How Obama Views the Men and Women Who (Also) Rule the World

A rough guide to the president�s relationships with other leaders

During the course of reporting on the Obama administration’s foreign and defense policies over the past several years, I’ve gained a certain level of insight into its frustrations, proclivities, and predispositions in the international arena. President Obama himself is famously transactional when it comes to relations with other leaders; in my new article on his foreign policy, I make note of his strong belief that countries tend to act in what their leaders perceive to be their core interests, and I’ve come to see that Obama doesn’t place enormous value in the notion that well-developed personal relationships between leaders could ever trump the cold-eyed pursuit of those interests. Nevertheless, he has intense relationships with many world leaders—and he has become, in his last years as president, a mentor to a handful of important new ones.
In speaking over the years with senior officials in his administration and other close observers of the president’s conduct of foreign relations, I’ve gathered impressions of how they parse the president’s view of his counterparts in other countries. Sometimes, in interviews with me, the president has rendered his own judgments. Drawing on these conversations, I’ve attempted to place some of these leaders on a continuum reflecting the state of their relations with Obama—from actually warm to ice-cold.
Pope Francis
President Obama’s favorite world leader is the one who commands no divisions. When the pope visited Washington this past September, Obama went to Joint Base Andrews to welcome him personally. He doesn’t do that for anyone. What does Obama like about the pope? Among other things, he views the pope as a devout believer who nevertheless is fully committed to pluralism. This sort of commitment is what Obama is seeking from Muslim leaders, and it is what progressive Muslim leaders are seeking from the more fundamentalist-minded clerics in their midst.
Angela Merkel
Merkel is perhaps Obama’s favorite ally. Transactional, clinical—an actual scientist by training—and emotionally self-contained, she also possesses a quality Obama says he admires: political courage. Her position on the absorption of Middle Eastern refugees might cost her her job. Obama, I get the sense, believes he would do what she has done if faced with similar circumstances. Their relationship appears to have recovered from revelations that U.S intelligence was spying on her.
Malcolm Turnbull
Obama has apparently formed a good impression of the new Australian prime minister, but Turnbull has a structural advantage: American presidents tend to like Australian prime ministers. One administration official told me, “Our allies all give us headaches, except for Australia. You can always count on Australia.”
David Cameron
Obama, who is something of a retrenchment president—prudently and cheaply managing America’s commitments overseas, watching the budget, being careful in making assurances to allies—sees Cameron as a retrenchment prime minister. Tensions developed between the two administrations last year when Cameron initially balked at committing 2 percent of Britain’s GDP to defense. Obama warned Cameron that he would have to pay his fair share or else set a damaging precedent within NATO. Although Obama told me that Britain, under Cameron, and France, under Nicolas Sarkozy, got “distracted” after the Libya War and didn’t fulfill their commitments, Obama’s aides say he likes the prime minister and sees him a bit like a younger brother. One British official described the relationship this way: “Neither man is needy, which is good for both of them.”
Lee Hsien Loong
This is just an educated guess on my part, but the ideal country, in Obama’s mind, would combine the strong safety-net culture of Scandinavia and the nose-to-the-grindstone ethos of Singapore, which is led by Lee, the eldest son of Singapore’s legendary first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore’s leader, like leaders of Scandinavian countries, governs coolly and rationally, in Obama’s view—no unnecessary fireworks, no drama, and no gratuitous, and messy, emotions.
Justin Trudeau
Trudeau, the new Canadian prime minister, who was described to me by one State Department official as a “mini-Obama,” comes into office with a built-in advantage: He is not his predecessor—the hard-edged, right-leaning Stephen Harper. The White House honored Trudeau with a state dinner in early March in part out of relief that a like-minded prime minister now rules in Ottawa. Obama, I’m told, sees Trudeau as very much the younger brother and is mentoring him actively.
