by Obama Barack
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OF ALL THE BRICS leaders in attendance at the G20, I was most interested in engaging with Medvedev. The U.S. relationship with Russia was at a particularly low point. The previous summer—a few months after Medvedev had been sworn into office—Russia had invaded the neighboring country of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, and illegally occupied two of its provinces, triggering violence between the two countries and tensions with other border nations.
For us, it was a sign of Putin’s escalating boldness and general belligerence, a troubling unwillingness to respect another nation’s sovereignty and a broader flouting of international law. And in many ways, it appeared he’d gotten away with it: Beyond suspending diplomatic contacts, the Bush administration had done next to nothing to punish Russia for its aggression, and the rest of the world had shrugged its shoulders and moved on, making any belated efforts to isolate Russia almost certain to fail. My administration’s hope was to initiate what we were calling a “reset” with Russia, opening a dialogue in order to protect our interests, support our democratic partners in the region, and enlist cooperation on our goals for nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. To this end, we’d arranged for me to meet privately with Medvedev a day ahead of the summit.
I relied on two Russia experts to prepare me for the meeting: the State Department’s undersecretary for political affairs, Bill Burns, and our NSC senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs, Michael McFaul. Burns, a career diplomat who’d been the Bush administration’s ambassador to Russia, was tall, mustached, and slightly stooped, with a gentle voice and the bookish air of an Oxford don. McFaul, on the other hand, was all energy and enthusiasm, with a wide smile and a blond mop of hair. A native Montanan, he’d advised my campaign while still teaching at Stanford and seemed to end every statement with an exclamation point.
Of the two, McFaul was more bullish about our ability to have an influence on Russia, partly because he’d lived in Moscow in the early 1990s, during the heady days of political transformation, first as a scholar and later as the in-country director of a pro-democracy organization funded in part by the U.S. government. When it came to Medvedev, though, McFaul agreed with Burns that I shouldn’t expect too much.
“Medvedev’s going to be interested in establishing a good relationship with you, to prove that he belongs on the world stage,” he said. “But you have to remember that Putin still calls the shots.”
Looking over his biography, I could see why everyone assumed Dmitry Medvedev was on a short leash. In his early forties, raised in relative privilege as the only child of two professors, he’d studied law in the late 1980s, lectured at Leningrad State University, and gotten to know Vladimir Putin when they both worked for the mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While Putin stayed in politics, eventually becoming prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin, Medvedev leveraged his political connections to secure an executive position and ownership stake in Russia’s largest lumber company, at a time when the country’s chaotic privatization of state-owned assets offered well-connected shareholders a guaranteed fortune. Quietly he became a wealthy man, called upon to work on various civic projects without having to bear the burden of the spotlight. It wasn’t until late 1999 that he got pulled back into government, recruited by Putin for a high-level job in Moscow. Just a month later, Yeltsin abruptly resigned, elevating Putin from prime minister to acting president, with Medvedev rising behind him.
In other words, Medvedev was a technocrat and a behind-the-scenes operator, without much of a public profile or political base of his own. And that’s exactly how he came across when he arrived for our meeting at Winfield House, the U.S. ambassador’s elegant residence on the outskirts of London. He was a small man, dark-haired and affable, with a slightly formal, almost self-deprecating manner, more international management consultant than politician or party apparatchik. Apparently he understood English, although he preferred speaking with a translator.
I opened our discussion with the subject of his country’s military occupation of Georgia. As expected, Medvedev stuck closely to the official talking points. He blamed the Georgian government for precipitating the crisis and insisted that Russia had acted only to protect Russian citizens from violence. He dismissed my argument that the invasion and continued occupation violated Georgia’s sovereignty and international law, and he pointedly suggested that, unlike U.S. forces in Iraq, Russian forces had genuinely been greeted as liberators. Hearing all this, I remembered what the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said about politics during the Soviet era, that “the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.”
But if Medvedev’s rebuttal on Georgia reminded me that he was no Boy Scout, I noticed a certain ironic detachment in his delivery, as if he wanted me to know that he didn’t really believe everything he was saying. As the conversation shifted to other topics, so did his disposition. On the steps needed to manage the financial crisis, he was well briefed and constructive. He expressed enthusiasm for our proposed “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations, especially when it came to expanding cooperation on nonmilitary issues like education, science, technology, and trade. He surprised us by making an unprompted (and unprecedented) offer to let the U.S. military use Russian airspace to transport troops and equipment to Afghanistan—an alternative that would reduce our exclusive reliance on expensive and not always reliable Pakistani supply routes.
