Obamas Trip: A Mission to Reshape Us Image
July 4th, 2009
Obama | 
And when in Rome? Obama will go to the Vatican to see Pope Benedict XVI for their first meeting.
Obamas weeklong trip - he leaves Sunday night for Moscow - typifies the pace of his first-year agenda.
Capitalizing on his popularity and his partys hold on power in Washington, Obama is moving quickly and broadly on foreign policy. That often means overturning George W. Bushs policies or mending relations that Obama contends went adrift under his Republican predecessor.
Familiar foes may shadow Obama and his plans.
Iran and North Korea are defiantly pursuing nuclear weapons programs despite international penalties. Iran has taken a hard and deadly line against postelection protesters, while North Korea fired seven ballistic missiles off its eastern coast on Americas Independence Day. The North also has raised the prospect of a long-range missile launch, possibly toward Hawaii. The U.S. has positioned more missile defenses around the state.
Obamas trip is anchored around a yearly meeting of leaders from the worlds industrial powers, set for Italy. The Group of Eight countries - the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia - will try to make progress on climate change. Negotiations for a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases get under way in Denmark in December.
Before the Italy meeting, Obama holds a nuclear-arms-focused summit in the Russian capital. The final leg of the trip brings the first black U.S. president to Africa, home to Obamas late Kenyan-born father.
Obama set a tone for the Moscow meeting by saying in an Associated Press interview Thursday that he was off to a good start with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. But, Obama added, Vladimir Putin - Medvedevs predecessor and the current prime minister - “still has a lot of sway in Russia.”
Obama has separate meetings with them.
“I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new,” Obama said in the interview. Putin responded Friday by poking fun at Obamas imagery and saying the new U.S. president is wrong about him. A Putin spokesman said Obama would change his mind after meeting Putin.
“Putin knows that, given Medvedevs position, hes the guy who deals with foreign leaders,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a Russian expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But Putin wants to find ways of reminding everybody whos really in charge. And I dont doubt that he will find ways of doing that.”
The rhetoric leading up to the summit reflects the complex relationship between the countries. Putting down a friendly marker of his own before Obama shows up, Medvedev noted that conditions had worsened in recent years but now there is “only one road to follow - the road of agreement.”
Any tangible progress now will be held up as proof of better U.S.-Russia ties, and a step toward broader cooperation on ridding the world of nuclear arms.
Yet there is harder work ahead to determine how many weapons both sides will give up and how those steps will be verified. Both sides hope to have a final deal in place before a current treaty expires in December. And still unclear is whether Russia will insist on linking its weapons reduction to an issue it says is related - U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Europe.
Obama plans to give a major address on U.S.-Russia relations and meet with a range of civic leaders, hoping to turn around Russian attitudes of the U.S.
“I think that there have been times over the last several years where U.S.-Russian relations were not as strong as they should be,” Obama told state-owned Russia TV. “What I have said coming in is I want to press the restart button on relations between the United states and Russia.”
In Italy, the G-8 site was moved from a deluxe seaside resort in Sardinia to a military school in LAquila, where an earthquake in April killed 300 and displaced tens of thousands. Italy shifted the summit there to draw attention to the plight of the victims. Obama is expected to get a personal look at some of the damage.