Shinzo Abe
One administration official told me that Obama has a deft touch with “awkward Asian leaders”—the older the better, I was told by one State Department official—but he and Abe, the Japanese prime minister, have not warmed to each other. On a recent visit by Obama to Japan, Abe staged a dinner at a famous sushi restaurant, hoping that the informal atmosphere, and renowned sushi, would allow the two men to bond. But Obama, sources say, declined to make small talk, instead limiting the discussion to defense and trade issues. Abe was said to be wounded by Obama’s standoffishness.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan
The crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de-facto leader of the United Arab Emirates thinks of Obama as “untrustworthy”—there are hard feelings in the Arab Gulf over what was perceived as Obama’s jettisoning of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, during the Arab Spring—but he is said to respect the president’s intellect. The opposite is also true: MBZ, as he is known, is one of the few Arab leaders whom Obama believes to be a substantive, strategic thinker, and Obama considers him the most impressive, and progressive, leader in the Gulf (a low bar, to be sure). Increasingly, officials in the Obama administration are coming to understand that the United Arab Emirates is the crucial player in the otherwise dysfunctional and ineffective Gulf Cooperation Council.
Uhuru Kenyatta
Obama’s relationship with Kenyatta is complicated. A careful reading of Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, suggests that he holds Kenyatta’s father, Jomo Kenyatta, the liberator of Kenya, indirectly responsible for his own father’s premature demise. (The elder Kenyatta, a member of the Kikuyu tribe, froze out Obama’s father, a Luo, from government service after the elder Obama complained too insistently about corruption.) And the younger Kenyatta’s association with human-rights violators has placed a question mark over his head. But Obama also believes that Kenyatta is at least intermittently committed to battling tribalism and corruption, and aides tell me that Obama will devote a part of his post-presidential years to the issue of African governance.
Xi Jinping
Obama finds Xi a marked improvement as an interlocutor over his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who would read from index cards during their meetings. And because he finds Xi more adept, he also finds him more formidable, particularly on South China Sea issues, where the U.S. and China could come into conflict. One aide told me that during his meetings with Hu, Obama was tempted to turn to his iPad, which is what he does when conversation partners bore him.
Raul Castro
At Nelson Mandela’s funeral, Obama surprised Castro by greeting him cordially. Castro went back to Cuba thinking that Obama might be serious about upending the status quo between their two countries. My impression is Obama understands that Castro is a dictator, but believes that Raul, like his brother Fidel, agrees that the “Cuban model” of economic management is unsustainable.
Mahmoud Abbas
Obama believes that it is up to the Israelis, as the stronger of the parties in their dispute with the Palestinians, to take the bolder steps for peace. And he has argued that Abbas, the Palestinian president, is the most moderate leader his people might ever produce. Abbas, Obama once told me, “is sincere about his willingness to recognize Israel and its right to exist, to recognize Israel’s legitimate security needs, to shun violence.” But Obama administration officials also see Abbas as weak, ineffective, and uncreative. For his part, Abbas believes that Obama is all hat, no horse: a critic of Israeli policies on the West Bank who won’t do anything to change those policies.
Daniel Ortega
Obama views the Nicaraguan as a tiresome Marxist ideologue in the Hugo Chávez style, but without Chávez’s panache. For Obama, Ortega is a classic example of a Latin American leftist who doesn’t know that the forces of history are working against him. One of Obama’s mainly unrecognized foreign-policy achievements has been to outwit the now-dying anti-American “ALBA” movement, made up of hard-left Bolivarian ideologues.
