by Obama Barack
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I MET VLADIMIR PUTIN for the first time the following morning when I traveled to his dacha, located in a suburb outside Moscow. Our Russia experts, Mike McFaul and Bill Burns, as well as Jim Jones, joined me for the ride. Having had some past interactions with Putin, Burns suggested that I keep my initial presentation short. “Putin’s sensitive to any perceived slights,” Burns said, “and in his mind, he’s the more senior leader. You might want to open the meeting by asking him his opinion about the state of U.S.-Russian relations and let him get a few things off his chest.”
After turning through an imposing gate and continuing down a long driveway, we pulled up in front of a mansion, where Putin welcomed us for the obligatory photo op. Physically, he was unremarkable: short and compact—a wrestler’s build—with thin, sandy hair, a prominent nose, and pale, watchful eyes. As we exchanged pleasantries with our respective delegations, I noticed a casualness to his movements, a practiced disinterest in his voice that indicated someone accustomed to being surrounded by subordinates and supplicants. Someone who’d grown used to power.
Accompanied by Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s urbane foreign minister and former U.N. representative, Putin led us to a broad outdoor patio, where an elaborate spread had been arranged for our benefit, with eggs and caviar, breads and teas, served by male waiters in traditional peasant dress and high leather boots. I thanked Putin for his hospitality, noted the progress our countries had made with the previous day’s agreements, and asked for his assessment of the U.S.-Russia relationship during his time in office.
Burns hadn’t been kidding when he said the man had a few things to get off his chest. I’d barely finished the question before Putin launched into an animated and seemingly endless monologue chronicling every perceived injustice, betrayal, and slight that he and the Russian people had suffered at the hands of the Americans. He’d liked President Bush personally, he said, and had reached out after 9/11, pledging solidarity and offering to share intelligence in the fight against a common enemy. He’d helped the United States secure airbases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan for the Afghan campaign. He’d even offered Russia’s help in handling Saddam Hussein.
And where had it gotten him? Rather than heed his warnings, he said, Bush had gone ahead and invaded Iraq, destabilizing the entire Middle East. The U.S. decision seven years earlier to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its plans to house missile defense systems on Russia’s borders continued to be a source of strategic instability. The admission of former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO during both the Clinton and Bush administrations had steadily encroached on Russia’s “sphere of influence,” while U.S. support for the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan—under the specious guise of “democracy promotion”—had turned Russia’s once-friendly neighbors into governments hostile to Moscow. As far as Putin was concerned, the Americans had been arrogant, dismissive, unwilling to treat Russia as an equal partner, and constantly trying to dictate terms to the rest of the world—all of which, he said, made it hard to be optimistic about future relations.
About thirty minutes into what was supposed to have been an hour-long meeting, my staffers started sneaking glances at their watches. But I decided not to interrupt. It seemed clear that Putin had rehearsed the whole thing, but his sense of grievance was real. I also knew that my continued progress with Medvedev depended on the forbearance of Putin. After about forty-five minutes, Putin finally ran out of material, and rather than trying to stick to our schedule, I began answering him point by point. I reminded him that I’d personally opposed the invasion of Iraq, but I also rejected Russia’s actions in Georgia, believing that each nation had the right to determine its own alliances and economic relationships without interference. I disputed the idea that a limited defense system designed to guard against an Iranian missile launch would have any impact on Russia’s mighty nuclear arsenal, but mentioned my plan to conduct a review before taking further steps on missile defense in Europe. As for our proposed “reset,” the goal wasn’t to eliminate all differences between our two countries, I explained; it was to get past Cold War habits and establish a realistic, mature relationship that could manage those differences and build on shared interests.
At times, the conversation got contentious, especially on Iran. Putin dismissed my concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and bristled at my suggestion that he suspend a pending sale of the powerful Russian-designed S-300 surface-to-air missile system to the regime. The system was purely defensive, he said, adding that reneging on a contract worth $800 million would risk both the bottom line and the reputation of Russian arms manufacturers. But for the most part he listened attentively, and by the end of what had turned into a two-hour marathon, he expressed openness, if not enthusiasm, for the reset effort.
“Of course, on all these issues, you will have to work with Dmitry,” Putin told me as he walked me to my waiting motorcade. “These are now his decisions.” Our eyes met as we shook hands, both of us knowing that the statement he’d just made was dubious, but for now, at least, it was the closest thing I was going to get to an endorsement.
The meeting with Putin wreaked havoc on the rest of the day’s schedule. We raced back to Moscow, where I was slated to deliver the commencement address to bright-eyed young Russians studying international business and finance. Beforehand, in a holding room off the stage, I had a brief pull-aside with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Seventy-eight years old and still robust, with the signature red birthmark splashed across his head, he struck me as a strangely tragic figure. Here was a man who’d once been one of the most powerful people on earth, whose instincts for reform and efforts at denuclearization—no matter how tentative—had led to an epic global transformation and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. He now found himself largely disdained within his own country, both by those who felt he’d surrendered to the West and by those who considered him a Communist throwback whose time was long past. Gorbachev told me he was enthusiastic about a reset and my proposals for a nuclear-free world, but after fifteen minutes I had to cut the conversation short to deliver my speech. Although he said he understood, I could tell he was disappointed—a reminder for both of us of the fleeting, fickle nature of public life.
