Culture | Russia and America

Testy relations

Why Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin will never get along

The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century. By Angela Stent. Princeton University Press; 384 pages; $35 and £24.95 . Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE pictures said it all: Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin meeting at a G20 summit in Mexico in mid-2012, and again last year at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland. The American and Russian presidents seemed to vie to see who could look the most bored and fed up. It is perhaps as well that Mr Obama cancelled his next meeting with Mr Putin and will not attend the winter Olympics in Sochi next week. In her new book Angela Stent, of Georgetown University, quotes Mr Putin as saying, “I don’t agree with his arguments and he doesn’t agree with mine.”

In truth, the American-Russian relationship has always been testy, as Ms Stent observes in her magisterial survey of the subject since December 1991, when the Soviet Union was abolished. She notes that there have been at least four “resets”. None seems to have worked. For the latest, in 2009, the American secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, even gave the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, a button mistakenly labelled with the Russian word for “overload” instead of “reset”.

Both George Bush senior and Bill Clinton were careful not to appear too triumphalist at the end of the cold war. They found the rambunctious Boris Yeltsin trickier to deal with than the smooth Mikhail Gorbachev, but they supported Yeltsin through the turmoil of the 1990s. Initially at least, Mr Clinton and his successor, George Bush junior, also welcomed Mr Putin. Mr Bush said in early 2001 that he had looked the man in the eye and “got a sense of his soul”.

Yet friction was inevitable. The rivalry of the world’s two biggest nuclear powers was likely to endure. NATO was often seen as a threat, especially when countries from the old Warsaw Pact started to join it. A cold-war mentality lingered in both Moscow and Washington, DC, long after 1991. Most important, Mr Putin’s KGB career and his stated belief that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” were always bound to cause disputes.

Ms Stent tells the story clearly and dispassionately. After NATO expansion and the long squabble over missile defence came the Iraq war, followed by “colour” revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Next came Mr Putin’s aggressive Munich speech in 2007, then a disastrous NATO summit in Bucharest and Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia. Mr Obama’s reset vested new hopes in the interim (but powerless) presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, yet differences persisted over Iran, Libya and, most recently, Syria and the Edward Snowden affair. Now Ukraine is once again the biggest flashpoint.

Could things have been done better? The differences between the two sides are hard to bridge. But one point that emerges strongly from this book is that the Russians did not crave agreement so much as respect. Had successive American presidents reassured Russia’s leaders that they still counted in the world, the relationship would surely have been easier. The problem is that, with a sinking economy, a demographic decline and almost no exports beyond oil and gas, Russia genuinely matters less than it once did. And that may be the hardest truth for Mr Putin to learn.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Testy relations"

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