Obama, Medvedev and Obduracy in Moscow

Look for presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev to emerge from their long hours of summitry this week massaging each other's shoulders, and riffing on their personal chemistry. While expressing the usual caveats, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will probably do the same. They will carefully avoid the soul-gazing verbage of George W. Bush, but the meaning will be similar.

That diplomatic lubrication won't make either side yield on the respective postures that mainly irritate the other side: Despite the knowledge that a U.S. missile defense system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic doesn't work, Obama isn't going to outright renounce its deployment, not without a fairly serious tradeoff from Moscow (and it's hard to imagine what that would be); and Medvedev won't relinquish Russia's insistence on a continued sphere of influence that includes the Caucasus, Central Asia and Ukraine, even if Obama outright cedes the right of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, which one can't picture him doing.

Certainly Obama isn't going to drive a wedge between Medvedev and Putin, nor drive the prime minister from influence, as seems to be the push in Washington. Obama should get accustomed to the apparent fact that Medvedev and Putin simply see eye to eye -- perhaps by necessity -- on most subjects.

Perhaps this is as it should be. My Business Week colleague Jason Bush and I write in this week's magazine on the business agenda for the summit. But in traditional Washington-Moscow relations, progress is made on the edges of obduracy. And in fact neither side wants much from the other. Washington would like more Russian cooperation on its initiatives; Moscow would like more respect.