And on my highest-priority issue—U.S.-Russian cooperation to curb nuclear proliferation, including Iran’s possible pursuit of nuclear weapons—Medvedev showed a readiness to engage with frankness and flexibility. He accepted my proposal to have our respective experts immediately begin negotiations on cuts to each country’s nuclear stockpiles as a follow-up to the existing Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was set to expire at the end of 2009. Although he wasn’t prepared to commit to an international effort to constrain Iran, he didn’t dismiss it out of hand, going so far as to acknowledge that Iran’s nuclear and missile programs had advanced much faster than Moscow had expected—a concession that neither McFaul nor Burns could recall a Russian official ever having made, even in private.
Still, Medvedev was far from acquiescent. He made clear during our discussions about nonproliferation that Russia had a priority of its own: wanting us to reconsider the Bush administration’s decision to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. He was speaking, I assumed, on behalf of Putin, who correctly understood that the main reason the Poles and the Czechs were eager to host our system was that it would guarantee increased U.S. military capabilities on their soil, providing an additional hedge against Russian intimidation.
The truth is that, unbeknownst to the Russians, we were already reconsidering the idea of a land-based missile defense in Europe. Before I’d left for London, Robert Gates had informed me that the plans developed under Bush had been judged potentially less effective against the most pressing threats (chiefly Iran) than originally envisioned. Gates had suggested that I order a review of other possible configurations before making any decision.
I wasn’t willing to grant Medvedev’s request to fold missile defense considerations into upcoming START negotiations. I did think, however, that it was in our interest to reduce Russian anxiety. And the fortuitous timing allowed me to make sure Medvedev didn’t leave London empty-handed: I presented my intent to review our plans in Europe as a show of willingness to discuss the issue in good faith. I added that progress on halting Iran’s nuclear program would almost certainly have a bearing on any decision I might make—a not-so-subtle message, to which Medvedev responded before it was even translated.
“I understand,” he said in English, with a slight smile.
Before leaving, Medvedev also extended an invitation for me to visit Moscow during the summer, a meeting I was inclined to accept. A
fter watching his motorcade drive away, I turned to Burns and McFaul and asked what they thought.
“I’ll be honest, Mr. President,” McFaul said. “I don’t know how it could’ve gone much better. He seemed a lot more open to doing business than I would have expected.”
“Mike’s right,” Burns said, “although I do wonder how much of what Medvedev said was cleared with Putin beforehand.”
I nodded. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
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BY THE END of the London summit, the G20 had managed to strike a deal in response to the global financial crisis. The final communiqué, to be issued jointly by the leaders in attendance, included U.S. priorities like additional commitments to stimulus and a rejection of protectionism, along with measures to eliminate tax havens and improve financial oversight that were important to the Europeans. BRICS nations could point to a commitment from the United States and the European Union to examine possible changes in their World Bank and IMF representation. In a rush of enthusiasm, Sarkozy grabbed both me and Tim as we were about to leave the venue.
“This agreement is historic, Barack!” he said. “It has happened because of you…No, no, it’s true! And Mr. Geithner here…he’s magnificent!” Sarkozy then started chanting my Treasury secretary’s last name like a fan at a football game, loudly enough to turn a few heads in the room. I had to laugh, not only at Tim’s evident discomfort but also at the stricken expression on Angela Merkel’s face—she had just finished looking over the wording of the communiqué and was now eyeing Sarkozy the way a mother eyes an unruly child.
The international press deemed the summit a success: Not only was the deal more substantive than expected, but our central role in the negotiations had helped to at least partially reverse the view that the financial crisis had permanently damaged U.S. leadership. At the closing press conference, I was careful to credit everyone who’d played a role, praising Gordon Brown in particular for his leadership and arguing that in this interconnected world, no single nation could go it alone. Solving big problems, I said, demanded the kind of international cooperation on display in London.
Two days later, a reporter followed up on this, asking for my views on American exceptionalism. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” I said. “Just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Only later would I learn that Republicans and conservative news outlets had seized upon this unremarkable statement, one made in an effort to show modesty and good manners, as evidence of weakness and insufficient patriotism on my part. Pundits began to characterize my interactions with other leaders and citizens of other nations as “Obama’s Apology Tour,” although they could never point to any actual apologies. Evidently my failure to lecture foreign audiences on American superiority, not to mention my willingness to acknowledge our imperfections and take the views of other countries into account, was somehow undermining. It was another reminder of how splintered our media landscape had become—and how an increasingly poisonous partisanship no longer stopped at the water’s edge. In this new world, a foreign policy victory by every traditional standard could be spun as a defeat, at least in the minds of half the country; messages that advanced our interests and built goodwill abroad could lead to a host of political headaches back home.
