Obama, Medvedev reset ties with pact

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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Making good on a pledge to rebuild relations from a post-Cold War low, U.S. President Obama and Russian President Medvedev issued a joint statement saying the "era when our countries viewed each other as enemies is long over." They pledged to work together to limit their nuclear arsenals and the White House also announced that Obama would visit Moscow this summer.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, limits the world's two largest nuclear arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads and expires Dec. 5.

The flurry of diplomacy ahead of a global economic summit in London came as Obama stepped on the world stage for the first time as president, aiming to shore up both America's economy and its reputation across the globe.

He met with British Preimer Gordon Brown and held face-to-face talks with Russian and Chinese leaderships - the two nations most aggressively challenging the U.S. position atop the global order. He has accepted an invitation by President Hu Jintao to visit China in the second half of 2009, the White House said, after talks between the two leaders.

As for nuclear arms control, the presidents of the U.S. and Russia said in a joint statement that "we are instructing our negotiators to start talks immediately on this new treaty and to report on results achieved in working out the new agreement by July," according to The Associated Press.

"In the past years, there were strains in relations between our two countries and they were drifting in the wrong direction," Medvedev told reporters. "This was not in the interests of the United States, Russia or global stability. We agreed to open a new page in these relations, to reset them, given the joint responsibilities of our states for the situation in the world," Reuters quoted him as saying.

Obama trumpeted the new arms undertaking as representing "great progress" between Moscow and Washington on areas where the two have mutual interests, although he also said he wouldn't try to minimize differences. "What we're seeing today is the beginning of new progress in U.S.-Russian relations," he said. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs noted that the two countries have not settled on a new cap for nuclear arms.

On the eve of G20 summit, Obama promised world leaders he would listen, not lecture, as they seek a common fix to the financial crisis. "We can only meet this challenge together," he said yesterday. Speaking directly to anxious families back home, Obama sought to restore consumer confidence and encourage people to think about spending now to help their future. "Basing decisions around fear is not the right way to go," he said. "We are going to get through this difficult time."

The president also disputed criticism that the U.S. was feuding with other nations about the need to pump more money into economic stimulus policies.

Meanwhile, Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, heading to London for the G20 summit, said he wanted to accelerate talks with the International Monetary Fund and he would have an opportunity meet IMF officials at the high-level meeting.