Hillary’s crudely made toy reset button for relations with Russia was defective from the day she had it made. It said “reset” in English for Americans who would see photos of it and “peregruzka” for Russians. Undoubtedly, a lot of thought went into putting the Russian word first in order to make the Russian’s feel good, since the button was being presented to Russians, not to Americans. However, not much thought went into how the word was written. Hillary Clinton’s state department missed the little detail that Russians read in Cyrillic alphabet, not in Roman. As a result, Russians had to read their own language in the American way. Rather symbolic, I think, of the ham-fisted way in which America has approached Russia on many issues from George Bush onward. “We’ll work with you … our way.”
Russians also found the Clinton reset button amusing because the Russian word Hillary Clinton and her Department of State chose actually meant “overload.” Oops. A truer word for Clinton’s relations with Russia during her time as US secretary of state and Obama’s relations from that point forward could not have been chosen.
What Hillary apparently didn’t foresee when she presented her toy reset button back in March of 2009 was that she brought the wrong button to her meeting with Russia’s foreign minister. Without realizing it, she was holding out the opportunity for her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to put his finger on the nuclear button. Ironically, it said “reset” in English only because the policies of the Clinton state department and the subsequent Kerry state department would ultimately reset Russian-American relations back to Cold War status.
Hillary miscalculated Russian response in Syria
While the next article in this series will establish from Wikileaks archive of Hillary Clinton’s emails that the Clinton State Department always intended a war against Syria for the sake of regime change, I want to point out one part of that masterplan that shows how Hillary’s strategies clearly misfired.
The Department of State, under Hillary’s lead, put out a document recommending war against Syria, that assured President Obama — based on Hillary’s close experience with her Husband’s war in Kosovo — that Russia would never involve itself in a Syrian War if the Obama administration chose to take the State Department’s advice and pursue regime change:
Russia will never support such a mission [as regime change in Syria], so there is no point operating through the UN Security Council. Some argue that U.S. involvement risks a wider war with Russia. But the Kosovo example shows otherwise. In that case, Russia had genuine ethnic and political ties to the Serbs, which don’t exist between Russia and Syria, and even then Russia did little more than complain. (Wikileaks)
Oops! I guess Russia thought differently after years of feeling pushed around its borders by the US and realized that it needs to do more than complain if the US is going to take its objections seriously and not discount them as the State Department did above. Rather than just complain Russia leaped directly into the Syrian Civil War with its own bombers.
This week, it took another leap and ended cooperation on its nuclear treaty with the US, taking both nations deeper into Cold War status. Oops again in terms of Hillary’s calculations about how Russia would respond to US efforts to turn over the Assad regime.
As the next article will show (“
Wikileaks Proves Syria about Iran and Israel“), the cost of getting a tenuous nuclear “deal” with Iran was the loss of an established nuclear
treaty with Russia. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s a winning outcome; but it is clearly a case where Hillary’s state department miscalculated how much the US can keep pushing Russia around, which the next step in Russia’s warnings makes even more clear:
Hillary’s War in Syria becomes a proxy war with Russia
While a few have claimed US involvement in the Syrian war was really intended as a proxy war against Russia, I think the next article will show that the US simply miscalculated how involved Russia would get in Syria because they show the state department clearly had a different (but equally imperial) motive than engaging with Russia. In the statement above, they show they didn’t believe Russia would get involved at all.
That said, the proximity of war with Russia in Syria certainly intensified Friday. Russia has placed anti-aircraft artillery in and around areas where Assad’s forces are located, and then issued the following warning late last week:
An extraordinary warning tonight from Russia to the US against conducting military strikes in Syria. In a strongly worded statement, a spokesperson for the Russian defense minister said any [US] strikes against President Bashar Assad’s regime … could result in American aircraft being shot down. (
ABC)
US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter responded Friday that Russia will face the consequences for its growing involvement in Syria. (See, they are surprised Russia has had the boxy to involve itself in a way that endangers US aircraft as a result of earlier advice from Hillary that said it wouldn’t. Thus, the Obama administration professes outrage that things have taken this seriously dangerous turn.)
The Pentagon this week has been presenting the Obama administration with options for potential strikes on Assad’s air force bases to punish the regime for its failure to abide by the recent ceasefire agreement. (And, as the next article shows, because overthrowing Assad was always Plan One as a measure of support for Israel.) State Department officials, however, have said that Obama is unlikely to approve the strikes, though the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in favor of them.
To this news of recommended air strikes directly against Assad, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, the Russian defense ministry spokesman, responded,
I would recommend our colleagues in Washington to thoroughly consider the possible consequences of the realization of such plans.
This is about as close as you get to a hot war with Russia without actually being in one. Russia is not just saber rattling. It is saying its missiles
will be in the air, and Russia won’t have time to coordinate missile flight plans with the US. So, if the US happens to be in the air in the same place and same time, its planes could get shot down.
