Now it is personal. By upping the ante with his threat to isolate Russia with sanctions over Crimea, US President Barack Obama risks setting off a cycle of confrontation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Despite his reluctance to play Cold War-style chess with Putin, a degeneration into a new great power rivalry cannot be ruled out.
Since Russia’s move into Ukraine, Obama has steadily upped pressure, while offering Putin a diplomatic “off ramp” to defuse the crisis.
Indefatigable US Secretary of State John Kerry has spent hours bartering ideas with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov in Europe.
However, the belief in Washington is that only Putin has the power to dictate outcomes — introducing a personal dimension into the crisis.
That recognition underpinned two bluntly spoken calls between Obama and Putin last week.
The US plan would see international observers monitor the welfare of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Moscow’s troops withdraw to Crimean bases and Ukrainian elections in May.
However, the Russian troop buildup in Crimea and a pending referendum among peninsula’s mainly Russian-speaking citizens on joining Russia seems to be outpacing US diplomacy.
The question now is whether the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War will chill the entire relationship between the world’s top two nuclear powers?
For instance, can Washington insulate high priority areas of cooperation — like Iran nuclear talks and its transit route out of Afghanistan — from the dispute
Or will the dynamics of the crisis and the pressure on both Obama and Putin to appear strong create their own destructive dynamic?
Lee Feinstein, a former US ambassador to Poland and a campaign adviser to Obama, said options were already narrowing.
“It depends on the trajectory that Putin takes,” said Feinstein, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
Obama last week appeared on camera to personally highlight visa bans on some Russian officials and a structure for sanctions on some entities and individuals.
If Crimea is taken from Ukraine and taken by Russia, Obama would have little choice, along with European partners, to make good on his threats, risking Russian retaliation.
A new great power rivalry is not Obama’s choice, he came to office determined to “reset” relations with Russia.
Although the policy yielded a new nuclear arms reduction deal, helped him win a Nobel prize and was instrumental in clamping tight sanctions on Iran — it ran out of steam before he won reelection.
By keeping diplomatic options open through Kerry and by coaxing Putin, Obama hopes to forestall a prolonged confrontation.
Michael McFaul, Obama’s just departed ambassador to Moscow, believes Russia’s cooperation on Iran nuclear talks, for example, can endure “not because Putin is doing us any favors, but because he sees [it] in Russia’s national interest.”
In that sense, the idea behind the reset — that while Russia and the US are not friends they can cooperate where it makes sense — could survive.
However, with Putin often seeming to define his bid to restore Russia’s pride and influence by thwarting US foreign policy — in Syria for instance — the spirit of the reset is long dead.
Soil was piled on its grave with Russia’s offer of asylum to fugitive US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
And Obama penned its obituary by snubbing Putin last year by judging their agenda too threadbare to justify a planned Moscow summit.
Meanwhile, the revival of long dormant tensions has electrified old cold warriors in Washington.
Obama has long dispensed with illusions about Putin.
He sees Putin’s worldview as framed by his apprenticeship in the KGB and nationalistic nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
He is also irritated by the perception that Putin “rescued” him after he blinked at striking Syria over its chemical weapons use.
Obama argues the now troubled deal to destroy the Syrian regime’s chemical arsenal was his idea nurtured by painstaking diplomacy, not an opportunist pounce by Putin.
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