Obama chose Stanford University professor Michael McFaul as his chief Russia adviser, and the new team immediately came up with a new, pragmatic philosophy which they called ‘dual-track engagement’. It meant that the administration would not link country-to-country relations with Russian behaviour on human rights or democracy. It would continue to challenge the Kremlin robustly on its human rights record and over its occupation of Georgia, but it would not make diplomatic or military cooperation in other areas (on Iran, for example, or missile defence) hostage to that. The two would operate on separate tracks. ‘The idea’s very simple,’ McFaul says. ‘We’re going to engage with the Russian government on issues that are of mutual interest and we’re going to engage directly with Russian civil society, including Russian political opposition figures, on things that we consider are important as well.’1
The first public hint of a new approach came in a speech by Vice-President Joe Biden at the Munich Security Conference in February 2009. This was the same venue where two years earlier Putin had virtually turned his back on the United States. ‘The last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and members of our alliance,’ Biden said. Now, the US wanted to ‘press the reset button’. The phrase quickly became shorthand for Obama’s new approach to Russia. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn it into a television image a month later by presenting her opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, with a large red button marked ‘reset’. The word was unfortunately rendered into Russian as ‘overload’ or ‘overcharged’ – which at least ensured some smiles as the policy was formally inaugurated.
Behind the scenes, more important resetting was getting under way. A week after Biden’s speech, Michael McFaul went to Moscow to hand-deliver a personal letter from Obama to Medvedev. The letter was intended to be a kind of bait, laid outside the cave to tempt the growling bear to come out. ‘We are taking a careful look at the missile defence programme,’ it said, hinting that it should become an issue for cooperation, not confrontation. The letter laid out in big, broad terms a vision of US–Russian relations which recognised that, in fact, America’s interests were by and large also Russia’s interests, and they should be looking for ‘win-win’ situations rather than the ‘zero-sum’ attitude that had dogged the past.
The bear sniffed the package and seemed to like it. Medvedev had his first face-to-face meeting with Obama in London on 1 April, on the margins of a G20 summit convened to tackle the global financial crisis. They got through the preliminaries – how nice that we’re both young, both lawyers, both new to the job – and then Obama decided to try out his new ‘win-win’ approach on a troublesome example that had recently arisen. A few months earlier, President Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan had suddenly announced he wanted the Americans to leave the Manas air base, a vital transit centre for the Afghan war, having been leant on – and bribed – by the Russians. Bakiyev’s decision came on the same day as Russia offered Kyrgyzstan a $2 billion loan. Sitting together in the US ambassador’s Regent’s Park residence, Obama explained to Medvedev, a trifle condescendingly, why it was in Russia’s interest to let the Americans stay at Manas: ‘I need you to understand why we have this base here. It supports our activities in Afghanistan. It’s where our troops fly in and out of Afghanistan. They take showers. They have hot meals and they get ready to go in to fight in Afghanistan, to deal with enemies of ours that are also enemies of yours. And if we weren’t fighting these people, you would have to be fighting these people. So tell me, President Medvedev, why is that not in your national interest, that we would have this base of operations that helps what we’re doing in Afghanistan?’ Medvedev did not respond immediately. But three months later the Americans signed a deal that allowed them to stay at Manas.
Michael McFaul recalls that Medvedev also made a surprising gesture at the London meeting, offering to expand the so-called ‘Northern Distribution Network’ for Afghanistan, to allow the US to transport lethal cargoes through Russian air space for the first time.
This became a key accord to be announced during Obama’s first official visit to Moscow in July 2009, together with a framework agreement for talks to begin on a new disarmament treaty to replace the old START nuclear arms reduction treaty, which was due to expire in December. The treaty, which would become known as New Start, was to be the centrepiece of the reset. But even agreeing wording for the framework agreement required some diplomatic acrobatics, to accommodate the two sides’ diametrically opposed views on whether the treaty should also impose limits on missile defences.
