The chill between Obama and Putin is felt internationally
The White House has cancelled President Barack Obama's planned bilateral summit in Moscow next month with Russian President Vladimir Putin, after a series of meetings between officials failed to map the way forward on important issues.
Summit meetings are showcases of statesmanship. The deals and accords that heads of state sign and shake hands on are largely negotiated in advance by officials behind the scenes to ensure the talks go as smoothly as possible. If these meetings make no progress, one side or the other usually finds it inconvenient to go ahead. In the latest example, the White House has cancelled President Barack Obama's planned bilateral summit in Moscow next month with Russian President Vladimir Putin, after a series of meetings between officials failed to map the way forward on important issues.
The two sides have long been at loggerheads over Syria, nuclear arms control, missile defence, trade and human rights. With Obama aides complaining that Moscow was no longer even responding to their proposals, all it took to shoot down the summit was a trigger. Russia supplied it by granting temporary asylum to fugitive American secret surveillance whistle-blower Edward Snowden, in defiance of American wishes, and the US pulled it. Obama and his advisers concluded that without substantive progress towards a successful summit, the domestic political risk of a failed one, when the president is under pressure to take a tougher stance with Putin, is too great.
Washington's displeasure over Snowden is genuine. But this is a serious setback to Obama's legacy goal of negotiating new reductions in nuclear weapons, and to any prospect of co-operation between the former cold-war rivals to help end the conflict in Syria. Ahead of the G20 leaders' summit in St Petersburg, also next month, the chill is regrettable when so many bigger international issues need to be sorted out.
As G20 host, Putin may have scored political points at home with his apparent tough stance with an old adversary. Such a posture may be a useful distraction from the woes of a country now dependent for economic growth on oil exports. Hopefully, both Putin and Obama will see the G20 summit as an opportunity to put differences aside and seek common ground for the sake of global and geopolitical stability.