Obama and Putin

Abstract

In the spring of 2012, soon after Vladimir Putin returned to the Russian presidency following four quiet years as prime minister, Barack Obama sat down with a few of his top advisers in the White House Situation Room to discuss the way forward. Obama had invested a lot in the “reset” with Russia, and believed it had achieved some meaningful wins. But he had no illusions about the Russian leader—having first met Putin during a tense 2009 meeting in Moscow, when Obama was subjected to one of his customary harangues about the West’s betrayals—and understood that U.S.-Russian relations were likely to get worse. “The main challenge is to put him in a box to stop making mischief,” Obama asserted. Yet he wondered what leverage the United States had to influence Putin, and struggled with how to send this message in a way the Russian leader would understand. “We have to look him in the eye,” the president said—knowingly referring to George W. Bush’s infamous statement in 2001 that he had looked into Putin’s eye and got a sense of his soul—“to tell him, ‘don’t think you can screw around without consequence.’”1