US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin Photo: REUTERS
The Reset That Wasn’t -- Matthew Rojansky and Nikolas Gvosdev, New York Times
Writing in these pages over the past two years, we have warned that despite the 2009 “reset,” relations between the United States and Russia continued to drift downward.
Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Moscow in May raised a glimmer of hope that the relations could be improving, but the frosty tone and negative body language of the meetings between Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin in Northern Ireland last month signaled nothing of the sort.
Today there can be no doubt that the relationship has deteriorated dramatically, apparently hostage to a downward spiral of crisis and retaliation: last year’s pre-election scapegoating, the imposition of new reciprocal sanctions, a worsening proxy war in Syria and a potentially endless reservoir of recrimination over spies and dissidents, to name just a few symptoms.
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My Comment: I do not see U.S. - Russian relations improving during the rest of President Obama's term. The differences in personality and policies are just to great .... and more to the point .... their focus on what is important is not shared by the other.
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