Warm Front in the New Cold War?

ABC News’ Ann Compton and Tara Woodside Report: The White House has announced that President George W. Bush has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to join the first family at Walker’s Point, the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, just prior to the 4th of July.

The move could signal a warm front in the leaders’ increasingly chilly relationship.

The two presidents once enjoyed a seemingly diplomatic, if not strategic, friendship.  Following their first meeting in 2001, a newly elected President Bush commented on Putin: "I looked the man in the eyes and I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul."

Putin was one of Bush’s first foreign guests at his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, and Putin quickly returned the favor, hosting Bush at a dacha, the ranch’s Russian equivalent, outside of Moscow. 
But the lines of communication spanning the Atlantic have grown brittle since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Bush’s declaration of war in Iraq. 

Putin opposed Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq and the U.S. fears Putin is drifting away from his commitment to democracy.  The Russian president began restricting the country’s civil liberties and has placed more of mother Russia under Moscow’s central control, causing concern to mount in Washington.

Now both Bush and Putin are on their way out office, neither able to serve another term according to their respective country’s constitution.  And perhaps the summer heat will allow each to step back from what some experts have feared could become the new Cold War.