The Georgia conflict had further sobered my expectations, and my view continued to be that we’d be operating within a fairly narrow band of possibilities in relations with a Russia that was still far more Putin’s than Medvedev’s. We still could, however, seek a better balance between areas of cooperation and inevitable differences. I found a kindred spirit in Mike McFaul, the new senior Russia expert on the NSC staff. Mike and I had first met on the basketball court at the embassy in Moscow in the 1990s, during my first tour and his stint at the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Center. He was as energetic in government as he had been on the court, driving the reset with similar determination and creativity.
McFaul was not, however, wildly enthusiastic about my first suggestion. I thought it would help reinforce the seriousness of the administration’s approach to lay out our thinking comprehensively in a presidential letter, and then have the two of us deliver it in Moscow. To Mike, this seemed very nineteenth-century; all that was missing was the quill pen. But I argued that the Russians tended to be traditionalists in their estimation of diplomatic seriousness, and that this would help. I eventually wore him down. We produced a long, systematic draft for the president, which Obama approved, and flew to Moscow in early February 2009. I also took along a handwritten note from Secretary Clinton to Foreign Minister Lavrov. Clinton was skeptical about how much could be accomplished in the reset, but believed it was worth a shot.
McFaul and I spent two days in intensive discussions with Lavrov and other senior officials. It went better than we expected. I told the secretary on February 13, “I left Moscow convinced that we have a significant opportunity before us, but realistic about how hard it is going to be to shift gears with a Russian leadership deeply distracted by a worsening economic predicament, and still conflicted about whether their interests are better served by a thaw in relations.” I was struck by high-level anxiety in Moscow about the global financial crisis, which had quickly undercut Russia’s boom. “The construction cranes that dominated the city skyline during my years as ambassador now sit idle,” I wrote. “The bankers and senior officials gathered in the Finance Minister’s anteroom while we were waiting to meet him…had none of the swagger I remember before, and their gloom was palpable.” The authoritarian modernization model of Putin and Medvedev was under considerable strain, and that strengthened the case in the Kremlin for testing a relaxation of tensions with us.7
On specific issues that the president raised in his letter to Medvedev, the Russians seemed cautiously receptive. Obama had made clear our areas of difference, particularly our disagreement over the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He was equally straight about our human rights concerns. The Russians didn’t belabor the Georgia conflict or beat their chests over U.S. policy in the former Soviet Union. Lavrov signaled immediate interest in talks about a new arms reduction agreement, with START due to expire at the end of 2009.
“No passage in the President’s letter caught the Russians’ attention more,” I told Clinton, “than the paragraph on Iran and missile defense.” Choosing his words carefully, the president had emphasized that he was in the process of reviewing U.S. missile defense strategy, including the plans for sites in Poland and the Czech Republic that had so exercised the Russians, and that—logically—progress in reducing the risks posed by Iran’s missile and nuclear programs would have a direct impact on our review, since those were the threats against which our European plans were primarily targeted. The Russians couldn’t miss the implication.8
In early March, Clinton had an introductory meeting with Lavrov in Geneva. It was marred only by a minor embarrassment, when Clinton sought to break the ice during a press availability at the outset by handing Lavrov a red button that was supposed to say “reset” in Russian, but instead was mistranslated as “overload.” Gimmicks and Lavrov rarely mixed well. Lavrov didn’t rub it in (at least not too much), and the secretary took it in stride. The media, however, had a field day.
The president had his first meeting with Medvedev in London at the beginning of April, on the margins of a G-20 meeting focused mostly on the continuing economic tidal wave caused by the 2008 financial crisis. They met at Winfield House, the elegant residence of the U.S. ambassador, in a tranquil corner of Regent’s Park. As we waited in the dining room for Medvedev and his delegation to arrive, I must admit that I was thinking less of the nuts and bolts of the reset agenda and more of the first time I walked into that room, a shy twenty-two-year-old in a bad suit trying to fade into the elegant woodwork at a welcome reception for Marshall Scholars. The woodwork still beckoned, and my sartorial standards were only marginally improved, but I was feeling a little more at ease this time.
It was clear from the start that Medvedev was eager to build rapport with Obama and try to make some version of the reset an advertisement for his effectiveness as a president and world leader. That didn’t mean that he was going to be a pushover; he was a tough defender of Russian interests, without his mentor’s snark but operating within the bounds of Putin’s hard-nosed views. He underscored his commitment to finalizing a successor to the START treaty by the end of the year, at substantially reduced levels of strategic nuclear weapons. He offered to allow the United States to fly troops and material through Russian airspace to Afghanistan—a big advantage for a U.S. administration eager to lessen dependence on supply lines through Pakistan. Most surprisingly, he admitted to Obama that Russia had underestimated the pace and threat of the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs—probing to see how far a tougher line on Iran might get him on the missile defense issue. Despite Medvedev’s sharp criticisms on missile defense and Georgia, the overall tenor of the conversation was surprisingly positive, with Medvedev at pains to show how comfortably he was settling into his presidential role.
