A Year of Living Dangerously: Obama’s Disappointing “Russian Year”

Ariel Cohen / November 04, 2009

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Munich in March she presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a gift intended to symbolize the Obama administration’s desire to “push the reset button” on U.S. relations with Moscow. Problem is, the lettering on the little red button said “overload” (peregruzka), not “reset” (perezagruzka). This high level gaffe is just about the perfect symbol for how Obama’s Russian relation relaunch has gone.

White House wordsmiths seem to also have forgotten that if you push the reset button, old software bugs get reloaded. When it comes to Russia’s visceral suspicion of America, that’s exactly what happened. (more…)