President Obama had promised to ‘review’ George W. Bush’s missile defence plans, and in September he would delight the Russians by cancelling the plans for a radar in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland. But he still intended to build something in their place, and the Americans were determined not to include in the New Start treaty anything that would impede their development of a missile shield. The Russians were equally determined to link the two. They insisted that building defences against offensive nuclear missiles destabilised the general strategic balance by making the side without the shield vulnerable to a first strike.
‘We were categorical that we were not going to have this conversation together,’ says McFaul. ‘We could have a separate conversation about missile defence, but here we were going to talk about reducing offensive strategic weapons. That’s what the negotiations had to be about. The Russians wanted to do it all together. We said no.’
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, recalls: ‘It was clear from the beginning – for us at least and I think for our American friends too – that the subject of missile defence would become a stumbling block.’2
They agreed a compromise, but it was a messy fudge. Their memorandum of understanding included a ‘provision on the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms’. The two presidents interpreted this in quite different ways. At their joint press conference, Medvedev said: ‘We have agreed that offensive and defensive systems of both countries should be considered as a complex.’ Obama said: ‘It is entirely legitimate for our discussions to talk not only about offensive weapons systems but also defensive weapon systems.’ He did not say they should be ‘considered as a complex’, indeed he explicitly pointed out that America’s planned missile shield was aimed exclusively at dealing with a strike from Iran or North Korea and had nothing to do with Russia’s strategic forces, and added: ‘And so, in that sense, we have not thought that it is appropriate to link discussions of a missile defence system designed to deal with an entirely different threat unrelated to the kinds of robust capabilities that Russia possesses.’ So was there linkage or not? The fudge allowed negotiations to start ... but on a fatally flawed basis.
The July summit in Moscow was designed to demonstrate the new ‘dual track’ approach, taking in not just summit talks with the Russian leadership but also ‘civil society’ – a speech at an independent college, the New Economic School, and a meeting with opposition figures, ‘the biggest critics we could find of the Russian government’, according to McFaul.
The first day was devoted to talks with President Medvedev, but Obama was also keen to meet the man who had shaped Russia for the past ten years. The second morning began with breakfast on the veranda at Putin’s dacha – a sumptuous meal that included three types of caviar (‘at least one of which must have been illegal’, according to one of the Americans). The meeting was scheduled to last one hour, but went on for two and a half. Obama started by asking Putin, ‘How did we get into this mess – this low point that US–Russian relations have been in for the past years?’ Luckily Obama is a good listener. Putin’s answer took up the whole of the first hour.
He delivered a history of the two countries’ relations, going back to his hobby horse, the West’s bombing of Serbia, and enumerating every slight he had felt in the years that followed: ABM, Iraq, WTO, NATO expansion, missile defence, Kosovo ... Putin’s tale of unrequited love. McFau
l felt that while one could argue over the substance ‘the prime minister was actually saying things that I think President Obama also agreed with – that if we just focus on our interests and talk very pragmatically about where we agree and disagree, we can cooperate’. For Obama, the history lesson was even rather helpful because it enabled him to emphasise to Putin: well, I’m different, I’m new, and I don’t want the past to haunt the future. I actually want to reset the relationship with Russia.
The summit achieved its goals – but in a surprisingly unspectacular way. There was none of the euphoria (or tension) that used to accompany East–West summitry during the Cold War. Obamamania just did not infiltrate Russia. The student audience for his major public speech looked rather bored.
Gradually, though, the reset began to bear fruit – including a marked shift in Russia’s stance towards Iran. Since joining the six-nation Iran group in 2005, Russia had consistently argued that while it, too, opposed the proliferation of nuclear weapons, it did not believe that Iran was trying to build them or could build them in the near future. It defended its right to help Iran develop a civil nuclear programme, and was reluctant to support sanctions. But at their first meeting in London in April 2009, Obama was astonished when Medvedev admitted that the Americans had ‘probably been more right’ than the Russians when it came to assessing Iran’s ballistic missile threat.