On a happier note, Michelle was a hit in her international debut, garnering especially glowing press for a visit she made to an all-girls secondary school in central London. As would be true throughout our time in the White House, Michelle reveled in such interactions, able to connect with kids of any age or background, and apparently that magic traveled well. At the school, she talked about her own childhood and the barriers she’d had to overcome, how education had always provided her a path forward. The girls—working-class, many of them of West Indian or South Asian descent—listened in rapt attention as this glamorous woman insisted that she had once been just like them. In the coming years, she’d visit with students from the school several times, including hosting a group of them at the White House. Later, an economist would study the data and conclude that Michelle’s engagement with the school had led to a notable spike in the students’ standardized test scores, suggesting that her message of aspiration and connection made a true and measurable difference. This “Michelle Effect” was something I was very familiar with—she had the same effect on me. Things like this helped us remember that our work as a First Family wasn’t solely a matter of politics and policy.
Michelle did generate her own bit of controversy, though. At a reception for the G20 leaders and their spouses with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, she was photographed with her hand resting on Her Majesty’s shoulder—an apparent breach of royalty-commoner protocol, although the queen didn’t seem to mind, slipping her arm around Michelle in return. Also, Michelle wore a cardigan sweater over her dress during our private meeting with the queen, sending Fleet Street into a horrified tizzy.
“You should have taken my suggestion and worn one of those little hats,” I told her the next morning. “And a little matching handbag!”
She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “And I hope you enjoy sleeping on a couch when you get home,” she said brightly. “The White House has so many to choose from!”
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THE NEXT FIVE DAYS were a whirlwind—a NATO summit in Baden-Baden, Germany, and Strasbourg, France; meetings and speeches in the Czech Republic and Turkey; and an unannounced visit to Iraq, where—in addition to thanking a raucous assembly of U.S. troops for their courage and sacrifice—I consulted with Prime Minister Maliki about our withdrawal plans and Iraq’s continued transition to parliamentary governance.
By the end of the trip I had every reason to feel pretty good. Across the board, we had successfully advanced the U.S. agenda. There had been no major pratfalls on my part. Everyone on my foreign policy team, from cabinet members like Geithner and Gates to the most junior member of the advance staff, had done outstanding work. And far from shying away from association with the United States, the countries we visited seemed hungry for our leadership.
Still, the trip provided sobering evidence of just how much of my first term was going to be spent not on new initiatives but on putting out fires that predated my presidency. At the NATO summit, for instance, we were able to secure alliance support for our Af-Pak strategy—but only after listening to European leaders emphasize how sharply their publics had turned against military cooperation with the United States following the Iraq invasion, and how difficult it was going to be for them to muster political support for additional troops. NATO’s central and Eastern European members had also been unnerved by the Bush administration’s tepid reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia and questioned whether the alliance could be counted on to defend them against similar Russian aggression. They had a point: Before the summit, I’d been surprised to learn that NATO lacked the plans or rapid-response capabilities to come to the defense of every ally. It was just one more example of a dirty little secret I was discovering as president, the same thing I’d learned during our Afghanistan review, the same thing the world had learned following the invasion of Iraq: For all their tough talk, Bush administration hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld had been surprisingly bad at backing up their rhetoric with coherent, effective strategies. Or as Denis McDonough more colorfully put it, “Open any White House drawer and you’ll find another turd sandwich.”
I did what I could to defuse the central European issue by proposing that NATO develop individualized defense plans for each of its members and by declaring that when it came to our mutual defense obligations, we should make no distinction between junior and senior members of the alliance. This was going to mean more work for our overstretched staff and military, but I tried not to let it raise my blood pressure too much. I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with th
e previous administration’s choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.
What did have me worried by the end of the trip was less a particular issue than an overall impression: the sense that for a variety of reasons—some of our own making, some beyond our control—the hopeful tide of democratization, liberalization, and integration that had swept the globe after the end of the Cold War was beginning to recede. Older, darker forces were gathering strength, and the stresses brought about by a prolonged economic downturn were likely to make things worse.
Before the financial crisis, for example, Turkey had appeared to be a nation on the upswing, a case study in globalization’s positive effects on emerging economies. Despite a history of political instability and military coups, the majority-Muslim country had been largely aligned with the West since the 1950s, maintaining NATO membership, regular elections, a market-based system, and a secular constitution that enshrined modern principles like equal rights for women. When its current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his Justice and Development Party had swept into power in 2002–2003, touting populist and often overtly Islamic appeals, it had unsettled Turkey’s secular, military-dominated political elite. Erdogan’s vocal sympathy for both the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in their fight for an independent Palestinian state, in particular, had also made Washington and Tel Aviv nervous. And yet, Erdogan’s government thus far had abided by Turkey’s constitution, met its NATO obligations, and effectively managed the economy, even initiating a series of modest reforms with the hope of qualifying for E.U. membership. Some observers suggested that Erdogan might offer a model of moderate, modern, and pluralistic political Islam and an alternative to the autocracies, theocracies, and extremist movements that characterized the region.