PUTIN’S RESET

Korea and Iran and a slew apologies by President Obama to nearly every global
audience – initially ranging from Europeans to the Muslim world and later to the
citizens of Hanoi and Hiroshima – for what he considered “arrogant” previous U.S.
policies.
Mr. Obama hoped this new approach would improve U.S. relations with its
enemies and reduce the threat to the United States from Islamist terrorist groups. He
was wrong. There was a huge increase in Iran’s nuclear program between 2009 and
2013. Iran also tested long-range missiles believed to be prototype ICBMs. North
Korea conducted its second nuclear test in May 2009 and expanded its missiles tests.
The threat from Islamist terrorism grew. ISIS was born due to a resurgence in
sectarian violence in Iraq that might have been avoided if President Obama had left a
small contingent of U.S. troops behind when U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq at the
end of 2011. The president’s inept policies in Syria and Iraq – including a $500
million train-and-equip program to arm “moderate” Syrian rebels that he was forced
to cancel -- worsened the crises in both states.
The Obama administration also began an effort to reset U.S.-Russia relations
after what it claimed were overly confrontational policies of the Bush administration
toward Russia. To announce this reset, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on March 6, 2009 with a box containing a
symbolic “reset” button. Lavrov mocked Clinton when receiving the box because
lettering, which she thought was the Russian word for reset actually was the Russian
word "peregruzka” which means “overcharged.”
Lavrov’s mocking of Clinton over the translation mistake was probably the
first public sign of the Putin government’s disrespect for the Obama administration.
It was followed by unyielding positions during talks to negotiate a follow-on
agreement to the START I Treaty which expired in December 2009. The Obama
administration’s desperation for this agreement led it to abandon the “Third Site”
missile defense initiative by scrapping plans to build missile defense facilities in
Poland and the Czech Republic due to Russian opposition. This move alienated the
Czech and Polish governments – both of which had resisted strong political pressure
at home and from Moscow regarding their agreement to host the Third Site
interceptors on their territories. More importantly, the Third Site cancellation was
seen as America betraying its allies to appease Moscow. This weakness is, as Mark
Schneider explains in this book, how Russia succeeded in making New START into
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