In September the Americans had a unique chance to prove they were right about Iran’s nuclear ambitions too. The presidents were due to meet at the United Nations in New York. Just before the meeting, Obama’s national security adviser, General James Jones, called his Russian opposite number, Sergei Prikhodko, and told him they needed to meet urgently. In a room at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, Jones showed Prikhodko spy photographs of a secret uranium enrichment plant that the Iranians were building near the holy city of Qom. Prikhodko admitted in an interview: ‘This was not the nicest surprise we could have got.’3 Jones says the Russian was shocked and kept shaking his head, saying, ‘This is bad, really bad ...’4
Foreign minister Lavrov couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He took Michael McFaul aside and said: ‘Why didn’t you tell us before, Mike?’
McFaul replied: ‘Well ... we thought you knew. I mean, these are your guys, not ours!’
Obama and Medvedev then met to discuss the news, and Medvedev’s reaction at a press conference generated positive headlines in Western countries, as for the first time he stated that ‘sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases the use of sanctions is inevitable’. It was only two days later, when news of the Qom facility was revealed to the world at a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, that the reason for Medvedev’s change of attitude could be guessed at. For the first time, Russia and the West now started to work more closely on Iran. The following June, Moscow would back new UN sanctions, and in September even cancel the sale of an S-300 air defence system to Iran, losing a billion-dollar contract.
Negotiations on New Start, meanwhile, began on a permanent basis in Geneva. Two sticking points quickly became evident. One was the exchange of what was known as ‘telemetric information’ – sharing data about missile tests and launches. The second was ‘unique identifiers’ – essentially, bar-coding every missile so they could all be accounted for and tracked.
Both Obama and Medvedev became deeply involved in the process, hammering out all the most important details in telephone calls and face-to-face meetings. Medvedev joked later that ‘telemetry’ had become his favourite English word.
One of their meetings took place in December in Copenhagen, where both leaders were attending climate-change talks. With every venue in the city apparently taken up with global warming discussions, Obama and Medvedev found themselves in a makeshift meeting-room in a curtained-off area of a women’s dress shop, surrounded by naked mannequins. It proved to be a conducive atmosphere. Obama explained the concept of unique identifiers: ‘Look, we just put these barcodes on the missiles, so we can count them. That’s what the treaty’s all about, after all.’
Russia’s negotiators had been resisting this, insisting that ‘if we sign a treaty, we fulfil it’ and that it should not be assumed they would cheat. But Medvedev saw the sense of it. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘so long as it’s done in a fair way. That you do it and we do it, and we do it in a symmetrical way.’
The breakthrough was followed by one on telemetry, and it seemed agreement was close. In January General Jones called Obama from Moscow airport after talks that seemed to clinch the deal.
But there was a hitch. The Americans had been assuming that the Russians agreed that the strategic arms treaty would stand alone, with no reference to missile defence. But now Obama’s replacement for the Bush missile shield was beginning to take shape, and the Russians did not like it. Instead of a radar in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland, Obama was developing what he called a ‘Phased Adaptive Approach’, which in many ways might pose even more of a potential threat to Russia. It would involve highly mobile sea-based missiles and radars, and short-range missiles based in Eastern Europe. On 4 February 2010 it was announced that those missiles would be located in Romania. It seemed to cause a hardening of attitudes in Moscow, where they realised they were about to agree a treaty that would considerably reduce Russia’s strategic arsenal, while the Americans were building a fence right on their border.
On 24 February the hot line between the Kremlin and the White House glowed red for almost an hour and a half. Medvedev was again trying to couple the arms cuts with legally binding missile defence restrictions – within the new treaty. Obama was angry. ‘We’d agreed, Dmitry! If the conditions for the treaty are this, then we’re not going to have a treaty.’ Obama was also angry with his staff, who had led him to believe the deal was all but done. In fact, his negotiators had done him a bad service by letting the Russians think they could insert a condition in the treaty that would freeze missile defence systems as they currently stood.
