Strongman, The

clinch the deal.
    But there was a hitch. The Americans had been assuming that the Russians agreed that the strategic arms treaty would stand alone, with no reference to missile defence. But now Obama’s replacement for the Bush missile shield was beginning to take shape, and the Russians did not like it. Instead of a radar in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland, Obama was developing what he called a ‘Phased Adaptive Approach’, which in many ways might pose even more of a potential threat to Russia. It would involve highly mobile sea-based missiles and radars, and short-range missiles based in Eastern Europe. On 4 February 2010 it was announced that those missiles would be located in Romania. It seemed to cause a hardening of attitudes in Moscow, where they realised they were about to agree a treaty that would considerably reduce Russia’s strategic arsenal, while the Americans were building a fence right on their border.
    On 24 February the hot line between the Kremlin and the White House glowed red for almost an hour and a half. Medvedev was again trying to couple the arms cuts with legally binding missile defence restrictions – within the new treaty. Obama was angry. ‘We’d agreed, Dmitry! If the conditions for the treaty are this, then we’re not going to have a treaty.’ Obama was also angry with his staff, who had led him to believe the deal was all but done. In fact, his negotiators had done him a bad service by letting the Russians think they could insert a condition in the treaty that would freeze missile defence systems as they currently stood.
    It took three more weeks of intense negotiation in Geneva and Moscow, and another Medvedev–Obama phone call on 13 March, to settle the deal. The New Start treaty was finally signed in Prague on 8 April. It dealt only with arms reductions, as the Americans wished, while both sides appended unilateral statements regarding missile defence. The Americans stated that US missile defence systems were not intended to affect the strategic balance with Russia. But the Russian statement invoked the right to withdraw from the treaty should it deem a future American build-up of missile defence capabilities to be a threat to its own strategic nuclear potential. The Russians thereby achieved some kind of linkage, as they had wanted: if at any point they decide that the US missile shield has become too strong, they can leave the treaty and build up their own nuclear forces.
    iMedvedev
    So far, internationally, President Medvedev had acted in much the same way as one would have expected Vladimir Putin to have acted. It did not go unnoticed that as prime minister, Putin continued to express his opinions on foreign affairs and even to make trips to other countries. It was he, for example, who publicly stated that missile defence was in fact an obstacle to the search for a strategic arms agreement – just weeks before Medvedev infuriated Obama by repeating the same thought.
    Medvedev’s views on defending Russia’s interests, and being treated as an equal partner, were identical to his mentor’s. Even the rapprochement with the West over Iran did not signify a strategic shift: for a variety of reasons – commercial, political and strategic – Moscow was never going to risk making an enemy of Tehran.
    Medvedev, as we shall see in the next chapter, was slowly changing the agenda at home but struggling to make an impact. The same was true of his early foreign overtures. His keynote speeches in Berlin and Evian had flopped. But now that the ice was broken with President Obama, he spotted a way, perhaps, to boost his image at home and abroad. Since ‘modernisation’ was his watchword in domestic politics, it made sense for him to be seen hobnobbing with a modern American president. It wasn’t enough just to own an iPad and record video-blogs for his website. He needed to get out West and visit Silicon Valley. He was never going to compete with Putin’s Action Man holiday stunts, but he could try to look cool in the company of Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or would he just look puny? That was the problem.
    A couple of months after the Prague treaty was signed, Medvedev set off on his first state visit to the United States. He did everything a modernising president should do. He opened a Twitter account, visited Cisco and Apple and Stanford University, met Russian émigrés working in Silicon Valley, then flew to Washington for talks with