King Salman
It is no secret that Obama’s least favorite family on planet Earth might be the House of Saud. In his first foreign-policy speech of note, in 2002, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, referred to Saudi Arabia as a “so-called ally” of the United States. At least a few Obama administration officials don’t believe that the family, which officials blame for fomenting fundamentalism and misogyny across the Muslim world, will be in power in 10 or 15 years.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
My impression is that Obama sees the Egyptian strongman as a Mubarak, but less clever and more brutal—a frightened general who is setting in motion the same cycle of suppression and radical reaction that Mubarak, the longtime ruler (and U.S. client), oversaw until he was booted from office in 2011. One administration official told me that if you want to put Obama in a bad mood, tell him he has to go to a Situation Room meeting about Egypt.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Erdogan has disappointed Obama like few others. Obama came into office thinking that the Turkish leader, a so-called moderate Islamist, would serve as a bridge between the United States and Muslims. But the king of Jordan, Abdullah II, among others, warned Obama that Erdogan was a false democrat. “Erdogan once said that democracy for him is a bus ride,” Abdullah told Obama. “‘Once I get to my stop, I’m getting off.’” It took a long time for Obama to realize that Erdogan’s critics in the region were correct.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Netanyahu is the world leader who consistently frustrates Obama the most, in large part because they are supposed to be close friends. Israel is America’s closest ally in the Middle East, and it is also, in many ways, a U.S. dependency. Obama believes that he understands Israel’s existential dilemmas better than Netanyahu does, and Netanyahu sees Obama as hopelessly naive. Obama also sees Netanyahu, who tried hard to sink Obama’s Iran deal, as a political rival and as a fountain of condescension. Obama’s biggest complaint: Netanyahu has no political courage, and won’t take risks to bring about a two-state solution. Obama expressed the core of his complaint about Netanyahu in an interview: His constant question to Netanyahu, he told me, was, “If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who? How does this get resolved?”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Sources tell me Obama’s private view is that Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, is an aging, brittle anti-Semite (Obama has actually publicly described the ayatollah as an anti-Semite, but not as aging or brittle) who is blocking reform and will continue to stymie the modernizers, including President Hassan Rouhani, as long as he is supreme leader. Unlike others in his administration, Obama, it seems, doesn’t expect much real change while Khamenei is in power, and doesn’t expect to visit Tehran before the end of his presidency, unlike Havana.
Vladimir Putin
“Not completely stupid” is how Obama describes the Russian leader. My previous understanding was that Obama viewed Putin in Hobbesian terms: nasty, brutish, and short. But Obama doesn’t find him nasty—Putin doesn’t leave him waiting for meetings, as he does other leaders. Obama believes Putin to be a thug, one who doesn’t understand his own best interests, but he also believes Putin understands Obama’s own red lines. Putin, for his part, sees Obama as hopelessly over-evolved. He’s said to be contemptuous of Obama’s lectures concerning Russia’s best interests, and he does not find Obama frightening.
—The Atlantic

How Obama Views the Men and Women Who (Also) Rule the World

A rough guide to the president�s relationships with other leaders

During the course of reporting on the Obama administrations foreign and defense policies over the past several years, Ive gained a certain level of insight into its frustrations, proclivities, and predispositions in the international arena. President Obama himself is famously transactional when it comes to relations with other leaders; in my new article on his foreign policy, I make note of his strong belief that countries tend to act in what their leaders perceive to be their core interests, and Ive come to see that Obama doesnt place enormous value in the notion that well-developed personal relationships between leaders could ever trump the cold-eyed pursuit of those interests. Nevertheless, he has intense relationships with many world leadersand he has become, in his last years as president, a mentor to a handful of important new ones. In speaking over the years with senior officials in his administration and other close observers of the presidents conduct of foreign relations, Ive gathered impressions of how they parse the presidents view of his counterparts in other countries. Sometimes, in interviews with me, the president has rendered his own judgments. Drawing on these conversations, Ive attempted to place some of these leaders on a continuum reflecting the state of their relations with Obamafrom actually warm to ice-cold. Pope Francis President Obamas favorite world leader is the one who commands no divisions. When the pope visited Washington this past September, Obama went to Joint Base Andrews to welcome him personally. He doesnt do that for anyone. What