Putin didn’t often agree to separate meetings with me, and almost never saw other ambassadors. Most of our encounters during my tenure were on the margins of other events, or with visiting senior U.S. officials. This time I was invited to come to the presidential dacha at Novo Ogaryovo, just outside Moscow. I was asked to come alone. Arriving at the appointed time, I was ushered into a reception room, with the usual assortment of bottled Russian mineral water and snacks. Putin was just finishing a meeting with the Security Council, a protocol assistant told me. I half expected a replay of the experience Rice and I had had, and wondered if I was going to have to navigate that not especially receptive audience before my session with Putin. I was also thinking through how best to convey my fairly lengthy message, well aware that Putin had little patience for long-winded presentations.
Almost as if to spare me from my mounting anxiety, I was ushered into Putin’s conference room. It was bright and airy, with light pine walls and furniture. Adding to the brightness, I quickly realized, were a dozen press cameras. Having been in Russia long enough to cultivate a bit of paranoia, I immediately thought this was a trap, an opportunity for Putin to lace into U.S. policy and its quavering representative. I was wrong. With the cameras running, Putin made some general comments about the potential of the Russian-American relationship, despite our differences. Noting that my tour as ambassador was nearing its end, he thanked me for being an honest and professional envoy for my country. I stumbled around a little in Russian in my reply, emphasizing how much I enjoyed serving in Russia. We would inevitably have disagreements, sometimes sharp ones, but stable relations were in the interests of both our countries, and of the wider world. Putin nodded, the camera lights went off, and the press left.
With Sergey Lavrov sitting beside him and the rest of the room cleared, Putin looked at me with his customary expressionless demeanor and invited me to deliver the message I was bearing. I condensed my points as best I could, without losing any of their meaning or precision. It took me about ten minutes. Somewhat to my surprise, Putin didn’t interrupt at all, and didn’t roll his eyes or make side comments to Lavrov. When I finished, he thanked me politely and said he would look forward to seeing President Bush, and would offer a few preliminary comments—none of which, he added, would surprise me.
Putin’s intimidating aura is often belied by his controlled mannerisms, modulated tone, and steady gaze. He’ll slouch a bit and look bored by it all if not engaged by the subject or the person across from him, and be snarky and bullying if he’s feeling pressed. But he can get quite animated if he wants to drive home a point, his eyes flashing and his voice rising in pitch. In this exchange, Putin displayed his full range.
As I took careful notes, he said, “Your government has made a big mistake on Kosovo. Don’t you see how that encourages conflict and monoethnic states all over the world?” Shaking his head ruefully, he observed, “I’m glad you didn’t try to tell me that Kosovo is not a precedent. That’s a ridiculous argument.” I smiled a little to myself, grateful that that was one point I had persuaded my colleagues in Washington to delete in the drafting process. Then Putin moved on to MAP. “No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia. Even President Chubais or President Kasyanov [two of Russia’s better-known liberals] would have to fight back on this issue. We would do all in our power to prevent it.” Growing angry, Putin continued, “If people want to limit and weaken Russia, why do they have to do it through NATO enlargement? Doesn’t your government know that Ukraine is unstable and immature politically, and NATO is a very divisive issue there? Don’t you know that Ukraine is not even a real country? Part of it is really East European, and part is really Russian. This would be another mistake in American diplomacy, and I know Germany and France are not ready anyway.”
On other issues, Putin was mostly dismissive. Looking perturbed and waving his arm, he said the United States wasn’t listening on missile defense. “Unfortunately, the U.S. just wants to go off on its own again.” He was scathing on Jackson-Vanik. “You’ve been teasing us on this for years.” It was “indecent” to keep prolonging the process, or leveraging Jackson-Vanik to settle agricultural trade issues. Even Soviet-era refuseniks, he said, were insulted by the continuation of the policy. They complained to him, “We didn’t go to jail for the sake of poultry.”
