As the presidential race heats up in the US, Republicans are set to make foreign policy a major campaign issue with Vladimir Putin serving as the quintessential example of what happens when The White House looks to ‘appease’ a head of state bent on the illegitimate expansion of national borders by violating the sovereignty of his neighbors.
The extent to which that characterization of Russia’s recent actions in Eastern Europe approximates reality almost doesn’t matter. Voters in the US are notoriously nave and even if they weren’t (i.e. even if the American public adopted a healthy level of skepticism towards Russophobic campaign rhetoric), the idea of Russia as the antithesis of Western democratic values is so deeply rooted in the American conscious that a resurgent Moscow will likely always be viewed as a threat by the majority of ballot box-bound Americans. This means that any US president who seeks to ‘reset’ relations with the Kremlin takes an enormous political risk, because when things go wrong – as they have recently – political rivals will leap at the chance to point to deteriorating US-Russia relations as proof that Washington should forever and always adopt a hardline stance towards Moscow.
Recently, the Obama administration has seemingly given up on the ill-fated Russian ‘reset.’ Whether The White House’s increasingly aggressive stance is an attempt to help pave the way for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid (presumably Clinton could deflect criticism by pointing to Democrats’ toughening stance towards Moscow as evidence that when military realities trump political idealism, the Obama administration was quick to ‘reset’ the ‘reset,’ so to speak) or simply proves that when push comes to shove and post-USSR unipolarity is threatened, US presidents will ultimately abandon all pretenses that American foreign policy isn’t based on the projection of military might, is debatable but one thing is clear:
This post was published at Zero Hedge on 06/14/2015.
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