President's firm stance on a rapid development schedule has led to agreement with Russia on a framework for negotiating the NMD issue. Staying that course, while offering Russia the prospect of joining several other countries cooperating with the Defense Department on missile defense research, will win more flexibility from Moscow.

Compared to entering NATO, Russian convergence with EU legislation, technical norms, and standards will be much more formidable. For it to happen, a qualitatively new and more dynamic process of EU-Russia cooperation needs to be put in place, beginning with a change in the tone of language. The communication process must be finessed to relieve Russia of the embarrassment of appearing to be a petitioner or an object of an EU strategy. It must allow Russia to publicly declare membership in the EU a long-term objective without any risk of being rebuffed.

The West must support in every way Putin's determination to implement the reforms envisaged in the 1994 Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with the EU. Recently strengthened U.S. backing for Russian accession to the World Trade Organization, which Putin's administration is eagerly pursuing, will facilitate the overall reform process.

The EU should offer Russia, in view of its unique importance, a custom-made association agreement with a long-term series of realizable milestones that will enable Russia to pursue membership over a ten-year period. The idea is to create a sense of purpose and connection with the EU that will help sustain and propel reform in Russia. Every effort should be made to provide Russia the incentives it needs to complete the difficult journey.

Putin won his first election on the promise of restoring his country's lost glory, which at first he attempted by prosecuting a failed and monstrous war in Chechnya. Facing reelection in 2004, the Russian president has the opportunity to win again, this time based on progress in civilizing Russia and striving to bring it up to European standards. At bottom, Russian voters want to be part of the civilized world more than they want the illusion of greatness that characterized the Soviet era.

Bush follows in the path of President Ronald Reagan, who in a 1982 address to the British Parliament foretold seven years before the fall of the Berlin Wall: "A march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history." George H. W. Bush facilitated history by helping oversee the actual collapse of communism and the rise of a new Russian state. George W. Bush now has the opportunity to make a quantum leap in this historical process. He has the chance to help usher America's former arch-rival into the West and actually win Russia.

Mark D'Anastasio is President of Development Communications Counsel, a Washington firm that advises governments and corporations in emerging markets. He was Moscow Bureau Chief for Business Week and the Wall Street Journal during the 1980's, and has been advising the Russian government for the past ten years.