Poor Barack Obama, he just can’t make anybody happy with his reset policy toward Russia.  His opponents on the right argue that he’s selling the farm through weakness and undeserved concessions to an uncooperative, aggressive government.  Other critics – like us – bemoan the ill-considered bargain of Washington’s Iran obsession in exchange for the free pass given to the siloviki on values of human rights, rule of law, corruption, and democracy.

But I have to admit that I was a little confused by Dmitri K. Simes’s take down of Obama’s START replacement treaty with Russia, which he argues is much less substantive than the administration would like to claim.  Simes points out that the new treaty “doesn’t really require either side to eliminate weapons it wants to keep,” that the agreement is void if the U.S. ever builds another missile defense system, and lastly, that the Russians themselves were giddy with excitement about they worked over their naive counterparts and didn’t budge an inch.