The election of François Hollande as president of France on Sunday and the inauguration of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s “new-old” president on Monday present the Obama administration with new foreign-policy headaches. While neither calls for sharp or drastic changes in relations with the United States, the replacement of two leaders who were inclined to do favors for Washington with two new chief executives who will be more skeptical of America’s assurances means that the Obama administration will lose some maneuvering room in the months ahead. As Peter Feaver has noted, “[Nicolas] Sarkozy was the indispensable key figure in two of the more prominent policies that Obama officials tout as ‘successes’”—meaning sanctions on Iran and the Libya operation. Dmitri Medvedev’s support was also essential in getting stricter sanctions passed and in Russia’s decision to abstain on the Libya UN resolution.
While it is now popular to assert that Medvedev was nothing more than a puppet in the hands of prime minister Vladimir Putin these past four years—and therefore the more conciliatory policy pursued by Medvedev towards the United States was in fact Putin’s own—I do not entirely agree. While it is true that Medvedev could not have undertaken policy initiatives in open defiance of Putin, this does not mean that the two men (and their advisors) were in lockstep agreement on every policy issue. My read is that Putin was willing to let Medvedev try “his way”—especially in terms of developing a close relationship with Barack Obama—to see if there could be substantive improvement in U.S.-Russia relations. Despite Putin’s own skepticism, Medvedev proffered a number of Russian concessions; he approved, for instance, tighter sanctions on Iran and cancelled the sale of the S-300 air-defense system that, if installed, would make an Israeli or U.S. airstrike on the Iranian nuclear program much more problematic.
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