Summit will let Obama and Putin size up competition

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin will use their meeting today, the first since Putin returned to Russia’s top job, to claim leverage in a mutually dependent but volatile relationship.

Obama needs Russia to help, or at least not hurt, U.S. foreign policy aims in the Mideast and Afghanistan. Putin needs the U.S. as a foil for his argument that Russia doesn’t get its due as a great power.

Obama and Putin are set to meet on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic gathering in Mexico that will otherwise focus largely on the European economic crisis. Greece’s fate as part of the eurozone may be sealed as Obama and other world leaders meet, and the gathering is a natural forum for sideline discussions of the urgent crisis in Syria as well as diplomatic efforts to head off a confrontation with Iran.

Russia is a linchpin in several U.S. foreign policy goals. Chief among them are the international effort to deny Iran a nuclear weapon and smooth shutdown of the Afghanistan war. Brutal attacks on anti-government protesters in Syria and the threat of civil war in the Mideast nation pose the most immediate crisis. In the longer term, Obama wants Russia’s continued cooperation in nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation.

Russia’s membership in numerous world bodies and its veto power at the U.N. Security Council give it leverage beyond its economic or military power.

Obama has far greater power and both leaders know it. But Putin can be a spoiler and irritant to the administration.