Then it was off to an abbreviated Kremlin lunch with Medvedev and a ballroom of important personages, followed by a roundtable discussion with U.S. and Russian business leaders, where boilerplate appeals for greater economic cooperation were exchanged. By the time I arrived at the summit of U.S. and Russian civil society leaders that McFaul had organized, I could feel jet lag kicking in. I was content to take a seat, catch my breath, and listen to the remarks of those speaking before me.
It was my kind of crowd: democracy activists, heads of nonprofits, and community organizers working at a grassroots level on issues like housing, public health, and political access. They mostly toiled in obscurity, jostled for money to keep their operations afloat, and rarely had a chance to travel outside their home cities, much less do so at the invitation of a U.S. president. One of the Americans was even someone I’d worked with during my organizing days back in Chicago.
Maybe it was the juxtaposition of my past and my present that kept me thinking about my conversation with Putin. When Axe asked for my impressions of the Russian leader, I’d said that I found him strangely familiar, “like a ward boss, except with nukes and a U.N. Security Council veto.” This prompted a laugh, but I hadn’t meant it as a joke. Putin did, in fact, remind me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall—tough, street smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences, and who viewed patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as legitimate tools of the trade. For them, as for Putin, life was a zero-sum game; you might do business with those outside your tribe, but in the end, you couldn’t trust them. You loo
ked out for yourself first and then for your own. In such a world, a lack of scruples, a contempt for any high-minded aspirations beyond accumulating power, were not flaws. They were an advantage.
In America, it had taken generations of protest, progressive lawmaking, muckraking journalism, and dogged advocacy to check, if not fully eliminate, such raw exercises of power. That reform tradition was in large part what had inspired me to enter politics. And yet, in order to reduce the risk of nuclear catastrophe or another Middle East war, I’d just spent the morning courting an autocrat who no doubt kept dossiers on every Russian activist in the room and could have any one of them harassed, jailed, or worse whenever he pleased. If Putin did go after one of these activists, how far would I go in taking him to task—especially knowing that it probably wouldn’t change his behavior? Would I risk the completion of START negotiations? Russian cooperation on Iran? And how did one measure such trade-offs anyway? I could tell myself that compromises existed everywhere, that in order to get things done back home, I’d cut deals with politicians whose attitudes weren’t so different from Putin’s and whose ethical standards didn’t always bear scrutiny. But this felt different. The stakes were higher—on both sides of the ledger.
Standing up finally to speak, I praised the people in the room for their courage and dedication and urged them to focus not just on democracy and civil rights but also on concrete strategies to provide jobs, education, healthcare, and decent housing. Addressing the Russians in the audience, I said that America couldn’t and shouldn’t fight their battles for them, that Russia’s future was for them to determine; but I added that I would be rooting for them, firm in my conviction that all people aspire to the principles of human rights, the rule of law, and self-governance.
The room burst into applause. McFaul beamed. I felt glad about being able to lift, however briefly, the spirits of good people doing hard and sometimes dangerous work. I believed that, even in Russia, it would pay off in the long run. Still, I couldn’t shake the fear that Putin’s way of doing business had more force and momentum than I cared to admit, that in the world as it was, many of these hopeful activists might soon be marginalized or crushed by their own government—and there’d be very little I could do to protect them.
CHAPTER 20
THE NEXT TIME I MET with Medvedev in person was in late September, when heads of state and government from around the world converged on Manhattan for the annual opening session of the U.N. General Assembly. “UNGA Week,” we called it, and for me and my foreign policy team it represented a seventy-two-hour, sleep-depriving obstacle course. With roads blocked and security tightened, New York traffic was more hellish than usual, even for the presidential motorcade. Practically every foreign leader wanted a meeting, or at least a photo for the folks back home. There were consultations with the U.N. secretary-general, meetings for me to chair, luncheons to attend, receptions to be hosted, causes to be championed, deals to be brokered, and multiple speeches to be written—including a major address before the General Assembly, a sort of global State of the Union that, in the eight years we worked together, Ben and I somehow never managed to finish writing until fifteen minutes before I was due to speak.
Despite the crazy schedule involved, the sight of the U.N. headquarters—its main building a soaring white monolith overlooking the East River—always put me in a hopeful, expectant mood. I attributed this to my mother. I remember as a boy, maybe nine or ten, asking her about the U.N., and having her explain how, after World War II, global leaders decided that they needed a place where people from a diversity of countries could meet to resolve their differences peacefully.
