The disarming charm of Barack Obama at the G20 in London.
BARACK OBAMA had difficulty pronouncing the name of his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, but people forgave him. In fact, they forgave him for almost everything: his aura seemed to glow ever brighter as he made his first foray into global, crisis-busting diplomacy.
A general willingness to give Mr Obama the benefit of the doubt was palpable even among the exuberant anti-capitalist demonstrators jamming the streets of London’s financial district—a minority of whom turned violent and clashed with police as they attacked a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. “He’s got good morals,” conceded a graffiti artist called Monkey, while helping his friend scale a traffic light and drape a banner: it depicted a grim reaper clutching fistfuls of banknotes.
Nico, a French resident of London who sported a cardboard box over his head (to denounce climate-change denial), said in muffled tones that he was “not sure about Obama—but he can’t be worse than George Bush.” Anyway, he opined, “the problem is the madness of the economic system—growth wrecks the environment.”
Even the Russians, so determined to wrong-foot America for the past few years, were gracious after the two presidents met and agreed to seek deeper cuts in their strategic arsenals than those foreseen by an existing treaty, which could slash each side’s stockpile to 1,700 warheads by 2012. Negotiators were told to set new goals by July, when Mr Obama will visit Moscow.
Recent strains in American-Russian relations had not been good for either country, said Mr Medvedev, as he and Mr Obama vowed to begin a “constructive dialogue” on everything from curbing terrorism to economics. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Russian parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, claimed that the two presidents had broken a “closed circle” in which each side felt the need to respond forcefully to a perceived provocation by the other. These upbeat noises from a hitherto grumpy Russian official marked a change of tone.
These days, America’s ties with China probably matter more to the world than the remnants of superpower diplomacy. And on that front, too, the chemistry was good. With China’s President Hu Jintao, Mr Obama agreed that his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, would start a Sino-American “strategic and economic dialogue” beginning in Washington, DC, this summer. The Americans said Mr Hu assured them of his commitment to boosting demand as well as improving economic management.
Visiting Downing Street earlier in the day, Mr Obama was at once emollient, self-critical and articulate, in a way that put an initially bashful Gordon Brown at his ease. “I came here to put forward ideas but I also came here to listen and not to lecture,” the president said, setting the tone—one that subtly combined humility with firmness about the responsibilities of others—for his meeting with the leaders of 19 developed and emerging economies.
The president admitted that the United States “has some accounting to do” over the failures in its regulatory system. He said the world had become used to viewing American consumers as the engine of global growth—with a clear hint that his country could no longer play this role, and that spenders in other countries should now be doing their bit. But he rejected the idea of American decline, saying that was an old theory, which had been repeatedly belied by the existence of “a vibrancy to our economic model, a durability to our political model, and a set of ideals that has sustained us through difficult times.”
If any of the participants arrived in London spoiling for a fight, it was the leaders of France and Germany, who were at pains from the beginning to stress their absolute accord with one another and their differences with everybody else. At a splashy joint appearance, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel said Europe had done a lot already to provide economic stimulus. What was needed was far tougher regulation, whose targets would include hedge funds, traders’ pay, rating agencies and tax havens. Both of them seemed keener on trying to prevent financial crises in future than on dealing with the one that is raging now.
But Mr Obama was anxious not to let the Franco-German duo spoil the party. Instead he stressed the “enormous consensus” that existed on the need to reinvigorate the sagging world economy. Among governments, anyway: Nico the box-wearer might beg to disagree.
Elsewhere on the sidelines, more conventional voices were stressing that there could be limits to Mr Obama’s ability to dissolve global problems at a stroke: the warming of the American-Russian atmosphere was not a breakthrough comparable with the one achieved by Mikhail Gorbachev in the last days of the cold war.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, a think-tank, said Messrs Obama and Medvedev had merely “plucked some low-hanging fruit” by signalling that rows over Georgia were no longer the central to their relationship. It was now conceivable, Mr Trenin said, that Russia and America could talk business over NATO expansion and possible Russian help to America over Iran. But Russia might not really want American-Iranian ties to improve too much—and the mood of anti-Americanism which was fanned under ex-President Vladimir Putin (now prime minister) would not disappear from the Russian scene. There are some tricks that even Obama magic cannot pull off.
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