The 100 day mark of a new Administration’s first term serves as the cue for the punditocracy to opine at a fever pitch, and with the Obama Administration reaching its first 100 days, they are predictably doing what they do best. Of course, this is an artificial and arbitrary milestone, so the pronouncements of the punditocracy have to be taken with a grain of salt. Even so, there are trends that are worth noticing and highlighting.
One such trend is the Obama Administration’s retrograde attitude towards Russian-American relations. Ever since the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, American Presidents have sought to bring Russian-American relations out of the shadows of the Cold War. Even before the old Soviet Union came to an end, President Bush the Elder, seeing the “New World Order” that was emerging with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, sought to integrate the Soviet Union with the pursuit of American security interests–making it a partner, for example, in the effort to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. President Clinton worked to transform Russia from an economic basket case with a bad totalitarian hangover into a modern country with a working and workable economy. And alluding to his own desire to make a partner out of Russia, President George W. Bush told the world early on in his first term that he had looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and gotten a sense of his soul. This statement would come back to haunt President Bush, who was roundly criticized as naïve for having made it. But it testified to his desire to transcend the old Cold War template and firmly establish a new, positive, and lasting relationship with the successor country to the Soviet Union.
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