Hillary Clinton Asked Why Russia “Reset” Didn’t Work, Blames Putin, Distances Herself From Failure

With U.S.-Russian relations appearing
to be at a thirty-year low the Obama Administration’s attempt to
“reset” relations with the former Cold War adversary has been an
utter failure. Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of state
while the administration was working on this reset and will likely
be a candidate for the presidency in 2016, would like to distance
herself from this pretty obvious, and pretty difficult to spin
away, foreign policy failure.

Asked by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria what happened to the reset,
Hillary Clinton provided a wandering answer that flagged her own
skepticism at the time and blamed it on Putin’s return to power in
2011 (everyone in the world knew this was coming, not just the top
men). A portion of her answer,
via CNN:

So when he announced in the fall of 2011 that he would be
changing positions with Medvedev, I knew that he would be more
difficult to deal with. He had been always the power behind
Medvedev, but he had given Medvedev a lot of independence to do
exactly what you said and make the reset a success.

I saw that firsthand with respect to the primary elections in
Russia, because they were filled with irregularities and Russian
people poured out in the streets to protest. And I, as Secretary of
State, said the Russians deserve better. They deserved elections
that reflected their will.

Putin attacked me personally because he is very worried about
any kind of internal dissent. He wanted to clamp down on any
opposition within Russia and he wanted to provide more influence
and even intimidation on his borders.

And I certainly made my views known in meetings, as well as in
memos to the president. I think that what may have happened is that
both the United States and Europe were really hoping for the best
from Putin as a returned president. And I think we’ve been quickly,
unfortunately, disabused of those hopes.

Mitt Romney insisted during the 2012 campaign that Russia was
America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” Insofar as that meant
Russian and U.S. interests don’t always align it’s
kind of a no shit thing. The idea that through good will alone
a relationship with a sovereign country with its own national
security interests could be “reset,” and by extension the idea at
somehow the personage of George W. Bush was why Vladimir Putin
didn’t align himself with U.S. interests, is a ridiculous one and
certainly not reality-based. As President Obama’s first secretary
of state, Clinton ought to accept her responsibility in the failure
that resulted from so misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) Russian
foreign policy interests.

Putin, on the other hand, denies a frosty relationship with the
U.S.,
pointing out his country, for example, still permits the U.S.
to transit through its territory to supply troops in Afghanistan—in
that interview he asked who Obama was to judge another country’s
interventionist foreign policy, suggesting the president go be a
judge somewhere if that’s what he wants to do. In a separate
interview, responding to Clinton comparing him to Hitler Putin

suggested it was better not to respond to a woman.