President Bush has an aversion to arms control treaties. He genuinely appears bewildered at their complexity and the many "hours" - in reality years - taken by negotiators to secure agreements that simply tie the hands of US presidents.
A new strategic reality has made redundant the main impediment to controversial US missile defence plans, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, he argues, while, simultaneously, he has leapfrogged offensive nuclear arms control agreements, the as yet unimplemented 1993 Start II and embryonic Start III, to declare unilateral cuts in US warheads of two-thirds in the next decade.
Between friends, who needs treaties? "I looked the man in the eye and shook his hand, and if we need to write it down on a piece of paper, I'll be glad to do that," he said in the White House on Tuesday as President Putin made clear he wanted more.
"We for our part, for the Russian part, are prepared to present all our agreements in a treaty form, including the issues of verification and control," Mr Putin said.
It was a strange role reversal. Ronald Reagan used to say of arms control regimes: "Trust, but verify". Today it is Russia which demands verification, and insists on the importance of treaties and Mr Bush who talks about a "new relationship based on trust and co-operation".
Not surprising really as the real prize for the Americans is the abandonment of ABM, or at the very least a willingness for the Russians to turn a blind eye for the time being to its prohibition on the testing of missile defence systems. After all, the US subtext runs, you guys don't want to look as if you stand over something signed up to by the bad guys of the Soviet Union, do you?
Yet Russia, if no longer a rival of the US, still has strategic interests and Mr Putin, despite his enthusiastic rallying to the US following September 11th, must not be seen at home to roll over and play dead for the Americans.
Russia still has superpower ambitions, a reality reflected in Mr Putin's somewhat contradictory stances at home and abroad. The US still has some way to go to persuade him to accept ultimate deployment of the system, if, that is, it ever works. Some Russia watchers, moreover, still remain to be convinced at the sincerity of Mr Putin's commitment to the West.
The cuts promised in the US offensive arsenals from 7,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200 reflect a compromise between the ambitions of the Russians to go even further and the conservatives in the Pentagon, notably Admiral Richard Mies, the head of Strategic Command, who has resisted throughout the Clinton era such radical cuts.
They go further, but not radically so, than the tentative agreement in 1997 between Mr Yeltsin and Mr Clinton to cut warheads to 2,000 to 2,500 each.
The difference is even smaller when account is taken of the new counting method which excludes from the total of deployed weapons the several hundred on bombers and submarines which are undergoing overhaul.
In 1990, at the end of the Cold War, both superpowers had stocks of over 10,000 nuclear warheads each. Start I, signed in 1991, reduced that to 6,000 each by a deadline that will expire in a few weeks. Start II, although signed, never got through Congress and the Russian Parliament. Start III never got off the drawing board.
Mr Bush has long been an advocate of such cuts, seeing them as a powerful argument against those who portray his desire for missile defence as a means of asserting global dominance.
On the Russian side, the cuts, from under 6,000 warheads, are driven by economics as much as by a rethink of strategy.
But Tuesday's news is not viewed by all experts as all good news.
In effectively scrapping Start II, Mr Bush has also abandoned what is seen as one of its main achievements, the ban on multiple-warhead missiles, known as Mirvs, based on land. Far more difficult to defend against, they were regarded as particularly effective for a surprise attack - and therefore particularly destabilising.
Such constraints, Administration supporters say, are no longer necessary now that the Russians are friends, and anyway the US deterrent is largely submarine-based and therefore still very much in place.
psmyth@irish-times.ie