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WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton found him to be cold and worrisome, but predicted he would be a tough and able leader. George W. Bush wanted to make him a friend and partner in the war on terror, but grew disillusioned over time.
Barack Obama
tried working around him by building up his protégé in the Kremlin, an
approach that worked for a time but 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.
To
the extent that there were any illusions left in Washington, and it is
hard to imagine there were by this point, they were finally and
irrevocably shattered by Mr. Putin’s takeover of Crimea and the exchange
of sanctions that has followed. As Russian forces now mass on the
Ukrainian border, the debate has now shifted from how to work with Mr.
Putin to how to counter him.
“He’s
declared himself,” said Tom Donilon, President Obama’s former national
security adviser. “That’s who you have to deal with. Trying to wish it
away is not a policy.”
Looking
back now, aides to all three presidents offer roughly similar takes:
Their man was hardly naïve about Mr. Putin and saw him for what he was,
but felt there was little choice other than to try to establish a better
relationship. It may be that some of their policies hurt the chances of
that by fueling Mr. Putin’s discontent, whether it was NATO expansion,
the Iraq war or the Libya war, but in the end, they said, they were
dealing with a Russian leader fundamentally at odds with the West.
“I
know there’s been some criticism on, was the reset ill advised?” said
Mr. Donilon, using the Obama administration’s term for its policy. “No,
the reset wasn’t ill advised. The reset resulted in direct
accomplishments that were in the interests of the United States.”
Some
specialists said Mr. Obama and his two predecessors saw what they
wanted to see. “The West has focused on the notion that Putin is a
pragmatic realist who will cooperate with us whenever there are
sufficient common interests,” said James M. Goldgeier, dean of
international studies at American University. “We let that belief
overshadow his stated goal of revising a post-Cold War settlement in
which Moscow lost control over significant territory and watched as the
West expanded its domain.”
Presidents
tend to think of autocrats like Mr. Putin as fellow statesmen, said
Dennis Blair, Mr. Obama’s first director of national intelligence. “They
should think of dictators like they think of domestic politicians of
the other party,” he said, “opponents who smile on occasion when it
suits their purposes, and cooperate when it is to their advantage, but
who are at heart trying to push the U.S. out of power, will kneecap the
United States if they get the chance and will only go along if the U.S.
has more power than they.”
Eric
S. Edelman, who was undersecretary of defense under Mr. Bush, said
American leaders overestimated their ability to assuage Mr. Putin’s
anger about the West. “There has been a persistent tendency on the part
of U.S. presidents and Western leaders more broadly to see the sense of
grievance as a background condition that could be modulated by
consideration of Russian national interests,” he said. “In fact, those
efforts have been invariably taken as weakness.”
After
15 years, no one in Washington still thinks of Mr. Putin as a partner.
“He goes to bed at night thinking of Peter the Great and he wakes up
thinking of Stalin,” Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman
of the House intelligence committee, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC on
Sunday. “We need to understand who he is and what he wants. It may not
fit with what we believe of the 21st century.”
Bush’s Disillusionment
Mr.
Clinton was the first president to encounter Mr. Putin, although they
did not overlap for long. He had spent much of his presidency building a
strong relationship with President Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Putin’s
predecessor, and gave the benefit of the doubt to the handpicked
successor who became Russia’s prime minister in 1999 and president on
New Year’s Eve.
“I
came away from the meeting believing Yeltsin had picked a successor who
had the skills and capacity for hard work necessary to manage Russia’s
turbulent political and economic life better than Yeltsin now could,
given his health problems,” Mr. Clinton wrote in his memoir. When Mr.
Putin’s selection was ratified in a March 2000 election, Mr. Clinton
called to congratulate him and, as he later wrote, “hung up the phone
thinking he was tough enough to hold Russia together.”
Mr.
Clinton had his worries, though, particularly as Mr. Putin waged a
brutal war in the separatist republic of Chechnya and cracked down on
independent media. He privately urged Mr. Yeltsin to watch over his
successor. Mr. Clinton also felt brushed off by Mr. Putin, who seemed
uninterested in doing business with a departing American president.
But
the prevailing attitude at the time was that Mr. Putin was a modernizer
who could consolidate the raw form of democracy and capitalism that Mr.
