Hillary’s Right, the Reset Worked – But to What Did it Reset?

Hillary reset button

Obama’s Russian foreign policy has been a disaster from the start.

Remember that hokey “reset button” photo op between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov early in President Obama’s first term? The Obama Administration was all excited to diss George W. Bush’s foreign policy with a little stunt that failed hard:

[Hillary] handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift—a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word “peregruzka” printed on top.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.

“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said, to Clinton’s clear surprise. Instead of “reset,” he said the word on the box meant “overcharge.”

They got it wrong then and they’ve got it wrong now. Five years later, Hillary is still defending the indefensible “reset button” policy with Russia and has even gone so far as to say it “succeeded.”

“What I think I demonstrate in the book, is that the reset worked,” Clinton told guest host John Harwood on NPR’s “On Point” on Thursday during a conversation about her new memoir, “Hard Choices.” “It was an effort to try to obtain Russian cooperation on some key objectives while (Dmitry) Medvedev was president.”

Clinton later said the reset “succeeded” and was meant to be “a device to try to refocus attention on the transactional efforts that we needed to get done with the Russians.”

As ridiculous as her claim is, Hillary is actually right – it’s technically true that the reset worked. It certainly reset relations with Russia. Right back to the Cold War.

Alexa is a freelance writer and communications consultant, with experience working on the Hill, at the RNC, and for... More about Alexa

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