Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publicly hit a red button to reset U.S.-Russia relations, the funny part wasn't that the State Department mistranslated "reset" as "overload." The button probably should have been labeled "rewind," and the funny part is that anyone thinks dramatic improvement in U.S.-Russia relations is possible.

The Obama administration placed its faith in two elder statesmen--Henry Kissinger and James Baker--to lay the groundwork for the first meeting of the U.S. and Russian presidents during this week's G-20 summit in London. That's the rewind. The rub is that both Kissinger and Baker have ties that raise questions about their ability to act as standard-bearers for the administration's Russia policy. At the...