Pushing the Wrong Buttons

Ariel Cohen / March 06, 2009

Friday night, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a dinner in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss US-Russian relations. As a token, Secretary Clinton brought a yellow box with a button and the words “reset” on both sides in English and Russian.

Apparently, the State Department got the Russian word for “reset” wrong and instead it said “overload”. This is highly symbolic, as incompetence and haste in foreign affairs are the enemies of wisdom, or as the Russian proverb goes, “Measure seven times before cutting”.

On the dinner menu were: Iran, Euro-Atlantic relations, missile defense in Europe, and negotiating a strategic armaments agreement, called START II, which will expire in December – enough to give indigestion to anyone. The working dinner prepares the agenda for the upcoming meeting of the two presidents, Barak Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, which will take place April 2 in London at the G20 economic summit. (more…)