We went back and forth over some of these issues for over an hour. Putin’s patience was wearing thin, and Lavrov was doodling intently, which I took as a signal to wrap things up. I thanked Putin for his time and said I would convey all his comments to Washington. I congratulated him on winning the Winter Olympics for Sochi in 2014, an effort in which he had invested significant personal energy, working hard on his English for the presentation to the International Olympic Committee, and even harder to grease the palms of its commissioners. Putin finally brightened, smiled, and said the Winter Olympics would be a great moment for Russia. He shook my hand, and I went back out to my car for the ride back to Moscow.
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THE BUCHAREST NATO summit had moments of high drama, with President Bush and Secretary Rice still hoping to find a way to produce MAP offers. Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy were dug in firmly in opposition. In the end, the curious outcome was a public statement, issued on behalf of the alliance by Merkel and Rice, that “we agreed today that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO.”20 There was no mention of MAP, which disappointed Kyiv and Tbilisi, but what the statement lacked in practical import it seemed to more than make up for in clarity of direction. Putin came the next day for a charged NATO–Russia Council meeting, and vented his concerns forcefully. In many ways, Bucharest left us with the worst of both worlds—indulging the Ukrainians and Georgians in hopes of NATO membership on which we were unlikely to deliver, while reinforcing Putin’s sense that we were determined to pursue a course he saw as an existential threat.
President Bush arrived in Sochi two days later. Sochi was Putin’s pride and joy, an old Soviet spa town on the Black Sea, with a temperate climate, pebbly beaches, and a few forlorn-looking palm trees set against snowcapped mountains an hour’s drive away. Putin had built an expansive retreat just outside town, where he spent increasing amounts of time and received foreign visitors. The basic infrastructure, like so much of the rest of Russia outside the emerald cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, was extremely run-down. The few hotels had all the beat-up charm that I remembered from the late Soviet era, and the Olympic skating, ice hockey, and skiing venues were still on the drawing board. A new airport was planned but construction had not yet begun; Air Force One looked out of place on the bedraggled runway, with weeds popping up through the concrete and the terminal building a ramshackle affair.
In a cable to the president and Secretary Rice before the visit, I had predicted that “while cocky and combative as ever, still without a mellow bone in his body, Putin will likely soften his roughest edges in Sochi.”21 To my relief, that had proven mostly true. Putin was certainly mad about NATO opening the door to Ukrainian and Georgian membership, and was already thinking of ways to tighten the screws on both to make his displeasure even clearer. Yet he also liked Bush and didn’t want to embarrass him on his valedictory visit. Moreover, he was anxious to get the “tandem” experiment off to a good start and show both his international and domestic audiences that he could make it work. The Russian elite was still a little uncertain about the whole idea. In my message to the president, I had recounted an experience at an event in Moscow the previous week, during which I listened to longtime mayor Yuri Luzhkov pontificate at some length to a group about the merits of the tandem arrangement. When I asked him afterward if he really believed that, he laughed uproariously and said, “Of course not. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”22
Relaxed by the setting, Putin and Bush covered the familia
r range of issues thoroughly and civilly. Putin was pointed on Ukraine and Georgia in a smaller session with the president, repeating his view that we didn’t understand what an unwieldy place Ukraine was, and how close Saakashvili was to provoking him. He didn’t belabor his concern, however, and the overall atmosphere was remarkably cordial. At a concluding dinner, Putin and Medvedev sat with the president, talking and joking, and generally conveying a sense that our relationship was solid enough to endure whatever troubles lay ahead. The after-dinner entertainment featured Russian folk music and a group of local dancers who invited members of the delegations to join them on the small stage. Several Russian officials, their alcohol consumption outpacing their abstemious president, climbed up and danced energetically. I wasn’t brave enough, clinging to what remained of my ambassadorial dignity. A few of my less inhibited colleagues made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in rhythm. Chuckling, President Bush said as we were walking out, “I didn’t see you up there, but maybe that was smart. Our folks looked like mice on a hot plate.”
