When Russia's Vladimir Putin and the new US defence secretary arrived in Munich over the weekend they were in decidedly different frames of mind. Mr Putin was there to pick a fight, Mr Gates to mend fences.
Mr Putin's tirade at a security conference against US global political and military hegemony was, as Mr Gates pointed out, like a blast from the Cold War past. "One Cold War was quite enough," he joked, otherwise dodging the missile. Mr Putin's language and tone may have made headlines across the west but they evinced scarcely a comment back home where the issues of the expansion of Nato to Russia's borders and the US basing missile interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic are commonplace themes of his public speeches.
The world "is one single centre of power. One single centre of force. One single centre of decision making. This is the world of one master, one sovereign," he said, accusing the US of blundering from one "unilateral, illegitimate war to the next ...We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the principles of international law," he complained. "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained, hyper use of force - military force - in international relations that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts."
His audience, particularly the less Atlanticist of the foreign and defence ministers present, might well have empathised with the broad perspective had it not been for the strong sense of Mr Putin's pot calling the kettle black. He disparaged the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe as having been turned "into a vulgar instrument of ensuring the foreign policy interests of one country". Nothing to do, perhaps, with the OSCE becoming a thorn in the side of many of the former states of the Soviet Union including Russia itself on electoral and media freedom issues?
Mr Putin complained of the "serious provocation" involved in allowing Nato expansion, but few will doubt that his concerns were less to do with the threat to Russian security interests, than the erosion of its sphere of influence. And Russia's own willingness to flex its oil and gas muscle will not have been far from ministers' minds.
Mr Gates, on the other hand, was a-wooing, projecting a new realism and sensitivity on the part of the US administration, scolding those who would divide America from her allies in Europe. He even had a mild, implied note of reproach for his predecessor: "I am told some have even spoken of 'Old Europe' versus 'New'." His audience laughed, and Donald Rumsfeld will have winced on reading the report.
We'll see. One swallow does not a summer make.