By Karen DeYoung and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers

CRAWFORD, Tex., Nov. 15 -- As they prepared to face questions from a gymnasium full of students at Crawford High School this morning, President Bush proposed to Russian President Vladimir Putin that they adopt a joint strategy for responses: "We'll just limit ourselves to generalities."

That seemed to sum up the three-day summit that ended here today. A meeting that was marked by an extraordinary display of camaraderie between "George" and "Vladimir," it did little to institutionalize their good will into anything more than agreement to keep talking about a range of outstanding issues.

Although the two separately announced unilateral cuts in their country's nuclear arsenals, they remained divided over how to accomplish them. They agreed to continue to disagree on missile defense. They discussed mutual concerns about nonproliferation, the Russian economy, Iraq and the Middle East without producing concrete initiatives to address them. They shared broad goals for the future of Afghanistan -- and a sense of urgency to put a representative government in place there -- while leaving aides to work out the next steps.

After all the talks and tours and barbecue dinners at the White House in Washington and the presidential ranch in Texas, what emerged was style rather than substance. But both leaders indicated that was an important breakthrough in its own right, and one that would provide the basis for resolving all future problems.

"We tasted steak and listened to music and all of this with a single purpose and objective, to increase the level of confidence between the leaders and the people," Putin said today before leaving for a visit to the World Trade Center site in New York, his final stop before returning to Moscow. "And if we are to follow this road further," he said, speaking specifically of differences over how to reduce the number of nuclear warheads, "we will certainly arrive at a solution, a decision acceptable both to Russia, to the United States and, indeed, to the entire world."

Bush was equally expansive. "A lot of people never really dreamt that an American president and a Russian president could have established the friendship that we have," he said, adding later, "The more I get to know President Putin, the more I get to see his heart and soul, and the more I know we can work together in a positive way."

Despite Bush's wonder at the ways in which the world has changed since "when I was in high school [and] Russia was the enemy," presidential rapprochement has been a feature of relations between Washington and Moscow since his father took the measure of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin bearhugged Bill Clinton.

But neither of those relationships was able to transcend the long-standing suspicions that have kept Washington and Moscow from forging a bilateral friendship. During the last presidential campaign, the Bush team criticized Clinton for basing U.S. policy toward Russia on his personal relationship with Yeltsin.

After their fourth, and clearly most successful, encounter, the growing friendship between Bush and Putin has yet to be tested by the need to act on any of the issues they discussed over the past three days.

One of the most theoretically easy steps to put some meat on the bones of their bonhomie would be to remove Russia from the list of countries covered by the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment restricting U.S. trade preferences based on emigration policies. Russia receives a presidential waiver every year but resents that the restrictions remain on the books.

Bush vowed Tuesday, after his first summit sessions with Putin, to "work with Congress" to accomplish this. But American Jewish groups, which pushed hard for the amendment, have seemed reluctant to see it go. Despite the fact that Russian emigration policies are no longer seen as a problem, some groups still want to maintain the Jackson-Vanik leverage to ensure broad religious freedom within the country.

In one of a series of joint statements after the Tuesday meetings, Bush and Putin expressed their "deep concern over the situation in the Middle East." But the statement gave no indication they were prepared to move beyond agreement that "the violence and terror must end."

The two leaders spoke of the need for new economic cooperation but broke no new ground to propel Russia's integration with the world economy. Putin hopes to join the World Trade Organization, but Bush said only that he would "confirm our commitment to working together in an effort to accelerate" WTO negotiations.

Today's session at the high school indicated the points at which good feelings will have to give way to compromise or concessions in the future.

Asked by a student to cite ways in which "this summit helped bring Russia and the U.S. closer together," Bush said he and Putin had "agreed to some significant changes in our relationship." But the only example he offered was his announcement of a unilateral U.S. reduction in deployed nuclear warheads.

Another student quickly reached the crux of the issue, asking whether Bush meant to destroy the weapons or merely to store them. Bush responded that he was talking about "reducing and destroying" warheads, only to have his staff later clarify that the administration had not decided what it would do with the warheads.

In his response, Putin made clear that merely dismantling warheads, and not destroying them, left the nuclear capability intact and called for negotiations to reach a mutual decision on the subject.

Putin appeared far more eager to get down to specifics in several areas. When a student asked whether they had decided whether the United States would deploy a national missile defense system, in violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Russian smiled and praised the questioner for raising a substantive point. Bush had said they would stick to generalities, Putin said, "but he was mistaken."

Even so, they glossed over the gulf between them on the ABM pact and predicted it would not rupture the relationship. Alexei Gromov, Putin's press secretary, said predictions of a breakthrough at the summit were always unrealistic. "We didn't expect it," he said. "It's a very complex process, and not all the Americans expect an agreement, either -- but we're prepared to talk."

The moment of decision appears to be closing in when Bush will have to either withdraw from the treaty or win acquiescence from Putin for further missile defense testing.

"Everybody, including the Russians, understands that we're soon going to run up against certain constraints of the treaty, and we're continuing to work with them," White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said.

The dispute, she said, now had to be seen "in the context of a substantially changed relationship from where we were several months ago. And that's just an extremely important point to keep in mind. This is a smaller element of the U.S.-Russian relationship than it was several months ago and certainly before September 11th."

For Bush, the highest foreign policy priority since the attacks has been the successful creation of an international coalition against terrorism. To the extent Putin reaffirmed his full support for that -- and both sides agreed not to highlight their differences on other matters -- Bush can consider the summit a rousing success.

Putin returns home able to claim success in forcing Bush to commit to a specific number of nuclear cuts before the United States goes ahead with a defensive system that the Russians oppose. For the moment, at least, he will be able to tell Russians that the ABM Treaty remains intact and demonstrate that Moscow, considered an unruly supplicant by the West for the past decade, again plays a central role on the world stage.