does Obama like about the pope? Among other things, he views the pope as a devout believer who nevertheless is fully committed to pluralism. This sort of commitment is what Obama is seeking from Muslim leaders, and it is what progressive Muslim leaders are seeking from the more fundamentalist-minded clerics in their midst. Angela Merkel Merkel is perhaps Obamas favorite ally. Transactional, clinicalan actual scientist by trainingand emotionally self-contained, she also possesses a quality Obama says he admires: political courage. Her position on the absorption of Middle Eastern refugees might cost her her job. Obama, I get the sense, believes he would do what she has done if faced with similar circumstances. Their relationship appears to have recovered from revelations that U.S intelligence was spying on her. Malcolm Turnbull Obama has apparently formed a good impression of the new Australian prime minister, but Turnbull has a structural advantage: American presidents tend to like Australian prime ministers. One administration official told me, Our allies all give us headaches, except for Australia. You can always count on Australia. David Cameron Obama, who is something of a retrenchment presidentprudently and cheaply managing Americas commitments overseas, watching the budget, being careful in making assurances to alliessees Cameron as a retrenchment prime minister. Tensions developed between the two administrations last year when Cameron initially balked at committing 2 percent of Britains GDP to defense. Obama warned Cameron that he would have to pay his fair share or else set a damaging precedent within NATO. Although Obama told me that Britain, under Cameron, and France, under Nicolas Sarkozy, got distracted after the Libya War and didnt fulfill their commitments, Obamas aides say he likes the prime minister and sees him a bit like a younger brother. One British official described the relationship this way: Neither man is needy, which is good for both of them. Lee Hsien Loong This is just an educated guess on my part, but the ideal country, in Obamas mind, would combine the strong safety-net culture of Scandinavia and the nose-to-the-grindstone ethos of Singapore, which is led by Lee, the eldest son of Singapores legendary first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Singapores leader, like leaders of Scandinavian countries, governs coolly and rationally, in Obamas viewno unnecessary fireworks, no drama, and no gratuitous, and messy, emotions. Justin Trudeau Trudeau, the new Canadian prime minister, who was described to me by one State Department official as a mini-Obama, comes into office with a built-in advantage: He is not his predecessorthe hard-edged, right-leaning Stephen Harper. The White House honored Trudeau with a state dinner in early March in part out of relief that a like-minded prime minister now rules in Ottawa. Obama, Im told, sees Trudeau as very much the younger brother and is mentoring him actively. Shinzo Abe One administration official told me that Obama has a deft touch with awkward Asian leadersthe older the better, I was told by one State Department officialbut he and Abe, the Japanese prime minister, have not warmed to each other. On a recent visit by Obama to Japan, Abe staged a dinner at a famous sushi restaurant, hoping that the informal atmosphere, and renowned sushi, would allow the two men to bond. But Obama, sources say, declined to make small talk, instead limiting the discussion to defense and trade issues. Abe was said to be wounded by Obamas standoffishness. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan The crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de-facto leader of the United Arab Emirates thinks of Obama as untrustworthythere are hard feelings in the Arab Gulf over what was perceived as Obamas jettisoning of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, during the Arab Springbut he is said to respect the presidents intellect. The opposite is also true: MBZ, as he is known, is one of the few Arab leaders whom Obama believes to be a substantive, strategic thinker, and Obama considers him the most impressive, and progressive, leader in the Gulf (a low bar, to be sure). Increasingly, officials in the Obama administration are coming to understand that the United Arab Emirates is the crucial player in the otherwise dysfunctional and ineffective Gulf Cooperation Council. Uhuru Kenyatta Obamas relationship with Kenyatta is complicated. A careful reading of Obamas memoir, Dreams From My Father, suggests that he holds Kenyattas father, Jomo Kenyatta, the liberator of Kenya, indirectly responsible for his own fathers premature demise. (The elder Kenyatta, a member of the Kikuyu tribe, froze out Obamas father, a Luo, from government service after the elder Obama complained too insistently about corruption.) And the younger Kenyattas association with human-rights violators has placed a question mark over his head. But Obama also believes that Kenyatta is at least intermittently committed to battling tribalism and corruption, and aides tell me that Obama will devote a part of his post-presidential years to the issue of African governance. Xi Jinping Obama finds Xi a marked improvement as an interlocutor over his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who would read from index cards during their meetings. And because