Given Iran’s well established pattern of behavior (and Russia’s, and China’s) we were highly skeptical about President Barack Obama’s “Reset Button” approach to U.S. diplomacy. And now it seems that the failure of Obama administration’s Iranian engagement strategy is about to shift the focus of U.S. diplomacy from “reset” to “panic.” Reuters reports: The United States wants the U.N. Security Council to approve a resolution within weeks, not months, laying the ground for new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert …
The world needs American leadership. In the interwar years, we saw that the enemies of freedom advance when the great liberal and democratic powers of the day failed to lead. We saw it again in the dark years of the Cold War under President Carter. The alternative to an America willing and able to lead is not a paradise of peace through engagement. It is a world where the undemocratic, the unsatisfied, and the illiberal powers of the world advance at the expense of American ideals, American interests, and America’s …
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 …
The media and pundits alike have skewered the Clinton State Department for giving Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a prop “reset button” when Secretary Clinton met with him in Geneva earlier in the month. Obviously it is a bad idea to reset relations with Russia only weeks into a new presidential term, especially given the number of outstanding sensitive issues that the United States should maintain some level of leadership on, rather than ceding all ground to Russia. But this episode also demonstrated a clear lack of leadership at the …