Yeltsin had introduced to Russia. He moved early to overhaul the
country’s tax, land and judicial codes. As Strobe Talbott, Mr. Clinton’s
deputy secretary of state, put it in his book on that period, George F.
Kennan, the noted Kremlinologist, thought that Mr. Putin “was young
enough, adroit enough and realistic enough to understand that Russia’s
ongoing transition required that he not just co-opt the power structure,
but to transform it.”
Mr.
Bush came to office skeptical of Mr. Putin, privately calling him “one
cold dude,” but bonded with him during their first meeting in Slovenia
in June 2001, after which he made his now-famous comment about looking
into the Russian’s soul. Mr. Putin had made a connection with the
religious Mr. Bush by telling him a story about a cross that his mother
had given him and how it was the only thing that survived a fire at his
country house.
Not
everyone was convinced. Mr. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney,
privately told people at the time that when he saw Mr. Putin, “I think
K.G.B., K.G.B., K.G.B.” But Mr. Bush was determined to erase the
historical divide and courted Mr. Putin during the Russian leader’s
visits to Camp David and Mr. Bush’s Texas ranch.
Mr.
Putin liked to brag that he was the first foreign leader to call Mr.
Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and he permitted American
troops into Central Asia as a base of operations against Afghanistan.
But
Mr. Putin never felt Mr. Bush delivered in return and the relationship
strained over the Iraq War and the Kremlin’s accelerating crackdown on
dissent at home. By Mr. Bush’s second term, the two were quarreling over
Russian democracy, reaching a peak during a testy meeting in Slovakia
in 2005.
“It
was like junior high debating,” Mr. Bush complained later to Britain’s
Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to notes of the conversation. Mr.
Putin kept throwing Mr. Bush’s arguments back at him. “I sat there for
an hour and 45 minutes and it went on and on,” Mr. Bush said. “At one
point, the interpreter made me so mad that I nearly reached over the
table and slapped the hell out of the guy. He had a mocking tone, making
accusations about America.”
He
was even more frustrated by Mr. Putin a year later. “He’s not
well-informed,” Bush told the visiting prime minister of Denmark in
2006. “It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong.”
He
told another visiting leader a few weeks later that he was losing hope
of bringing Mr. Putin around. “I think Putin is not a democrat anymore,”
he said. “He’s a czar. I think we’ve lost him.”
‘A Stone-Cold Killer’
Putin, in the Words of U.S. Officials
President Bill Clinton
— Writing in “My Life” about Vladimir Putin’s election in March 2000
Vice President Dick Cheney
— On his impression of Mr. Putin, in private conversations in 2001
President George W. Bush
— Commenting after first meeting with Mr. Putin in June 2001.
President George W. Bush
— To the visiting prime minister of Denmark in June 2006.
President
Bill Clinton I called to congratulate him and hung up the phone thinking
he was tough enough to hold Russia together and hoping he was wise
enough to find an honorable way out of the Chechnya problem and
committed enough to democracy to preserve it.
— Writing in “My Life” about Vladimir Putin’s election in March 2000 Vice President Dick Cheney I think K.G.B., K.G.B., K.G.B.
— On his impression of Mr. Putin, in private conversations in 2001 President George W. Bush I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.
— Commenting after first meeting with Mr. Putin in June 2001. President George W. Bush He’s not well-informed. It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong.
— To the visiting prime minister of Denmark in June 2006.
— Writing in “My Life” about Vladimir Putin’s election in March 2000 Vice President Dick Cheney I think K.G.B., K.G.B., K.G.B.
— On his impression of Mr. Putin, in private conversations in 2001 President George W. Bush I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.
— Commenting after first meeting with Mr. Putin in June 2001. President George W. Bush He’s not well-informed. It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong.
— To the visiting prime minister of Denmark in June 2006.
But
Mr. Bush was reluctant to give up, even if those around him no longer
saw the opportunity he saw. His new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates,
came back from his first meeting with Mr. Putin and told colleagues that
unlike Mr. Bush, he had “looked into Putin’s eyes and, just as I
expected, had seen a stone-cold killer.”
In the spring of 2008, Mr. Bush put Ukraine
and Georgia on the road to NATO membership, which divided the alliance
and infuriated Mr. Putin. By August of that year, the two leaders were
in Beijing for the Summer Olympics when word arrived that Russian troops
were marching into Georgia.
Mr.