It was not at all clear, however, that there was space in a one-man political system for a second player—and also not at all clear that that one man shared Medvedev’s apparent enthusiasm for the reset. President Obama agreed to an early visit to Moscow to test both propositions. Caution might have dictated a slower pace, especially since Obama wouldn’t visit Beijing for the first time until November, and had a massive domestic agenda to contend with and a steep recession still consuming much of his time and attention. Yet the president was in a hurry, on a number of fronts, and he wanted to see if the reset with Russia could get traction. He flew to Moscow during the first week in July, and I went along as the senior State Department representative.
The Medvedev meeting went smoothly. Most of it—three hours out of a little less than four altogether—took place in a small group. Both presidents were on top of their briefs, and had an easy rapport as they went back and forth over the issues. Obama put particular emphasis on the need to accelerate the New START negotiations, and on his concerns about Iran. Medvedev continued to hammer away at Russian reservations about missile defense, stressing their general interest in some form of constraints on missile defense alongside strategic arms reductions, and specifically their opposition to the two Central European sites, which he argued would do little to address the modest medium-term Iranian threat. The practical accomplishments of their first six months working together, however, were already substantial, and hinted at even greater potential.
The following morning, Obama drove out to meet Putin at his Novo Ogaryovo dacha just outside Moscow. Jim Jones, McFaul, and I rode along with him in the “Beast,” the heavily armored limousine that is flown out in advance to transport and protect the president on his overseas trips. Mike and I sat facing the president, and we talked generally about the meeting and how best to approach Putin. I described a few of my own interactions with him over the years, and suggested that he usually didn’t react well to a long presentation, especially since he would see himself as the more senior and experienced leader. Why not ask him at the start for his candid assessment of what he thought had gone right and what he thought had gone wrong in Russian-
American relations over the past decade? Putin liked being asked his opinion, and he certainly wasn’t shy. Maybe it would set a good tone to let him get some things off his chest up front. The president nodded.
After President Obama’s initial question produced an unbroken fifty-minute Putin monologue filled with grievances, raw asides, and acerbic commentary, I began to wonder about the wisdom of my advice, and my future in the Obama administration. The meeting was supposed to last one hour, and Putin had already eaten up most of the clock. He had arranged an impressive setting, sitting under a canopy on an elaborate patio, with waiters in eighteenth-century costumes bringing out an endless variety of dishes. I just drank coffee and listened to Putin’s familiar litany—how he liked George W. Bush, but saw his efforts to build solid relations after 9/11 go unrequited; how the Bush administration had bungled Iraq and orchestrated color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. He was less concerned than Medvedev about the Iranian threat, and more caustic about missile defense and what he perceived to be the unwillingness of the Bush administration to listen to him. His manner was blunt, his language sometimes crude, and his overall demeanor self-servingly dismissive of the value of working with Americans. He had tried with Bush. It hadn’t panned out. Why get burned again?
Obama listened patiently, and then delivered his own firm message on the reset. He was matter-of-fact about our differences, and made no effort to gloss over the profound problems that Russia’s actions in Georgia had caused. He said it was in neither of our interests to let our disagreements obscure those areas where we could each benefit by working together, and where U.S.-Russian leadership could contribute to international order. We should test that, he explained, without inflating expectations. After all, we already had a lot of experience testing the alternative approaches—either getting our hopes up too high or retreating into more familiar adversarial stances—and they hadn’t worked out so well. Putin didn’t look persuaded, but he conceded that it made sense to try. “These issues are Dmitry’s responsibility now,” he said airily. “He has my support.”
The discussion between Putin and Obama went two hours longer than planned, but it was well worth the anxiety it caused schedulers on both sides. As we rode back to Moscow, the president said Putin’s capacity for venting didn’t surprise him. The challenge, Obama recognized, was to “stay connected to this guy, without undercutting Medvedev.” That was to prove much harder than we thought at the outset. When we suggested that Putin co-chair the new Bilateral Presidential Commission with Vice President Biden, he didn’t bite; Putin didn’t view vice presidents as his peers. We came up with other ideas—like Putin leading a Russian business delegation to the United States, which would give him occasion to visit Washington—but none stuck. Rank and structure, and Putin’s own wariness, combined to make him elusive throughout the reset effort, leaving a vulnerability that we were never able to patch. By the time Putin and Obama met again, three years later, the reset had collapsed.
Despite my doubts about whether we could stay connected to Putin, there was no question that we were making progress on the reset. The transit arrangements that we had negotiated for moving materiel and troops to Afghanistan through Russian and Central Asian airspace proved invaluable. To help solidify our ties, McFaul and I set off on a trip to all five Central Asian states just after Obama’s Moscow summit in the summer of 2009. Woody Allen famously observed that 90 percent of life is showing up; that certainly applies to American diplomacy in places like Central Asia, whose leaders were habitually autocratic, sensitive to American inattention, and squeezed between their big, ambitious Russian and Chinese neighbors.
In Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev appreciated the timely briefing on the Moscow talks, supported our pragmatic approach, and emphasized shrewdly that one of the keys to sustaining it would be finding a way to work with Putin as well as Medvedev, about whom he was politely dismissive. In Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov wondered why Americans always stopped in Astana first and failed to grasp that Tashkent was the center of gravity in the small Central Asian solar system. His two-hour opening monologue was impressive for its sheer stamina, as well as for his dismal opinions of other regional leaders, whom he clearly regarded as venal lightweights (presumably in contrast to his weightier venality). Karimov was frosty about our human rights concerns, and pessimistic on Afghanistan, but willing to help. So was Kyrgyzstan’s leadership. In Turkmenistan, President Garbanguly Berdimuhamedov was a distinct improvement on his clinically unbalanced predecessor. I survived our stop in Tajikistan, where my major accomplishment was to consume the deer’s ear I was served as the guest of honor at a presidential banquet, a digestive exercise for which no amount of vodka seemed sufficient.
Back in Washington, the administration was focused on an intensive interagency review of the missile defense strategy that it had inherited. Obama made clear that he wasn’t interested in catering to the Russians. He wanted to make sure that we were moving in the most effective way possible for dealing with the emerging Iranian missile threat.
The result of the review was a strong recommendation, supported by both Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton, to pursue an alternative, relying at least initially on systems based on Aegis cruisers in the Mediterranean and in southern Europe. The review concluded that this “phased adaptive approach” would be a technically superior defense against a potential Iranian threat over the near and medium term, and more sustainable politically in Europe. It left open the possibility of revisiting the original Polish and Czech plans further down the road. I pointed out in a note to Clinton in early September an obvious corollary benefit: “A fresh start on missile defense, entirely defensible on the technical merits, gives you and the President a stronger hand to play” with the Russians. “Far from letting the Russians off the hook, this approach is our best bet to corner them on Iran, and to press ahead on post-START and wider European security issues.”9
We moved quickly to take advantage of the improving atmosphere with Russia to advance one of the president’s central priorities—preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Cooperation with Moscow was at the heart of that effort; if we could prevent the Iranians from driving a wedge between us and the Russians, the chances for mobilizing the Europeans, Chinese, and other players in a united front improved substantially. Medvedev was persuaded by our willingness to work with Russia in good faith, negotiate directly with the Iranians, and offer reasonable compromises before pivoting to an effort to build more economic pressure against Iran. The result was UN Security Council Resolution 1929 in June 2010, the platform on which we were able to build unprecedented pressure against the Iranians, and ultimately bring them back to the negotiating table.
We made similar headway on the New START agreement. A determined U.S. negotiating team, after lots of ups and downs along the way, worked out a solid accord in late 2009, just before the expiration of the original START treaty. It further reduced strategic nuclear arms, bringing them to their lowest levels since the dawn of the nuclear age. The president himself played a critical role in this, hammering out key compromises with Medvedev by phone and in meetings on the margins of international conferences. Hillary Clinton was instrumental in selling the deal on the Hill. The Senate voted in favor before the Christmas recess, with Republican opposition mollified by an agreement to invest billions in nuclear weapons modernization, some of which had questionable utility. It was another reminder of the costs of getting diplomatic business done in an increasingly polarized political system.
I accompanied Clinton to Moscow in March 2010, a moment when it felt like the reset might be taking hold. She had useful discussions with Medvedev and Lavrov, and we then went out to see Putin at his dacha. He was mildly combative at the outset of their meeting, while the press was still in the room, poking at continuing difficulties in the American economy and his skepticism about Washington’s seriousness about deepening economic ties to Russia. Slouching
a little in his chair, his legs spread wide in front of him, Putin looked every bit the kid in the back of the classroom with an attitude problem (an image that Obama once, undiplomatically, cited in public). Clinton took it all in stride, laughed off his barbs, and engaged in a crisp back-and-forth with Putin once the media were gone and the meeting unfolded. Accustomed to pushing people around and finding their weak spots, Putin seemed a bit frustrated by Clinton’s measured reaction.
The secretary and I had talked earlier that day about Putin’s love of the outdoors and fascination with both big animals and his own bare-chested persona. Shifting gears in the conversation, she asked him to talk a little about his well-publicized efforts to preserve Siberian tigers. A light seemed to go off, and Putin described with uncharacteristic excitement some of his recent trips to the Russian Far East. With what for him was borderline exuberance, he stood up and asked Clinton to come with him to his private office. I trailed them down several hallways, past startled guards and assistants, as Putin led the way. Arriving at his office, he proceeded to show the secretary on a large map of Russia covering most of one wall the areas he had visited on his Siberian tiger trips, and those in the north where he planned to go that summer to tranquilize and tag polar bears. With genuine enthusiasm, he asked if former president Clinton might like to come along, or maybe even the secretary herself?
I had never seen Putin so animated. The secretary applauded his commitment to wildlife conservation, and said this might be another area where Russia and America could work more together. She politely deflected the invitation to the Russian Far North, although she promised to mention it to her husband. Riding back to her hotel in Moscow afterward, Clinton smiled and said that neither she nor the former president would be spending their summer vacation with Putin near the Arctic Circle.
The Back Channel Page 30