WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin will use their meeting today, the first since Putin returned to Russia’s top job, to claim leverage in a mutually dependent but volatile relationship.
Obama needs Russia to help, or at least not hurt, U.S. foreign policy aims in the Mideast and Afghanistan. Putin needs the United States as a foil for his argument that Russia doesn’t get its due as a great power.
Obama and Putin are set to meet on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic leaders gathering in Mexico that will otherwise focus largely on the European economic crisis. The gathering also is a natural forum for discussions of the crisis in Syria, as well as diplomatic efforts to head off a confrontation with Iran.
Russia is a linchpin in several U.S. foreign policy goals. Chief among them are the international effort to deny Iran a nuclear weapon and a shutdown of the Afghanistan war. Attacks on anti-government protesters in Syria and the threat of civil war in the Mideast nation pose the most immediate crisis. In the longer term, Obama wants Russia’s continued cooperation in nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation.
Things got off to a rocky start this spring, when Obama withheld a customary congratulatory phone call to Putin until days after his election. Putin appeared to snub Obama by skipping the smaller and weightier Group of Eight meeting that Obama hosted last month at Camp David.
“Putin is in a petulant sort of mood,” said Russia scholar Mark N. Katz of George Mason University. “He’s got all these grievances about American foreign policy, and he’s looking for us to satisfy him, and I don’t think we’re going to do that. No amount of bonhomie or talking nicely is going to fix that.”
Obama seems to be trying to avoid a distracting public spat with Russia during this election year. Obama told outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in May that he would have more flexibility to answer Russian complaints about a U.S.-built missile defense shield in Europe after the November election
For all Obama’s talk of resetting the relationship with Russia, it remains a wary standoff.
Putin’s campaign included some of the strongest anti-American rhetoric from Moscow in a decade and he openly accused Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of inciting protests against him. Putin’s return to the presidency makes it more likely that any help Russia provides in Syria, Iran or other matters will come at a cost.
“The reset with Russia was based on the belief that we could cooperate with them on areas of common interest, understanding that we saw some differences,” White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Friday.
At the summit
At the Group of 20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, starting today, President Barack Obama is expected to press European leaders to do more to stabilize their banks, stimulate job growth and prevent debt-stricken Greece from dropping out of the euro zone. Obama is also scheduled to hold one-on-one talks with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Chinese President Hu Jintao and recently reinstated Russian President Vladimir Putin.