he finds Xi more adept, he also finds him more formidable, particularly on South China Sea issues, where the U.S. and China could come into conflict. One aide told me that during his meetings with Hu, Obama was tempted to turn to his iPad, which is what he does when conversation partners bore him. Raul Castro At Nelson Mandelas funeral, Obama surprised Castro by greeting him cordially. Castro went back to Cuba thinking that Obama might be serious about upending the status quo between their two countries. My impression is Obama understands that Castro is a dictator, but believes that Raul, like his brother Fidel, agrees that the Cuban model of economic management is unsustainable. Mahmoud Abbas Obama believes that it is up to the Israelis, as the stronger of the parties in their dispute with the Palestinians, to take the bolder steps for peace. And he has argued that Abbas, the Palestinian president, is the most moderate leader his people might ever produce. Abbas, Obama once told me, is sincere about his willingness to recognize Israel and its right to exist, to recognize Israels legitimate security needs, to shun violence. But Obama administration officials also see Abbas as weak, ineffective, and uncreative. For his part, Abbas believes that Obama is all hat, no horse: a critic of Israeli policies on the West Bank who wont do anything to change those policies. Daniel Ortega Obama views the Nicaraguan as a tiresome Marxist ideologue in the Hugo Chvez style, but without Chvezs panache. For Obama, Ortega is a classic example of a Latin American leftist who doesnt know that the forces of history are working against him. One of Obamas mainly unrecognized foreign-policy achievements has been to outwit the now-dying anti-American ALBA movement, made up of hard-left Bolivarian ideologues. King Salman It is no secret that Obamas least favorite family on planet Earth might be the House of Saud. In his first foreign-policy speech of note, in 2002, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, referred to Saudi Arabia as a so-called ally of the United States. At least a few Obama administration officials dont believe that the family, which officials blame for fomenting fundamentalism and misogyny across the Muslim world, will be in power in 10 or 15 years. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi My impression is that Obama sees the Egyptian strongman as a Mubarak, but less clever and more brutala frightened general who is setting in motion the same cycle of suppression and radical reaction that Mubarak, the longtime ruler (and U.S. client), oversaw until he was booted from office in 2011. One administration official told me that if you want to put Obama in a bad mood, tell him he has to go to a Situation Room meeting about Egypt. Recep Tayyip Erdogan Erdogan has disappointed Obama like few others. Obama came into office thinking that the Turkish leader, a so-called moderate Islamist, would serve as a bridge between the United States and Muslims. But the king of Jordan, Abdullah II, among others, warned Obama that Erdogan was a false democrat. Erdogan once said that democracy for him is a bus ride, Abdullah told Obama. Once I get to my stop, Im getting off. It took a long time for Obama to realize that Erdogans critics in the region were correct. Benjamin Netanyahu Netanyahu is the world leader who consistently frustrates Obama the most, in large part because they are supposed to be close friends. Israel is Americas closest ally in the Middle East, and it is also, in many ways, a U.S. dependency. Obama believes that he understands Israels existential dilemmas better than Netanyahu does, and Netanyahu sees Obama as hopelessly naive. Obama also sees Netanyahu, who tried hard to sink Obamas Iran deal, as a political rival and as a fountain of condescension. Obamas biggest complaint: Netanyahu has no political courage, and wont take risks to bring about a two-state solution. Obama expressed the core of his complaint about Netanyahu in an interview: His constant question to Netanyahu, he told me, was, If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who? How does this get resolved? Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Sources tell me Obamas private view is that Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, is an aging, brittle anti-Semite (Obama has actually publicly described the ayatollah as an anti-Semite, but not as aging or brittle) who is blocking reform and will continue to stymie the modernizers, including President Hassan Rouhani, as long as he is supreme leader. Unlike others in his administration, Obama, it seems, doesnt expect much real change while Khamenei is in power, and doesnt expect to visit Tehran before the end of his presidency, unlike Havana. Vladimir Putin Not completely stupid is how Obama describes the Russian leader. My previous understanding was that Obama viewed Putin in Hobbesian terms: nasty, brutish, and short. But Obama doesnt find him nastyPutin doesnt leave him waiting for meetings, as he does other leaders. Obama believes Putin to be a thug, one who doesnt understand his own best interests, but he also believes Putin understands Obamas own red lines. Putin, for his part, sees Obama as hopelessly over-evolved. Hes said to be contemptuous of Obamas lectures concerning Russias best interests, and he does not find Obama frightening. The Atlantic