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I WOULD LEAVE Moscow a month later. Earlier that spring, Secretary Rice had asked me to return to the State Department as undersecretary for political affairs, the third-ranking position in the department and traditionally the highest post to which a career officer could aspire. I departed with a sense of foreboding. For all our efforts to steady the relationship, some kind of crash seemed more and more likely.
Putin was determined to take Saakashvili down a peg, and perhaps also to show, in the wake of the Bucharest statement, that the Germans and French were right to see Georgia’s not-so-frozen conflicts as a long-term obstacle to NATO membership. He was clearly baiting the impulsive Georgian president, who may have wanted for his own reasons after Bucharest to act in South Ossetia and force a resolution of the disputes there and in Abkhazia. Rice visited Tbilisi in July and pushed Saakashvili hard not to take the bait. He heard other, more encouraging voices in Washington, including in the vice president’s office, and couldn’t resist the temptation to move, as the Russians continued to prod and provoke, their trap carefully laid. On the night of August 7, the Georgians launched an artillery barrage on Tskhinvali, the tiny South Ossetian capital, killing a number of Ossetes and Russian peacekeepers. Already poised, the Russians sent a large force through the Roki Tunnel between North and South Ossetia, routed the Georgians, and within a few days were on the verge of seizing Tbilisi and overthrowing Saakashvili. European diplomatic intervention led by French president Sarkozy, in close coordination with the United States, produced a cease-fire. The damage was done, however, leaving U.S.-Russian relations in their worst shape since the end of the Cold War.
The slow-motion trainwreck in U.S.-Russian relations that had its flaming culmination in Georgia in August 2008 had more than one cause. Certainly, the complexes of Putin’s Russia were on vivid display—pent-up grievance, wounded pride, suspicion of American motives and color revolutions, a sense of entitlement about Russia’s great power prerogatives and sphere of influence, and Putin’s particular autocratic zeal for translating all those passions into calculated aggression. Saakashvili’s impulsiveness didn’t help. Neither did our own post–Cold War complexes, born of the self-confidence of the unipolar moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the searing experience of 9/11. Restraint and compromise seemed unappealing and unnecessary, given our strength and sense of mission. They seemed especially unappealing with Putin’s Russia, a declining power with a nasty repressive streak.
Whether a crash could have been avoided, and a difficult but more stable relationship constructed, is a hard question. The next administration would take its own run at answering it, with a sustained effort to “reset” relations with Russia that produced early dividends. It ended, however, with an even bigger trainwreck, and not much to show for my quarter century of episodic involvement in relations between Russia and America. It was another lesson in the complexities of diplomacy, and the risks of wishful thinking—both about the disruptive Mr. Putin and our own capacity to maneuver over or around him.
Over the next decade, Putin’s confidence and risk tolerance would deepen further. Increasingly convinced of his ability to “play strongly with weak cards,” increasingly disdainful of “poor players” of stronger hands like the irresolute and divided Americans and Europeans, Putin gradually shifted from testing the West in places where Russia had a greater stake and more appetite for risk, like Ukraine and Georgia, to places where the West had a far greater stake, like the integrity of its democracies.
7
Obama’s Long Game: Bets, Pivots, and Resets in a Post-Primacy World
IN THE SUMMER of 2005, Barack Obama, a newly elected Democratic senator from Illinois, was one of my first guests in Moscow. I had arrived with my family earlier that week, and Spaso House was still littered with unpacked boxes. I had yet to meet with all the members of my team, let alone complete my first round of courtesy calls with Russian officials. Obama, sensing my professional and domestic disorder, could not have been more gracious. With two young daughters of his own, he instantly connected with Lizzy and Sarah. He could sense that they were just getting their bearings in yet another new home and new school. He knew precisely what that felt like and went out of his way to relate, reassure, and comfort them.
