Hillary Clinton has no regrets about the Russian reset.
Clinton told NPR’s John Harwood in an interview Thursday that she believes “that the reset worked.”
The former secretary of state argued that she designed the strategy with specifically then-president Dmitry Medvedev in mind. With Vladimir Putin’s return to power, however, Clinton explained that the policy had effectively expired and that she told President Barack Obama, “We were going to have to change our thinking and approach.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner finds Clinton’s defense of the reset “laughable” and representative of the “highest order of delusional thinking.”
Gardiner, director of the Margret Thatcher Center, dismisses Clinton’s leadership caveat to the reset, explaining that Putin controlled power in Russia even during the Medvedev presidency.
Gardiner maintains that the policy is one “of appeasement towards Moscow that has blown up in Washington’s face.”
The scholar says that what Clinton heralds as a success, represents a “staggering embarrassment” to the West, and has allowed the Russians to “become emboldened, more aggressive, and more hostile.”
Gardiner warns that policies like Clinton’s reset are tantamount to appeasement and indicative of weakness. He says Americans should be “very nervous about any continuation of any kind of this failure.”
“Hillary Clinton has held up the white flag to Moscow,” he says, “and that is a recipe for long term American decline.”
