No soul-searching, no Colgate in Obama"s G20 diplomacy
There was no peering into anyone's soul, and there was no bonding over Colgate toothpaste.
But U.S. President Barack Obama, while taking a more businesslike approach to diplomacy than his predecessor George W. Bush, used his debut on the world stage to start developing his own brand of rapport with fellow world leaders.
In Obama's first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, there were smiles and handshakes but none of the backslapping that characterized the relation between their predecessors, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.
Aides said it was a conscious effort by the U.S. president, known for his "no-drama Obama" style, to strike up a more formal relation with his Russian counterpart when they met on the sidelines of a G20 economic crisis summit in London.
"Our strategy is to develop an agenda based on interests, also accentuating where we disagree, but not to make the goal of these meetings to establish some buddy-buddy above," one U.S. official said after the talks.
It was a stark contrast to Bush, who said after his first meeting with Putin in 2001 that had gotten a "sense of his soul." Critics later said Bush had been naive to trust the former KGB spymaster.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov detected a new approach and welcomed it.
"The new heaven of mutual trust, an sky which does not create the illusion of good relations because they develop well on a personal level but which ensure taking into account mutual interests and readiness to listen to each other, we missed this much in recent years," Lavrov told reporters.
But U.S. President Barack Obama, while taking a more businesslike approach to diplomacy than his predecessor George W. Bush, used his debut on the world stage to start developing his own brand of rapport with fellow world leaders.
In Obama's first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, there were smiles and handshakes but none of the backslapping that characterized the relation between their predecessors, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.
Aides said it was a conscious effort by the U.S. president, known for his "no-drama Obama" style, to strike up a more formal relation with his Russian counterpart when they met on the sidelines of a G20 economic crisis summit in London.
"Our strategy is to develop an agenda based on interests, also accentuating where we disagree, but not to make the goal of these meetings to establish some buddy-buddy above," one U.S. official said after the talks.
It was a stark contrast to Bush, who said after his first meeting with Putin in 2001 that had gotten a "sense of his soul." Critics later said Bush had been naive to trust the former KGB spymaster.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov detected a new approach and welcomed it.
"The new heaven of mutual trust, an sky which does not create the illusion of good relations because they develop well on a personal level but which ensure taking into account mutual interests and readiness to listen to each other, we missed this much in recent years," Lavrov told reporters.
