Make a plan; then make another plan. Both won't work.
- Bertolt Brecht
This is getting ridiculous. The President of the United States (POTUS) screamed and shouted because he wanted his spy (Edward Snowden) back. Snowden, following Russian laws, was granted temporary asylum. The White House was "disappointed".
Then POTUS snubbed the bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow coinciding with the Group of 20 in St Petersburg in early September. The Kremlin was equally "disappointed".
Putin sent a telegram to George "Dubya" Bush - wishing him a quick recovery from heart surgery. [1] POTUS went to a US talk show and said Russia tended to "slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality."
Brechtian distancing tells us that "ridiculous" does not even begin to describe it. The Cold War mentality is actually impregnated in the Beltway genes - from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon. As for POTUS, he acted like a diplomatic dilettante at best. "Yes, We Can" has morphed into "Yes, We Scan"; and now it's "Yes, We Scorn". This may apply to assorted poodles of European breeding, but it won't stick to Vlad the Hammer.
The White House justified its decision by "lack of progress" on everything including missile defense, arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, human rights and civil society. Nonsense; this was all about an impotent POTUS prevented from prosecuting his war against whistleblowers. Putin's foreign affairs adviser, Yury Ushakov, was closer to the truth when he said, "The US is not ready to build relations on an equal basis."
Comment: These "new efforts to increase transparency and build greater confidence" are to be seen in the stunt the US government pulled last week by shutting down its embassies in a swathe of predominantly Muslim countries, massively stepping up its bombing campaigns in several of them, and terrorising its citizens from straying beyond US borders.