[Ostensibly complying with Russia ’s
two-term constitutional limit, Mr. Putin had stepped down as president and
installed his aide, Dmitri A. Medvedev, in his place, while taking over as
prime minister himself. So Mr. Obama decided to treat Mr. Medvedev as if he
really were the leader.]
By Peter Baker
Barack Obama tried working around
him by building up his protégé in the Kremlin, an approach that worked for a
time but steadily deteriorated to the point that relations between Russia
and the United States
are now at their worst point since the end of the Cold War.
For 15 years, Vladimir V. Putin
has confounded American presidents as they tried to figure him out, only to
misjudge him time and again. He has defied their assumptions and rebuffed their
efforts at friendship. He has argued with them, lectured them, misled them, accused
them, kept them waiting, kept them guessing, betrayed them and felt betrayed by
them.
Each of the three presidents
tried in his own way to forge a historic if elusive new relationship with
Russia, only to find their efforts torpedoed by the wiry martial arts master
and former K.G.B. colonel. They imagined him to be something he was not or
assumed they could manage a man who refuses to be managed. They saw him through
their own lens, believing he viewed Russia ’s
interests as they thought he should. And they underestimated his deep sense of
grievance.
To the extent that there were any
illusions left in Washington , and
it is hard to imagine there were by this point, they were finally and
irrevocably shattered by Mr. Putin’s takeover of Crimea
and the exchange of sanctions that has followed. As Russian forces now mass on
the Ukrainian border, the debate has now shifted from how to work with Mr.
Putin to how to counter him.
“He’s declared himself,” said Tom
Donilon, President Obama’s former national security adviser. “That’s who you
have to deal with. Trying to wish it away is not a policy.”
Looking back now, aides to all
three presidents offer roughly similar takes: Their man was hardly naïve about
Mr. Putin and saw him for what he was, but felt there was little choice other
than to try to establish a better relationship. It may be that some of their
policies hurt the chances of that by fueling Mr. Putin’s discontent, whether it
was NATO expansion, the Iraq
war or the Libya
war, but in the end, they said, they were dealing with a Russian leader
fundamentally at odds with the West.
“I know there’s been some
criticism on, was the reset ill advised?” said Mr. Donilon, using the Obama
administration’s term for its policy. “No, the reset wasn’t ill advised. The
reset resulted in direct accomplishments that were in the interests of the United
States .”
Some specialists said Mr. Obama
and his two predecessors saw what they wanted to see. “The West has focused on
the notion that Putin is a pragmatic realist who will cooperate with us
whenever there are sufficient common interests,” said James M. Goldgeier, dean
of international studies at American University Moscow lost
control over significant territory and watched as the West expanded its
domain.”
Presidents tend to think of
autocrats like Mr. Putin as fellow statesmen, said Dennis Blair, Mr. Obama’s
first director of national intelligence. “They should think of dictators like
they think of domestic politicians of the other party,” he said, “opponents who
smile on occasion when it suits their purposes, and cooperate when it is to
their advantage, but who are at heart trying to push the U.S. out of power,
will kneecap the United States if they get the chance and will only go along if
the U.S. has more power than they.”
Eric S. Edelman, who was
undersecretary of defense under Mr. Bush, said American leaders overestimated
their ability to assuage Mr. Putin’s anger about the West. “There has been a
persistent tendency on the part of U.S.
presidents and Western leaders more broadly to see the sense of grievance as a
background condition that could be modulated by consideration of Russian
national interests,” he said. “In fact, those efforts have been invariably
taken as weakness.”
After 15 years, no one in Washington
still thinks of Mr. Putin as a partner. “He goes to bed at night thinking of
Peter the Great and he wakes up thinking of Stalin,” Representative Mike
Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said on
“Meet the Press” on NBC on Sunday. “We need to understand who he is and what he
wants. It may not fit with what we believe of the 21st century.”
Bush’s Disillusionment
Mr. Clinton was the first
president to encounter Mr. Putin, although they did not overlap for long. He
had spent much of his presidency building a strong relationship with President
Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Putin’s predecessor, and gave the benefit of the doubt to
the handpicked successor who became Russia ’s
prime minister in 1999 and president on New Year’s Eve.
