Reading: The Obama effect

 

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.