Bush in his memoir recalled confronting Mr. Putin, scolding him for
being provoked by Mikheil Saakashvili, then Georgia’s anti-Moscow
president.
“I’ve been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Putin.
“I’m hot-blooded too,” Mr. Putin said.
“No, Vladimir,” Mr. Bush responded. “You’re coldblooded.”
Mr.
Bush responded to the Georgia war by sending humanitarian aid to
Georgia, transporting its troops home from Iraq, sending an American
warship to the region and shelving a civilian nuclear agreement with
Russia.
Worried
that Crimea might be next, Mr. Bush succeeded in stopping Russia from
swallowing up Georgia altogether. But on the eve of the collapse of
Lehman Brothers and the global financial meltdown, he did not impose the
sort of sanctions that Mr. Obama is now applying.
“We
and the Europeans threw the relationship into the toilet at the end of
2008,” Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, recalled
last week. “We wanted to send the message that strategically this was
not acceptable. Now in retrospect, we probably should have done more
like economic sanctions.”
If
Mr. Bush did not take the strongest punitive actions possible, his
successor soon made the point moot. Taking office just months later, Mr.
Obama decided to end any isolation of Russia because of Georgia in
favor of rebuilding relations. Unlike his predecessors, he would try to
forge a relationship not by befriending Mr. Putin but by bypassing him.
Ostensibly
complying with Russia’s two-term constitutional limit, Mr. Putin had
stepped down as president and installed his aide, Dmitri A. Medvedev, in
his place, while taking over as prime minister himself. So Mr. Obama
decided to treat Mr. Medvedev as if he really were the leader.
A
diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks later captured the strategy in
summing up similar French priorities: “Cultivating relations with
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, in the hope that he can become a
leader independent of Vladimir Putin.”
Before
his first trip to Moscow, Mr. Obama publicly dismissed Mr. Putin as
having “one foot in the old ways of doing business” and pumped up Mr.
Medvedev as a new-generation leader. Mr. Obama’s inaugural meeting with
Mr. Putin a few days later featured a classic tirade by the Russian
about all the ways that the United States had mistreated Moscow.
Among
those skeptical of Mr. Obama’s strategy were Mr. Gates, who stayed on
as defense secretary, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the new secretary of
state. Like Mr. Gates, Mrs. Clinton was deeply suspicious of Mr. Putin.
In private, she mockingly imitated his man’s-man, legs-spread-wide
posture during their meetings. But even if they did not assign it much
chance of success, she and Mr. Gates both agreed the policy was worth
trying and she gamely presented her Russian counterpart with a “reset”
button, remembered largely for its mistaken Russian translation.
Obama’s ‘Reset’ Gambit
For
a time, Mr. Obama’s gamble on Mr. Medvedev seemed to be working. They
revived Mr. Bush’s civilian nuclear agreement, signed a nuclear arms
treaty, sealed an agreement allowing American troops to fly through
Russian airspace en route to Afghanistan and collaborated on sanctions
against Iran. But Mr. Putin was not to be ignored and by 2012 returned
to the presidency, sidelining Mr. Medvedev and making clear that he
would not let Mr. Obama roll over him.
Mr.
Putin ignored Mr. Obama’s efforts to start new nuclear arms talks and
gave asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the national security leaker. 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.
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.”
As
Mr. Obama has tried to figure out what to do to end the crisis over
Ukraine, he has reached out to other leaders who still have a
relationship with Mr. Putin, including Angela Merkel, the German
chancellor. She privately told Mr. Obama that after speaking with Mr.
Putin she thought he was “in another world.” Secretary of State John
Kerry later said publicly that Mr. Putin’s speech on Crimea did not
“jibe with reality.”
That
has sparked a debate in Washington: Has Mr. Putin changed over the last
15 years and become unhinged in some way, or does he simply see the
world in starkly different terms than the West does, terms that make it
hard if not impossible to find common ground?
“He’s
not delusional, but he’s inhabiting a Russia of the past — a version of
the past that he has created,” said Fiona Hill, the top intelligence
officer on Russia during Mr. Bush’s presidency and co-author of “Mr.
Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “His present is defined by it and
there is no coherent vision of the future. Where exactly does he go from
here beyond reasserting and regaining influence over territories and
people? Then what?”
That is the question this president, and likely the next one, will be asking for some time to come.
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