Sunday, August 23, 2009

Hitting the Deset Button

It's kind of funny to read this Time story. Once, bad US-Russian relations were all George W. Bush's fault and the new Obama administration would heal all.

But now that Russia is still acting like Russia and US-Russian relations don't look like they are improving as promised, it is all Russia's fault:

The reset, announced by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in February, was meant to signal the rebuilding of the relationship between the U.S. and Russia that had soured under George W. Bush. But despite some progress on issues such as arms control and Afghanistan when U.S. President Barack Obama visited Moscow in July, it's back to business as usual for Russia with its neighbors, as it tries to assert its authority despite the U.S.'s disapproval. "The one thing that could most endanger the reset policy would be really bad Russian behavior in the post-Soviet states," says Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "The Russians don't want to recreate the Soviet Union, but they do want a sysem in which their neighbors pay close deference to what Moscow determines to be its vital national interests. The United States has a different view."


Fancy that. We have different views.

My only surprise is that the Time-based Obama interns didn't try to continue to blame bad relations on Bush.