The shift in America’s rhetoric toward its soi-disant adversaries is perplexing. Its president and other officials now attempt to flatter Vladimir Putin and other Russians by depicting them as the servants and emissaries of a great power. On the one hand, this shift is welcome after so many years of futile condescension, culminating in Barack Obama’s periodic, gratuitous, and, to be frank, rather amateur, campaign of insults; on the other hand, it comes so late that one has to wonder what the point is, as though Russians have no real security interests or even legitimate collective neuroses, and merely need a bit of flattery, laid on with a trowel, to turn pliant. And yet, on another hand, the shift draws an unfortunate contrast with the Americans’ repetitive, truculent, and, to be charitable, rather undiplomatic, rhetoric towards China. In the game of tertius gaudens, it is necessary to align one’s rhetoric with one’s policy, and in this instance, it appears that the Americans have got things the wrong way round… but then maybe Bismarck was right about Americans: they are much cleverer (or luckier) than they look.
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