The visuals on the split screen this week made a striking contrast. On one side, the leaders of Germany and the U.S. sat in front of the fireplace of the Oval Office, their body language cordial and relaxed, their messages coordinated. Facing the press later, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, switched spontaneously into redundant but frank English: “We will act together, and we will take all the necessary steps and all the necessary steps will be done by both of us together.”
The other side of my TV screen also showed a meeting of two leaders — French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The latter is the subject of all this crisis diplomacy as he masses troops around Ukraine.
Macron and Putin had already talked on the phone five times since December. Now they jaw-jawed for another six hours, facing each other across a long table in the sort of room you nowadays see only in the post-communist world — a space of bombast and cold lighting, designed to distance and intimidate people rather than connect them. The two men looked diminutive in it, their body language tense and shifty.
