medium | We were
scheduled to have sixty minutes with Putin. After pleasantries were
exchanged, Obama opened the conversation by expressing his optimism for
U.S.-Russia relations. Putin interrupted him early to express a
different view.
For
the next hour, Putin walked through the complete history of
U.S.-Russian relations during his time as president. He punctuated his
narrative with several instances of disrespect from the Bush
administration. He liked President George W. Bush as a person, he told
Obama, but loathed his administration. As Putin explained, he had
reached out to Bush after September 11, believing that the United States
and Russia should unite to fight terrorists as a common enemy. He had
helped persuade leaders in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to allow the U.S.
to open air bases in their countries to help fight the war in
Afghanistan. But in return, so he claimed, the Bush administration had
snubbed him.
Putin even suggested that Russia and the United States
could have cooperated on Iraq had the Bush administration treated Russia
as an equal partner. But it did not, and that’s why U.S.-Russia
relations deteriorated so dramatically while Bush was president. The
Bush team had supported color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine — a
blatant threat to Russia’s national interests. In Putin’s view, Russia
had done nothing wrong; America was to be blamed for the poor relations
between the two countries.
Putin
knew how to tell a dramatic story. For each vignette of disrespect or
confrontation, he told the president the date, the place, and who was at
the meeting. During one story, he pointed to a chair he recalled
Condoleezza Rice sitting in at the time, right next to Sergei Ivanov,
then Putin’s defense minister. He must have rehearsed all these details
beforehand. For one story about counterterrorism cooperation, Putin told
Obama how the Russians had benefited from some information shared with
them by American officials. Dramatically, he waved away the waiters
serving us tea, leaned in, and told Obama that they had used this
information to “liquidate” the terrorists.
As
I remember it, Putin spoke uninterrupted for nearly the entire time
scheduled for the meeting, documenting the injustices of the Bush
administration. This was a guy with a chip on his shoulder. Obama
listened patiently, maybe too patiently. I was amazed. There was no way I
could have sat for a full hour without saying something. I was also
nervous. The meeting was scheduled for sixty minutes, and by minute
fifty-five the U.S. president had not said a thing. It was my assignment
to read out this meeting to our press corps later that day. I couldn’t
tell them that Obama had merely listened the entire time!
My worries
were misplaced. In the end the meeting went well beyond three hours, and
Obama had plenty to say. His main message was again about Reset. He
asked Putin to have an open mind about resuming engagement with the
United States on issues of common interest. He explained to Putin that
he was different, representing a break with many of the policies of the
Bush administration. Obama avoided flowery language about friendships
and strategic partnerships. Instead, he pledged to always be straight
with Putin and to respect Russia.
The
two most contentious subjects that morning were missile defense and
Iran. Putin explained to Obama why planned American missile deployments
in Europe threatened “strategic stability” — otherwise known as mutual
assured destruction (MAD) — between our two countries. Putin seemed
annoyed — irrationally annoyed — with the Bush administration’s plan for
missile-defense deployments so close to Russia’s borders. Obama pledged
to review America’s missile-defense plans and get back to Putin on his
decisions. Putin expressed less concern about the Iranian threat than
Medvedev had. He talked more generally about the strategic importance of
Russia’s bilateral relationship with Iran as its most significant
partner in the Middle East.
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