As a candidate for the presidency, Barack Obama presented himself as more worldly than the incumbent, George W. Bush. Implicit in his claim was that he would do a better job managing America’s affairs in the world that Bush did. But Obama has not always been able to live up to that promise, in part because of difficult, or at least complicated, relationships with some of the key world leaders.
President Obama, left, walks with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, Calif., on June 8, 2013. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)
Obama’s trip to China in September 2016 was supposed to bolster the possibility of U.S.-China cooperation. Instead, from the moment Obama landed, the trip was swallowed up in disagreements small and large, and it never really recovered.
There were no stairs for Obama to disembark Air Force One because of arguments over security. On the tarmac, White House aides got into a screaming match with a Chinese official over media access. The skirmishes reflected just how frayed and fraught the relationship between the two world powers had become. Obama adopted a strategy of trying to entice China into behaving like a more responsible global citizen in exchange for the prospect of greater respectability and influence on the world stage. It did not work.
A significant part of Obama’s challenge was that his presidency coincided with a period of burgeoning Chinese confidence, a time when leaders in Beijing began to gauge just how powerful their country had become in the world. They were increasingly eager to throw their newfound weight around against Washington. Suddenly, leaders such as President Xi Jinping were no longer willing to make concessions or give ground on issues such as territorial claims and disputes over trade, cybersecurity and human rights.
As stewards of the world’s two largest economies, Obama and Xi had been quick to point out how much their two countries need each other, but with increasing competition, suspicion and battle for influence, the U.S.-China relationship has taken on a dynamic most accurately described as “frenemies.”
— William Wan
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Obama attend the opening ceremony of an industrial trade fair in Hanover, Germany, on April 24, 2016. (Ronny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
Over time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel emerged as Obama’s closest overseas ally and his ideological soul mate. Some of their bond can be traced to style. Merkel is Obama’s ideal partner. Like him, she is a sober, rational technocrat who rarely seeks out the spotlight or demands credit.
Obama even went out of his way to praise the taciturn German’s funny bone. “She has a really good sense of humor that she doesn’t show all the time at news conferences,” Obama once said. “She’s a little more — she’s much more serious in front of all of you.”
The two leaders share a similar worldview that emphasizes the importance of international institutions and cooperation over unilateral action, and sees global problems, such as climate change and nuclear proliferation, as greater threats than terrorism.
The chaos in the Middle East and resulting refugee crisis only deepened Obama’s respect for Merkel, who pressed her fellow European leaders to welcome those fleeing starvation and war.
The only issue on which they have broken is economic policy. Obama believes that Merkel’s commitment to austerity during Europe’s economic crisis has delayed the continent’s recovery.
— Greg Jaffe
Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Obama attend a meeting Sept. 28, 2015, at United Nations headquarters in New York. (Dmitry Azarov/Kommersant via Getty Images)
The reset button then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov at the beginning of the Obama administration didn’t work. The gag gift was inaccurately translated to mean “overload,” not reset, although that was a better translation of what was to come. Yes, Russia supported United Nations sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table for a deal restricting its nuclear program. And Russia in 2010 signed a new agreement limiting nuclear weapons. But otherwise, relations with Moscow are as dismal as they have been since the end of the Cold War. As Obama’s presidency draws to an end, a Russian flotilla has been making its way through the English Channel and into the Mediterranean to bolster its presence there. NATO forces are rotating through the Baltic states. And Russia is bombing U.S.-backed forces in Syria.
The gap between the two nations is embodied in the frigid relationship between the judo-loving Putin and golf-playing Obama, who for more than two years did not have a conversation. When they did meet, the body language said it all. Whereas President George W. Bush once looked Putin in the eye and got “a sense of his soul,” Obama appealed to Putin’s brain, urging him to act out of reason and self-interest, if not sentiment. Obama hoped economic sanctions would persuade Putin to pull back forces in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Later, he warned Putin to avoid disaster in Syria and not “get bogged down in an inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict.”
But for Putin, relations with the United States haven’t been about economic well-being, but about pride, power, influence and a larger strategic game. On those fronts, Obama made matters worse. In March 2014, Obama said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” Putin objected to his “derogatory manner.”
Since then, Putin has risked little but gained much. Russia still holds Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Its fighter jets have pummeled U.S.-backed forces in Syria and won Russia and Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad seats at any negotiating table. The European Union, which once flirted with Ukraine, is coming apart at the seams as Britain exits. The wave of immigrants from Africa and Syria is destabilizing the entire continent. And in the closing scene, U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia has hacked Democratic Party and Clinton emails and given them to WikiLeaks in what is seen as an effort to tarnish American democracy. As Putin said in an interview after Obama’s “regional power” comment: “If we say that Russia is a regional power, we should first determine what region we are referring to.”
— Steven Mufson
President Obama meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on May 18, 2009. (Amos Moshe Milner/Israeli Government Press Office via Getty Images)
Diplomacy is a highly choreographed art, but occasionally reality pierces through.
Such was the moment in May 2011 when Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office. The president decided to publicly call for a resumption of talks between Israel and the Palestinians based on Israel’s borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; Netanyahu responded by declaring that his country “cannot go back to the 1967 lines, because those lines are indefensible.” The prime minister noted that under that scenario Israel’s width would be half that of Washington’s Beltway.
By that point the two men had a history, based on real policy agreements and perceived slights. Obama pushed repeatedly against the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, an approach Netanyahu pursued throughout his time in office. And the prime minister, for his part, smarted when he was escorted into the West Wing through a rear entrance in March 2010, out of sight of White House photographers.
When they met at the U.N. in September 2016 they were careful to smile in front of the cameras, but there was no real warmth. Netanyahu praised Obama’s “terrific golf game,” prompting the president to reply, “We’ll set up a tee time.”
A few days later, the Israeli government announced that it would expand settlements once again — something Netanyahu made no mention of when the two men posed together before the White House press corps.
— Juliet Eilperin
Cuban President Raúl Castro lifts President Obama’s arm at then end of a joint news conference in Havana on March 21, 2016. (Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press)
When the two men briefly shook hands at Nelson Mandela’s 2013 funeral, it was international news. A little more than a year later — four months after they announced plans to normalize relations between their neighboring countries after a half-century of hostile estrangement — Cuban President Raúl Castro and Obama held their first extended face-to-face meeting and sat at the same table at a Western Hemisphere summit.
The American president and the Cuban leader are, without a doubt, from different generations and different worlds. But both say they recognize the historic nature of what they have done and want to make it work, within the confines of their backgrounds, beliefs and domestic realities.
In his Summit of the Americas speech, Castro railed against American imperialism and recounted the many ways the United States had tried to destroy the Cuban Revolution. When he finished, however, he asked Obama to excuse him. “Passion seeps into my very pores when it comes to the Revolution,” Castro explained, but “President Obama has no responsibility for any of this” and “is an honest man.” He’d even read some of Obama’s two books, he said, although “not in full.”
When Obama traveled to Cuba in March 2016, he and Castro greeted each other with smiles and handshakes. They held a private meeting, and chatted amiably at a U.S.-Cuban exhibition baseball game. In a speech broadcast throughout the island, Obama noted that he wasn’t even born when the Cuban Revolution took place. There was much they did not agree on, Obama said, looking directly at Castro in the audience. But “you do not need to fear a threat from the United States.”
— Karen DeYoung