“Humans aren’t that different from animals, Bar,” she told me. “We fear what we don’t know. When we’re afraid of people and feel threatened, it’s easier to fight wars and do other stupid things. The United Nations is a way for countries to meet and learn about each other and not be so afraid.”
As always, my mother possessed a reassuring certainty that despite humanity’s primal impulses, reason, logic, and progress would eventually prevail. After our conversation, I imagined the goings-on at the U.N. to be like an episode of Star Trek, with Americans, Russians, Scots, Africans, and Vulcans exploring the stars together. Or the “It’s a Small World” display at Disneyland, where moon-faced children with different skin tones and colorful costumes would all sing a cheerful tune. Later, for a homework assignment, I read the U.N.’s 1945 founding charter and was struck by how its mission matched my mother’s optimism: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,” “establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained,” and “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”
Needless to say, the U.N. hadn’t always lived up to these lofty intentions. Like its ill-fated predecessor, the League of Nations, the organization was only as strong as its most powerful members allowed it to be. Any significant action required consensus among the five permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, the Soviet Union (later Russia), the United Kingdom, France, and China—each possessing an absolute veto. In the middle of the Cold War, the chances of reaching any consensus had been slim, which is why the U.N. had stood idle as Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary or U.S. planes dropped napalm on the Vietnamese countryside.
Even after the Cold War, divisions within the Security Council continued to hamstring the U.N.’s ability to tackle problems. Its member states lacked either the means or the collective will to reconstruct failing states like Somalia, or prevent ethnic slaughter in places like Sri Lanka. Its peacekeeping missions, dependent on voluntary troop contributions from member states, were consistently understaffed and ill-equipped. At times, the General Assembly devolved into a forum for posturing, hypocrisy, and one-sided condemnations of Israel; more than one U.N. agency became embroiled in corruption scandals, while vicious autocracies like Khamenei’s Iran and Assad’s Syria would maneuver to get seats on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Within the Republican Party, the U.N. became a symbol of nefarious one-world globalism. Progressives bemoaned its impotence in the face of injustice.
And yet I remained convinced that, for all its shortcomings, the U.N. served a vital function. U.N. reports and findings could sometimes shame countries into better behavior and strengthen international norms. Because of the U.N.’s work in mediation and peacekeeping, cease-fires had been brokered, conflicts had been averted, and lives had been saved. The U.N. played a role in more than eighty former colonies becoming sovereign nations. Its agencies helped lift tens of millions of people out of poverty, eradicated smallpox, and very nearly wiped out polio and Guinea worm. Whenever I walked through the U.N. complex—my Secret Service detail brushing back the crowds of diplomats and staffers who typically milled along the wide, carpeted corridors for a handshake or a wave, their faces reflecting every shape and hue of the human family—I was reminded that inside were scores of men and women who pushed against boulders every day, trying to convince governments to fund vaccination programs and schools for poor children, rallying the world to stop a minority group from being slaughtered or young women from being trafficked. Men and women who anchored their lives to the same idea that had anchored my mother, an idea captured in a verse woven into a tapestry that hung in the great-domed General Assembly hall:
Human beings are members of a whole
In creation of one essence and soul.
Ben informed me that those lines were written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa’adi, one of the most beloved figures in Iranian culture. We found this ironic, given how much of my time at UNGA was devoted to trying to curb Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Apparently, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad didn’t share the poet’s gentle sensibilities.
Since rejecting my offer of bilateral talks, Iran had shown n
o signs of scaling back its nuclear program. Its negotiators continued to stall and bluster in sessions with P5+1 members, insisting that Iran’s centrifuges and enriched uranium stockpiles had entirely civilian purposes. These claims of innocence were spurious, but they provided Russia and China with enough of an excuse to keep blocking the Security Council from considering tougher sanctions against the regime.
We continued to press our case, and a pair of new developments helped bring about a shift in Russian attitudes. First, our arms control team, ably headed by nonproliferation expert Gary Samore, had worked with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on a creative new proposal meant to test Iran’s true intentions. Under the proposal, Iran would ship its existing stockpile of LEU to Russia, which would process it into HEU; Russia would then transport the HEU to France, where it would be converted into a form of fuel that met Iran’s legitimate civilian needs but had no possible military application. The proposal was a stopgap measure: It left Iran’s nuclear architecture in place and wouldn’t prevent Iran from enriching more LEU in the future. But depleting its current stockpiles would delay “breakout capacity” by up to a year, thus buying us time to negotiate a more permanent solution. Just as important, the proposal made Russia a key implementation partner and showed Moscow our willingness to exhaust all reasonable approaches when it came to Iran. During the course of UNGA, Russia signed off on the idea; we even referred to it as “the Russia proposal.” Which meant that when the Iranians ultimately rejected the proposal at a P5+1 meeting held later that year in Geneva, they weren’t just thumbing their noses at the Americans. They were snubbing Russia, one of their few remaining defenders.