Bluffing the KGB

The hot story this morning at the Washington Post is the Obama administration's attempt to enroll Russia in Obama's half-hearted attempts at containment of Iran (which, we learned Sunday, now has the materials for an atomic bomb--oops) and the mullahs' attempts to acquire the ability to produce atomic weapons.

The question, though, is this: given Obama's deliberate humiliation of Poland's government for its support of the missile defense facilities, what reason does the Russian government have to believe that Obama is seriously intending to complete the project he's now attempting to bargain away?

If Russia is already going to get what it wants from Obama on missile defense--namely returning it to the research-and-development curiosity-we-never-intend-to-deploy box in which it was kept throughout the Clinton years, why would anyone think that this offer alone would be persuasive to the former-KGB clique which runs the Russian government?

Hoping for change, Philo-Junius supposes.