The New York Times did its level best to once again defend President Obama by pointing to previous administrations’ similar failures, this time in regard to the (surprisingly predictable) “riddle named Putin,” who by the author’s description is following the script of the past yet, somehow, remains impossible to anticipate.
The piece, written by Peter Baker, starts with a quick summary of both Clinton’s and Bush’s misreadings of Putin, stating Clinton found Putin “cold and worrisome” but one who had the makings of a “tough and able leader,” while Bush tried to “make him a friend and partner in the war on terror, but grew disillusioned over time.” Obama came into office promising a Russian “reset,” trying to build up Putin’s protégé in the Kremlin, which Baker argues seemed to work for a time, but then “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.
Conceding the point that many on the right continue to make about Putin—namely that he is a strategically savvy leader—Baker attempts to forgive Obama from ignoring the lessons that Obama’s opponents in each of his presidential elections had clearly learned: Russia is America’s greatest international threat.
Baker describes Obama’s “reset” with Medvedev as a “gamble” that might have worked had Putin not returned to office. After Putin gave asylum to Edward Snowden and ignored Obama’s overtures to start new nuclear talks, Obama soured on Putin's "bored schoolboy" act and canceled a meeting in Moscow, signaling a major rift in their relationship.
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.
Baker cites a former Russia adviser to Clinton who argues that the absence of a rapport between the two leaders made it impossible for Obama to anticipate Putin’s motives.
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.”
The New York Times piece ends by echoing the Obama administration’s central talking point: Putin is a leader living in the past who’s goals are retrograde and whose plans will likely/hopefully lead to dead ends. Citing a former Bush intelligence officer who argues that Putin is set on “reasserting and regaining influence over territories and people,” Baker finishes the piece by suggesting that Putin's endgame is ultimately inscrutable and that Obama will not be the last president to be confounded by questions of Putin’s end game.
