The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

After the opening talking points had been delivered and the conversation became more casual, Medvedev surprised us when he said, Gaddafi has to go. He is messianic. It was a pattern that we’d seen—Medvedev breaking somewhat from the Russian hard line and saying what he seemed to truly believe. You got the sense that he was further out in front of Putin than we knew. Later in the meeting, when Obama explained to him that he couldn’t just demand that the WTO grant membership to Russia because he wasn’t all-powerful, Medvedev agreed and came back to Gaddafi. No one is all-powerful, he said, except the man with the little green book. It was a reference to the bizarre book of political propaganda that Gaddafi had published in 1975. Among other things, it instructed people on how to breast-feed, dress, and design sporting venues. Medvedev, it seemed, had a hard time feigning support for the more extreme thugs aligned with Russian interests.