It took three more weeks of intense negotiation in Geneva and Moscow, and another Medvedev–Obama phone call on 13 March, to settle the deal. The New Start treaty was finally signed in Prague on 8 April. It dealt only with arms reductions, as the Americans wished, while both sides appended unilateral statements regarding missile defence. The Americans stated that US missile defence systems were not intended to affect the strategic balance with Russia. But the Russian statement invoked the right to withdraw from the treaty should it deem a future American build-up of missile defence capabilities to be a threat to its own strategic nuclear potential. The Russians thereby achieved some kind of linkage, as they had wanted: if at any point they decide that the US missile shield has become too strong, they can leave the treaty and build up their own nuclear forces.
iMedvedev
So far, internationally, President Medvedev had acted in much the same way as one would have expected Vladimir Putin to have acted. It did not go unnoticed that as prime minister, Putin continued to express his opinions on foreign affairs and even to make trips to other countries. It was he, for example, who publicly stated that missile defence was in fact an obstacle to the search for a strategic arms agreement – just weeks before Medvedev infuriated Obama by repeating the same thought.
Medvedev’s views on defending Russia’s interests, and being treated as an equal partner, were identical to his mentor’s. Even the rapprochement with the West over Iran did not signify a strategic shift: for a variety of reasons – commercial, political and strategic – Moscow was never going to risk making an enemy of Tehran.
Medvedev, as we shall see in the next chapter, was slowly changing the agenda at home but struggling to make an impact. The same was true of his early foreign overtures. His keynote speeches in Berlin and Evian had flopped. But now that the ice was broken with President Obama, he spotted a way, perhaps, to boost his image at home and abroad. Since ‘modernisation’ was his watchword in domestic politics, it made sense for him to be seen hobnobbing with a modern American preside
nt. It wasn’t enough just to own an iPad and record video-blogs for his website. He needed to get out West and visit Silicon Valley. He was never going to compete with Putin’s Action Man holiday stunts, but he could try to look cool in the company of Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or would he just look puny? That was the problem.
A couple of months after the Prague treaty was signed, Medvedev set off on his first state visit to the United States. He did everything a modernising president should do. He opened a Twitter account, visited Cisco and Apple and Stanford University, met Russian émigrés working in Silicon Valley, then flew to Washington for talks with congressmen and an impromptu shirt-sleeves lunch with Obama at Ray’s Hell Burger joint. They discussed whether jalapenos were better than pickles, but what Barack did not tell Dmitry over lunch was that the FBI had just uncovered a nest of Russian spies. That only emerged after Medvedev was back in Moscow, and a grand spy swap was executed at Vienna airport, in true Cold War style, on 9 July. Ten Russian ‘sleeper’ agents, including the glamorous and instantly celebrated Anna Chapman, were exchanged for four Americans who had been jailed in Russia, accused of espionage.
The incident did more than remind everyone that espionage is still a thriving business. It also involuntarily brought to mind the spymaster who was President Medvedev’s patron and now his prime minister. Putin welcomed the spies home as heroes – notwithstanding the fact that they had, in fact, proved to be almost useless during their many years as ‘sleepers’, with fake identities and jobs in the United States. They had failed to penetrate any worthwhile institution and allowed themselves to be caught doing the most basic of espionage tricks. But Putin’s loyalty to his profession is unequivocal, and he fell comfortably into his role as godfather of Russia’s spies. A week or so after the agents’ return, Putin organised a morale-boosting meeting with them, where they sang patriotic Soviet songs and he promised them ‘an interesting, bright future’ working in ‘worthy places’. He also promised retribution for the traitor who exposed them to the Americans: ‘This was the result of treason, and traitors always end badly. They finish up as drunks, addicts, on the street.’
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