MOSCOW ? President George H.W. Bush flew to Moscow at the end of July 1991 for a somewhat hastily arranged summit with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. They signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, talked about U.S. support for Soviet economic reform and agreed that Washington and Moscow were going to be happy partners in world affairs.
Twenty years later, hindsight shows that the idea of a constructive relationship with the Soviet Union was missing the point. (Actually, that was already pretty clear only 20 weeks later.) But American optimism is a force to be reckoned with, and this was the beginning of two decades of hopeful expectation that Moscow was on the verge of becoming a reliable and capable partner ? an expectation that has waxed and waned but is still out there today, in the form of President Obama?s reset.
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