Later it would be said that the American President had been naïve and that Putin’s protestations of friendship with the West were a masquerade from the start. But Clinton was not alone in seeing the Russian President as a valuable partner in the post-Cold War world. Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, thought “Putin admired America and wanted a strong relationship with it. He wanted to pursue democratic and economic reform.” The Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, pronounced him ‘a Russian patriot’ and Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, found his support after 9/11 simply “amazing… He even ordered Russian generals to brief their American counterparts on their experiences during their Afghanistan invasion in the 1980s… I appreciated his willingness to move beyond the suspicions of the past.”
