Strongman, The

philosophy which they called ‘dual-track engagement’. It meant that the administration would not link country-to-country relations with Russian behaviour on human rights or democracy. It would continue to challenge the Kremlin robustly on its human rights record and over its occupation of Georgia, but it would not make diplomatic or military cooperation in other areas (on Iran, for example, or missile defence) hostage to that. The two would operate on separate tracks. ‘The idea’s very simple,’ McFaul says. ‘We’re going to engage with the Russian government on issues that are of mutual interest and we’re going to engage directly with Russian civil society, including Russian political opposition figures, on things that we consider are important as well.’ 1
    The first public hint of a new approach came in a speech by Vice-President Joe Biden at the Munich Security Conference in February 2009. This was the same venue where two years earlier Putin had virtually turned his back on the United States. ‘The last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and members of our alliance,’ Biden said. Now, the US wanted to ‘press the reset button’. The phrase quickly became shorthand for Obama’s new approach to Russia. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn it into a television image a month later by presenting her opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, with a large red button marked ‘reset’. The word was unfortunately rendered into Russian as ‘overload’ or ‘overcharged’ – which at least ensured some smiles as the policy was formally inaugurated.
    Behind the scenes, more important resetting was getting under way. A week after Biden’s speech, Michael McFaul went to Moscow to hand-deliver a personal letter from Obama to Medvedev. The letter was intended to be a kind of bait, laid outside the cave to tempt the growling bear to come out. ‘We are taking a careful look at the missile defence programme,’ it said, hinting that it should become an issue for cooperation, not confrontation. The letter laid out in big, broad terms a vision of US–Russian relations which recognised that, in fact, America’s interests were by and large also Russia’s interests, and they should be looking for ‘win-win’ situations rather than the ‘zero-sum’ attitude that had dogged the past.
    The bear sniffed the package and seemed to like it. Medvedev had his first face-to-face meeting with Obama in London on 1 April, on the margins of a G20 summit convened to tackle the global financial crisis. They got through the preliminaries – how nice that we’re both young, both lawyers, both new to the job – and then Obama decided to try out his new ‘win-win’ approach on a troublesome example that had recently arisen. A few months earlier, President Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan had suddenly announced he wanted the Americans to leave the Manas air base, a vital transit centre for the Afghan war, having been leant on – and bribed – by the Russians. Bakiyev’s decision came on the same day as Russia offered Kyrgyzstan a $2 billion loan. Sitting together in the US ambassador’s Regent’s Park residence, Obama explained to Medvedev, a trifle condescendingly, why it was in Russia’s interest to let the Americans stay at Manas: ‘I need you to understand why we have this base here. It supports our activities in Afghanistan. It’s where our troops fly in and out of Afghanistan. They take showers. They have hot meals and they get ready to go in to fight in Afghanistan, to deal with enemies of ours that are also enemies of yours. And if we weren’t fighting these people, you would have to be fighting these people. So tell me, President Medvedev, why is that not in your national interest, that we would have this base of operations that helps what we’re doing in Afghanistan?’ Medvedev did not respond immediately. But three months later the Americans signed a deal that allowed them to stay at Manas.
    Michael McFaul recalls that Medvedev also made a surprising gesture at the London meeting, offering to expand the so-called ‘Northern Distribution Network’ for Afghanistan, to allow the US to transport lethal cargoes through Russian air space for the first time.
    This became a key accord to be announced during Obama’s first official visit to Moscow in July 2009, together with a framework agreement for talks to begin on a new disarmament treaty to replace the old START nuclear