“I came away from the meeting
believing Yeltsin had picked a successor who had the skills and capacity for
hard work necessary to manage Russia’s turbulent political and economic life
better than Yeltsin now could, given his health problems,” Mr. Clinton wrote in
his memoir. When Mr. Putin’s selection was ratified in a March 2000 election,
Mr. Clinton called to congratulate him and, as he later wrote, “hung up the
phone thinking he was tough enough to hold Russia
together.”
Mr. Clinton had his worries,
though, particularly as Mr. Putin waged a brutal war in the separatist republic
of Chechnya
But the prevailing attitude at
the time was that Mr. Putin was a modernizer who could consolidate the raw form
of democracy and capitalism that Mr. Yeltsin had introduced to Russia .
He moved early to overhaul the country’s tax, land and judicial codes. As
Strobe Talbott, Mr. Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, put it in his book on
that period, George F. Kennan, the noted Kremlinologist, thought that Mr. Putin
“was young enough, adroit enough and realistic enough to understand that Russia ’s
ongoing transition required that he not just co-opt the power structure, but to
transform it.”
Mr. Bush came to office skeptical
of Mr. Putin, privately calling him “one cold dude,” but bonded with him during
their first meeting in Slovenia
in June 2001, after which he made his now-famous comment about looking into the
Russian’s soul. Mr. Putin had made a connection with the religious Mr. Bush by
telling him a story about a cross that his mother had given him and how it was
the only thing that survived a fire at his country house.
Not everyone was convinced. Mr.
Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, privately told people at the time that when
he saw Mr. Putin, “I think K.G.B., K.G.B., K.G.B.” But Mr. Bush was determined
to erase the historical divide and courted Mr. Putin during the Russian
leader’s visits to Camp David and Mr. Bush’s Texas
ranch.
Mr. Putin liked to brag that he
was the first foreign leader to call Mr. Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 , and he permitted American
troops into Central Asia as a base of operations against
Afghanistan .
But Mr. Putin never felt Mr. Bush
delivered in return and the relationship strained over the Iraq War and the
Kremlin’s accelerating crackdown on dissent at home. By Mr. Bush’s second term,
the two were quarreling over Russian democracy, reaching a peak during a testy
meeting in Slovakia
in 2005.
“It was like junior high
debating,” Mr. Bush complained later to Britain ’s
Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to notes of the conversation. Mr. Putin
kept throwing Mr. Bush’s arguments back at him. “I sat there for an hour and 45
minutes and it went on and on,” Mr. Bush said. “At one point, the interpreter
made me so mad that I nearly reached over the table and slapped the hell out of
the guy. He had a mocking tone, making accusations about America .”
He was even more frustrated by
Mr. Putin a year later. “He’s not well-informed,” Bush told the visiting prime
minister of Denmark
in 2006. “It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong.”He told
another visiting leader a few weeks later that he was losing hope of bringing
Mr. Putin around. “I think Putin is not a democrat anymore,” he said. “He’s a
czar. I think we’ve lost him.”
‘A Stone-Cold Killer’
But Mr. Bush was reluctant to
give up, even if those around him no longer saw the opportunity he saw. His new
defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, came back from his first meeting with Mr.
Putin and told colleagues that unlike Mr. Bush, he had “looked into Putin’s
eyes and, just as I expected, had seen a stone-cold killer.”
In the spring of 2008, Mr. Bush
put Ukraine and
Georgia on the
road to NATO membership, which divided the alliance and infuriated Mr. Putin.
By August of that year, the two leaders were in Beijing
for the Summer Olympics when word arrived that Russian troops were marching
into Georgia .
Mr. Bush in his memoir recalled
confronting Mr. Putin, scolding him for being provoked by Mikheil Saakashvili,
then Georgia ’s
anti-Moscow president.
“I’ve been warning you
Saakashvili is hot-blooded,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Putin.
“I’m hot-blooded too,” Mr. Putin
said.
“No, Vladimir,” Mr. Bush
responded. “You’re coldblooded.”
Mr. Bush responded to the Georgia
war by sending humanitarian aid to Georgia ,
transporting its troops home from Iraq ,
sending an American warship to the region and shelving a civilian nuclear
agreement with Russia .
Worried that Crimea
might be next, Mr. Bush succeeded in stopping Russia
from swallowing up Georgia
altogether. But on the eve of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the global
financial meltdown, he did not impose the sort of sanctions that Mr. Obama is
now applying.
