Sharing the spotlight

IT WAS almost like one of those moments in a buddy-cop movie when the two partners who dislike each other at the beginning finally bond while taking on the bad guys.

In mid-December Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were in Copenhagen, where the leaders of more than 100 countries had gathered to negotiate a new agreement to combat global warming, and the summit was on the verge of collapse. Clinton later described it as the most disorganised meeting she’d seen since her eighth-grade student council.

It “was just disintegrating right before everybody’s eyes,” she recalled. Clinton and her former political rival, now the president, found themselves up against most of the rest of the world. At the last minute, Obama sought a one-on-one meeting with the Chinese leader to rescue some kind of agreement, only to be told that Premier Wen Jiabao and his team still weren’t ready to meet (after two years of prior procrastination).