Obama’s travel partner was Republican senator Dick Lugar from Indiana—one of the most respected voices in the Senate, with enormous foreign policy expertise and credibility across the aisle and around the world. For more than a decade, he had been a regular visitor to Russia with Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia—his Democratic friend and co-sponsor of legislation that secured loose nuclear material and weapons left behind in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. With Nunn now retired, Lugar hoped Obama would step into his shoes. Obama had a long interest in nuclear policy, and Lugar a keen eye for talent.
Obama and Lugar joined Lisa and me for an informal dinner at Spaso House one evening, together with Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a decorated Vietnam veteran and a leading Republican voice on foreign policy, who was on a separate visit to Russia. We talked until nearly midnight. Obama wanted to know about my experiences in Russia in the 1990s, and what I thought about Putin. He was curious about the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 and where things were headed as the Sunni insurgency picked up steam. He seemed particularly interested in what it was like to work for Secretary Baker and how the Bush 41 administration coped with such an avalanche of transformative international events. “That was an impressive bunch,” he said.
Lugar and Obama spent a couple days in Moscow. We had lots more time to talk, bouncing around in embassy minivans to and from meetings. At a former biological weapons lab outside Moscow, Obama watched warily as Lugar handled dusty old jars of toxins perched precariously on the shelves. As we sat down for lunch, Obama was equally wary of the green Jell-O mold on our plates. He looked to me, pointed at my untouched plate, and said, “You first, Mr. Ambassador. This is what diplomats get paid the big bucks to do.”
The following day, Lisa and I were busily unpacking our boxes when my cellphone rang. The embassy duty officer had some inconvenient news: Officials at Perm airport were demanding payment of an exorbitant landing fee (from which official delegations were supposed to be exempt) before clearing the congressional delegation and its U.S. military plane to take off. Over the next three hours, I hunted frantically for a senior Russian official to spring Obama and Lugar. Sunday afternoons in August are not the most accessible moment for senior Russians, but I managed to track down the groggy first deputy foreign minister at his dacha near Moscow. He pulled the necessary strings, and Lugar and Obama made it to Ukraine later that day. I was lucky that my first (and only) senatorial detainees in Russia were two of the least affected members of Congress. Nevertheless, Obama would occasionally tease me about the incident in later years. “You’re not going to pull another Perm on me, are you?” he’
d ask, semi-kidding.
Perm-gate was a reminder that no matter how thoughtful the effort, no matter how carefully laid the plan, other forces and players had a vote too. It was a lesson I learned time and time again during the course of my diplomatic career, and it would rear its head regularly during President Obama’s tenure in the White House. He inherited a world in which America’s post–Cold War dominance—thanks to the forces of history and our unforced errors—was coming to an end. Although America’s relative power and influence were diminishing, its myriad strengths seemed to ensure its preeminence for decades to come. The question for Obama was how to make best use of that preeminence to secure American interests and values in a more competitive world.
That required playing a long game—molding an emerging international order, realigning relationships with major powers like China, India, and Russia, and revitalizing diplomacy to achieve goals like preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It also required a relentlessly adaptable short game, navigating through a landscape in which terrorism was still a threat, the weight of the military-intelligence complex was still far greater than diplomatic tools, and the pull of old dysfunctions in the Middle East would threaten to swallow the foreign policy agenda. It was a world of unsynchronized passions, full of collisions between the ambitions of the long game and the vexations of the short game.
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IN QUESTIONS OF temperament, instinct, and worldview, President Obama and his secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, diverged in a number of ways, but they all saw the importance of getting America off of its war footing and reclaiming its diplomatic leadership. During the campaign, Obama’s diagnosis of U.S. foreign policy was harsh: The United States had failed to prioritize interests and investments; had inverted the roles of force and diplomacy; had been stubbornly reluctant to engage adversaries directly; and had been too attuned to the siren song of unilateralism and often deaf to the hard task of coalition-building in a world in which both power and problems were more diffuse.
The Back Channel Page 26