“We and the Europeans threw the
relationship into the toilet at the end of 2008,” Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s
national security adviser, recalled last week. “We wanted to send the message
that strategically this was not acceptable. Now in retrospect, we probably
should have done more like economic sanctions.”
If Mr. Bush did not take the
strongest punitive actions possible, his successor soon made the point moot.
Taking office just months later, Mr. Obama decided to end any isolation of Russia
because of Georgia
in favor of rebuilding relations. Unlike his predecessors, he would try to
forge a relationship not by befriending Mr. Putin but by bypassing him.
Ostensibly complying with Russia ’s
two-term constitutional limit, Mr. Putin had stepped down as president and
installed his aide, Dmitri A. Medvedev, in his place, while taking over as
prime minister himself. So Mr. Obama decided to treat Mr. Medvedev as if he
really were the leader.
A diplomatic cable obtained by
WikiLeaks later captured the strategy in summing up similar French priorities:
“Cultivating relations with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, in the hope that
he can become a leader independent of Vladimir Putin.”
Before his first trip to Moscow ,
Mr. Obama publicly dismissed Mr. Putin as having “one foot in the old ways of
doing business” and pumped up Mr. Medvedev as a new-generation leader. Mr.
Obama’s inaugural meeting with Mr. Putin a few days later featured a classic
tirade by the Russian about all the ways that the United
States had mistreated Moscow .
Among those skeptical of Mr.
Obama’s strategy were Mr. Gates, who stayed on as defense secretary, and
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the new secretary of state. Like Mr. Gates, Mrs.
Clinton was deeply suspicious of Mr. Putin. In private, she mockingly imitated
his man’s-man, legs-spread-wide posture during their meetings. But even if they
did not assign it much chance of success, she and Mr. Gates both agreed the
policy was worth trying and she gamely presented her Russian counterpart with a
“reset” button, remembered largely for its mistaken Russian translation.
Obama’s ‘Reset’ Gambit
For a time, Mr. Obama’s gamble on
Mr. Medvedev seemed to be working. They revived Mr. Bush’s civilian nuclear
agreement, signed a nuclear arms treaty, sealed an agreement allowing American
troops to fly through Russian airspace en route to Afghanistan
and collaborated on sanctions against Iran .
But Mr. Putin was not to be ignored and by 2012 returned to the presidency,
sidelining Mr. Medvedev and making clear that he would not let Mr. Obama roll
over him.
Mr. Putin ignored Mr. Obama’s
efforts to start new nuclear arms talks and gave asylum to Edward J. Snowden,
the national security leaker. Mr. Obama canceled a trip to Moscow ,
making clear that he had no personal connection with Mr. Putin. The Russian
leader has a “kind of slouch” that made him look “like that bored schoolboy in
the back of the classroom,” Mr. Obama noted.
In the end, Mr. Obama did not see
how the pro-Western revolution in Ukraine that toppled a Moscow ally last month
would look through Mr. Putin’s eyes, said several Russia specialists. “With no
meaningful rapport or trust between Obama and Putin, it’s nearly impossible to
use high-level phone calls for actual problem solving,” said Andrew Weiss, a
former Russia
adviser to Mr. Clinton and now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. “Instead, it looks like we’re mostly posturing and talking
past each other.”
As Mr. Obama has tried to figure
out what to do to end the crisis over Ukraine ,
he has reached out to other leaders who still have a relationship with Mr. Putin,
including Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She privately told Mr. Obama
that after speaking with Mr. Putin she thought he was “in another world.”
Secretary of State John Kerry later said publicly that Mr. Putin’s speech on Crimea
did not “jibe with reality.”
That has sparked a debate in washington :
has mr. Putin changed over the last 15 years and become unhinged in some way,
or does he simply see the world in starkly different terms than the west does,
terms that make it hard if not impossible to find common ground?
“He’s not delusional, but he’s
inhabiting a russia of the past — a version of the past that he has created,”
said fiona hill, the top intelligence officer on russia during mr. Bush’s
presidency and co-author of “mr. Putin: operative in the kremlin.” “his present
is defined by it and there is no coherent vision of the future. Where exactly
does he go from here beyond reasserting and regaining influence over
territories and people? Then what?”
That is the question this
president, and likely the next one, will be asking for some time to come.
