A lame duck in Asia.

So, Barack Obama is touring east Asia to revive his ' Asia pivot ', which he had completely forgotten after mentioning it. But then, when you are a gasbag you say so many things that you cannot be expected to remember all of them. Or even one. He called his Russia policy ' the reset ' when he first became president and in a photo op Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov with a plastic button. After Putin had helped the US in its attack on Afghanistan the US helped pro western governments to take power in Georgia and Ukraine and expanded NATO to include former Soviet bloc countries. Naturally, Putin saw this as a betrayal. When Obama came in Putin was Prime Minister and Dmitry Medvedev was the President of Russia. In 2008 Obama said," I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new." That is as stupid as it is insulting. The ongoing troubles in Ukraine were instigated by the US exactly as it did in 2004-05, the so called Orange Revolution. This time the Russian response has been more muscular, threatening to divide the country, having already annexed Crimea. The old Soviet Union had disappeared and the Soviet bloc countries were independent. There was no reason to encircle Russia in a policy of containment going back to the cold war days. Matthew Rojansky, a Russia expert said," Putin is a reflection of Russia. This weird notion that Putin will go away and there will suddenly be a pliant Russia is false." A massive propaganda campaign has been unleashed by the BBC, CNN and other news channels to try and justify US aggression. But everyone is not fooled. After stories of the National Security Agency snooping on leaders of other countries were exposed Chancellor Angela Merkel was furious with the US, comparing its actions with those of the hated East German secret police, the Stasi. Forcing the plane of Evo Morales, President of Bolivia to land in Vienna after France, Spain and Portugal refused permission to fly over their territory under US pressure was an act of air piracy. This was to look for Edward Snowden who is hiding in Russia. The middle-east talks between Israel and the Palestinians have broken down after the 2 factions, Fatah and Hamas announced a ' unity pact '. So what about India? After the initial embraces there is virtually no relation between Delhi and Washington. Can any president make his country the most hated in the world? Yes he can. The legacy of a gasbag.