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End of the Affair: Inevitable Collapse of Obama’s Russian Reset

Daily Beast

After Snowden and snubs, the relationship between Obama and Putin has reached an all-time low. Peter Pomeranzev on the death of the Russian reset.

It usually ends in tears. The Kremlin-White House romance, has fallen repeatedly from starry-eyed hope and foreign policy petting to hysterics and blame-gaming.

Jimmy Carter thought he could find a partner in Brezhnev. He cast off ‘containment’ and encouraged America to lose the ‘inordinate fear of communism’: by the end of his term he was boycotting the Moscow Olympics as the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Bill Clinton went in for drinking sessions and back-slapping with Boris Yeltsin, but the more he backed him the more corrupt Yeltsin’s regime became and the more the US was discredited: by the time NATO bombed Yugoslavia, the Kremlin was already grinding its teeth. George W. looked into Putin’s eyes and claimed he could “see his soul” (“I looked into Putin’s eyes and saw KGB” quipped the less smitten Colin Powell): by 2008 they were almost at war over Georgia and relations were back to a “Cold War low”. Obama’s decision today to snub his September tête-à-tête with Putin “due to a lack of progress on missiles, arms control, trade, commercial relations, global security, human rights, civil society and…Edward Snowden “ fell on the five year anniversary of the Georgian war. It feels like the beginning of the end of the ‘”reset with Russia”, the policy that has defined Obama’s own dalliance with the Kremlin.