And don’t expect anything close to “tear down this wall.” While Vladimir Putin resurrects a Russian dictatorship, what does President Bush have to say about it in advance of his St. Petersburg G-8 trip?
He still speaks about his “good friendship” with Putin. Is Russia blackmailing the region using energy? “That’s not an issue we worry about here at home. That’s an issue that the European leaders are going to have to work through.” The Marshall Plan, it ain’t.
Christopher Hitchens’s recent quip on Russia hosting a gathering of “industrial democracies” comes to mind: the country “is neither advanced nor a democracy.”
