The Mistakes of the “Reset Button”

From the Financial Times:

Mr McCain was equally emollient on Mr Obama’s soft-pedalling approach to Russia, in spite of bouts of near cold war rhetoric during the campaign (“We are all Georgians now”).

This month, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, gave Sergei Lavrov, her Russian counterpart, a box which said “reset” in English on one side and “self-destruct”, instead of “reset”, in Russian on the other side in a slip-up that caused some embarrassment.

“If I gave him a reset button, I’d find someone in the state department who understands Russian,” said Mr McCain. But he added, “I’d reiterate that we want to engage in dialogue with Russia . . . We are not going to see a reignition of the cold war. Russia doesn’t have the military or economic clout to do that.”