The (Ex) Washington Realist

I read your TNI commentary; well put.

The comments from Richard Holbrooke do not surprise me - he was one of the chief instigators of the foolish EU-US policies in the Balkans. May God protect us from the do-gooders.

I would like also to point out also that Iran, already entrenched in Armenia, will be in a position to return back the area including Georgia, after a 200-year old absence, in the near future.

I wonder what Richard Holbrooke’s reaction would be then?
 

You can either choose not to deal with people you find awful and reprehensible; that is a defensible choice. Or you can hold your nose and figure out what exchanges you are prepared to countenance to get your priorities. What you can't expect is other people you find immoral and evil to somehow do you favors because they recognize your superior morality.
 

Holbrooke does get one thing right when he says that Washington now needs Moscow more than Moscow needs Washington. And this day was always coming, during those days when we were up and they were down. Unfortunately for us, between the crap economic advice, NATO expansion, the Kosovo war, more NATO expansion, and tearing up the ABM Treaty, the Russian government learned not to rely on Washington for anything. So instead of being in this situation having established a 15 year bipartisan record of working situations for mutual benefit, we are in it having established a 15 year bipartisan record of exploiting Russian weakness and concessions as much as we could have. The Russian response to this abuse has been to systematically eliminate our leverage over them.


So here we are. We need the Russians. The Russians don't need us. So how do we rebuild the bridges Gorbachev tried to build and which we systematically wrecked now that we need them?