Strongman, The

well, I’m different, I’m new, and I don’t want the past to haunt the future. I actually want to reset the relationship with Russia.
    The summit achieved its goals – but in a surprisingly unspectacular way. There was none of the euphoria (or tension) that used to accompany East–West summitry during the Cold War. Obamamania just did not infiltrate Russia. The student audience for his major public speech looked rather bored.
    Gradually, though, the reset began to bear fruit – including a marked shift in Russia’s stance towards Iran. Since joining the six-nation Iran group in 2005, Russia had consistently argued that while it, too, opposed the proliferation of nuclear weapons, it did not believe that Iran was trying to build them or could build them in the near future. It defended its right to help Iran develop a civil nuclear programme, and was reluctant to support sanctions. But at their first meeting in London in April 2009, Obama was astonished when Medvedev admitted that the Americans had ‘probably been more right’ than the Russians when it came to assessing Iran’s ballistic missile threat.
    In September the Americans had a unique chance to prove they were right about Iran’s nuclear ambitions too. The presidents were due to meet at the United Nations in New York. Just before the meeting, Obama’s national security adviser, General James Jones, called his Russian opposite number, Sergei Prikhodko, and told him they needed to meet urgently. In a room at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, Jones showed Prikhodko spy photographs of a secret uranium enrichment plant that the Iranians were building near the holy city of Qom. Prikhodko admitted in an interview: ‘This was not the nicest surprise we could have got.’ 3 Jones says the Russian was shocked and kept shaking his head, saying, ‘This is bad, really bad ...’ 4
    Foreign minister Lavrov couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He took Michael McFaul aside and said: ‘Why didn’t you tell us before, Mike?’
    McFaul replied: ‘Well ... we thought you knew. I mean, these are your guys, not ours!’
    Obama and Medvedev then met to discuss the news, and Medvedev’s reaction at a press conference generated positive headlines in Western countries, as for the first time he stated that ‘sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases the use of sanctions is inevitable’. It was only two days later, when news of the Qom facility was revealed to the world at a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, that the reason for Medvedev’s change of attitude could be guessed at. For the first time, Russia and the West now started to work more closely on Iran. The following June, Moscow would back new UN sanctions, and in September even cancel the sale of an S-300 air defence system to Iran, losing a billion-dollar contract.
    Negotiations on New Start, meanwhile, began on a permanent basis in Geneva. Two sticking points quickly became evident. One was the exchange of what was known as ‘telemetric information’ – sharing data about missile tests and launches. The second was ‘unique identifiers’ – essentially, bar-coding every missile so they could all be accounted for and tracked.
    Both Obama and Medvedev became deeply involved in the process, hammering out all the most important details in telephone calls and face-to-face meetings. Medvedev joked later that ‘telemetry’ had become his favourite English word.
    One of their meetings took place in December in Copenhagen, where both leaders were attending climate-change talks. With every venue in the city apparently taken up with global warming discussions, Obama and Medvedev found themselves in a makeshift meeting-room in a curtained-off area of a women’s dress shop, surrounded by naked mannequins. It proved to be a conducive atmosphere. Obama explained the concept of unique identifiers: ‘Look, we just put these barcodes on the missiles, so we can count them. That’s what the treaty’s all about, after all.’
    Russia’s negotiators had been resisting this, insisting that ‘if we sign a treaty, we fulfil it’ and that it should not be assumed they would cheat. But Medvedev saw the sense of it. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘so long as it’s done in a fair way. That you do it and we do it, and we do it in a symmetrical way.’
    The breakthrough was followed by one on telemetry, and it seemed agreement was close. In January General Jones called Obama from Moscow airport after talks that seemed to