Published Aug. 8, 2013|Updated Aug. 8, 2013
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON - The Edward Snowden case may have been the last straw, but the White House decision to cancel a Moscow summit next month came after President Barack Obama decided the meeting was unlikely to resolve any of the issues increasing tensions between the countries.
The diplomatic snub comes six days after Russia granted temporary asylum to Snowden, a former intelligence agency contractor who leaked information on classified surveillance programs and then fled to Moscow. Obama has repeatedly called on Russia to return him to the United States to face prosecution.
But Snowden is not the only source of trouble in the U.S.-Russia relationship. The White House, after an unproductive start in Obama's first term, had crafted an approach to Russia that included a new push for nuclear arms reductions and a joint effort to resolve the civil war in Syria. Both went nowhere.
"Major issues were not teed up to make significant progress on the level of a president-to-president summit," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. "That wasn't a constructive step to take at this point."
Obama expressed his frustration with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno on Tuesday.
"There have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality," he said. "And what I consistently say to them, and what I say to President Putin, is that's the past and we've got to think about the future, and there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to cooperate more effectively than we do."
Press secretary Jay Carney, who announced the decision, cited "lack of progress" on several issues. "We believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda," he said in a statement. "Russia's disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship."
Obama had made a number of diplomatic gestures to the Russian leader this year but has received a chilly response. This spring, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced what Washington saw as a concession on missile defense deployment, but the Russians dismissed the move as no concession at all. A letter from Obama to Putin, hand-delivered in April by national security adviser Tom Donilon, did nothing to warm relations.
And in June, Moscow brushed off Obama's public call in a speech at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate for Russia to join the United States to make deep cuts in their deployed strategic U.S. nuclear warheads.
Andrew Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Russia expert on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff, said Putin sees a domestic political advantage in opposing the United States.
"So the question is, is it worth chasing after them?" Weiss said. "It's not in this circ*mstance. That's what's driving these decisions, as much as the optics about Snowden."
Obama will still travel to Russia in September for the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg, but the leaders won't put their lack of rapport back on display. When they last met one-on-one in June, Obama and Putin exchanged awkward jokes through clenched teeth.
The decision comes just two days before Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry are scheduled to meet with their Russian counterparts in Washington. The cancellation of the Obama-Putin meeting shortly before that visit suggests U.S. officials expected little progress on major differences Friday.
State and Pentagon officials decided to go ahead with the meetings to focus on other areas where they still hope to cooperate, such as Iran and North Korea. "There certainly is a recognition that it's important to maintain regular contact," Psaki said.
Some analysts said the president had little choice but to scrap the visit to Moscow. A presidential trip would have forced Obama to share the spotlight with a leader who has dismissed the U.S. agenda and rejected Obama's calls to return Snowden.
Obama has grown impatient with the former KGB officer since the decision to let Snowden remain in the Moscow airport. That was clear in Obama's interview on The Tonight Show.
"I was disappointed because even though we don't have an extradition treaty with them, traditionally we have tried to respect if there's a lawbreaker or an alleged lawbreaker in their country. We evaluate it, and we try to work with them," Obama told Leno. "They didn't do that with us. And in some ways it's reflective of some underlying challenges that we've had with Russia lately."
The Kremlin responded with its own expression of disappointment - but said that ultimately Obama was hurting himself.
Putin aide Yuri Ushakov saidRussia was "dissatisfied" with the decision. He blamed it on "Snowden's situation, which was not created by us at all."
growing rift between the United States and Russia
Snowden
The latest in a long list of grievances, Russia granted temporary asylum to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed the secret phone data collection program. The U.S. wants him on espionage charges.
Missile defense: A beef dating back to the Cold War, Russia sees the U.S. missile defense system as a threat to its own nuclear deterrent. The U.S. says the defenses are there to protect NATO and counter Iran.
human rights: Americans have objected to Russian leaders' silencing critical voices, as when opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on embezzlement charges last month.
Syria
The U.S. says Russian support for Syrian President Bashar Assad is helping him cling to power despite two years of violence and, according to the United Nations, more than 100,000 deaths of his people.
Diplomatic timeline
Before President Barack Obama took office, Vladimir Putin had served two terms as president of Russia. From 2008 to 2012, Putin served as President Dmitry Medvedev's prime minister, a role in which Putin effectively ruled the country. Putin was re-elected president in 2012. He could be in office until 2024. Here is a look at some of Obama's diplomacy with the leaders:
April 2009: Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev meet in London. The Obama administration says it wants to "reset" relations, which had deteriorated under President George W. Bush. The leaders agree to a broad statement of cooperation on numerous issues.
July 2009: Obama makes his first state visit to Moscow, where he and Medvedev reach a preliminary agreement to cut American and Russian nuclear arsenals by as much as a third.
April 2010: In Prague, Obama and Medvedev sign the New START Treaty and Protocol, which limits nuclear arms.
June 2010: Medvedev visits the United States for one-on-one meetings with Obama before the two travel to Toronto for a meeting of the G-20 nations.
May 2011: Obama and Medvedev pledge counterterrorism cooperation after bilateral meetings at the G-8 Summit in Deauville, France.
March 2012: Putin wins the Russian presidency. He and Medvedev switch jobs in May.
June 2012: In their first meeting as heads of state, Obama presses Putin to join the United States and its allies at the G-20 Summit in Mexico to force Syria's government out of power.
June 17: During a two-hour meeting at the G-8 Summit in Northern Ireland, Obama and Putin fail to resolve differences over how to end the war in Syria, with each country increasing support for the opposing forces at war.
Washington Post
