Putin Snub Shows Obama's Fury
Updated: 9:36pm UK, Wednesday 07 August 2013
By Greg Milam, US Correspondent
They sandwiched it in between a late-night chat show appearance and a web live-chat about the housing market.
But make no mistake, what the White House delivered to Moscow from sunny California was nothing but cold, hard fury.
The Obama administration has been pondering the cancellation of its planned summit with Vladimir Putin for weeks.
One cannot overestimate the anger felt in Washington over the decision to grant temporary asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
The US had lobbied hard against it and thought they were getting somewhere. When it turned out they weren't, they were livid.
The statement issued in cancelling the Putin summit, listing the damning catalogue of relationship failures, was a remarkable public rebuke to Moscow: missile defence, arms control, trade relations, human rights, civil society and, biggest of all, "global security issues".
For that, read "Syria".
"Given the lack of progress ...," it read.
In effect, it said that if there is nothing the two sides can agree on, there appears to be nothing to talk about.
Mr Obama had already used his appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to lambaste Mr Putin for "slipping into Cold War thinking".
Leaving aside why Mr Obama chose a comedy show to address (for the first time in the case of the worldwide terror alert) the big issues facing America, it was a calculated show of strength from the Commander-in-Chief.
He has been under pressure to show Moscow that the US would not take its Snowden decision lightly.
For that reason, if he had not cancelled the summit, and had handed Mr Putin the courtesy of a bilateral meeting, he would have appeared weak in the eyes of his critics.
Remember this is a president who signalled a reset on relations with Russia under its then leader Dmitry Medvedev.
Those days, of muttered promises from a Mr Obama unaware the microphone was still on, seem long distant now.
The difference, White House officials will tell you, is all about the man now in the Kremlin and his unwillingness to do business.
"A troubled relationship" is how deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes describes it.
Who can see it getting better? Snowden has ripped the wound wide open again but Syria is the long-running and ever-deepening malaise between the two.
And that is even before we get to the issue of gay rights and calls for a boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Mr Obama chose to chide Mr Putin about that too - on The Tonight Show, of course.
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