How Obama Views the Men and Women Who (Also) Rule the World
President Obama himself is famously transactional when it comes to relations with other leaders; in my new article on his foreign policy, I make note of his strong belief that countries tend to act in what their leaders perceive to be their core interests, and I’ve come to see that Obama doesn’t place enormous value in the notion that well-developed personal relationships between leaders could ever trump the cold-eyed pursuit of those interests. Nevertheless, he has intense relationships with many world leaders—and he has become, in his last years as president, a mentor to a handful of important new ones.
.. Among other things, he views the pope as a devout believer who nevertheless is fully committed to pluralism. This sort of commitment is what Obama is seeking from Muslim leaders, and it is what progressive Muslim leaders are seeking from the more fundamentalist-minded clerics in their midst.
.. Obama believes that he understands Israel’s existential dilemmas better than Netanyahu does, and Netanyahu sees Obama as hopelessly naive.
.. His constant question to Netanyahu, he told me, was, “If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who? How does this get resolved?”
.. My previous understanding was that Obama viewed Putin in Hobbesian terms: nasty, brutish, and short. But Obama doesn’t find him nasty—Putin doesn’t leave him waiting for meetings, as he does other leaders. Obama believes Putin to be a thug, one who doesn’t understand his own best interests, but he also believes Putin understands Obama’s own red lines. Putin, for his part, sees Obama as hopelessly over-evolved. He’s said to be contemptuous of Obama’s lectures concerning Russia’s best interests, and he does not find Obama frightening.