The culture of U.S diplomatic service failed to stop the terrorist attack

TedLipien.com, SAN FRANCISCO — One group of U.S. Government employees that has not received much media scrutiny in the aftermath of the failed terrorist attack are U.S. diplomats who had issued and failed to cancel Mr. Abdulmutallab’s U.S. visa.

U.S. Consular Officers at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Robin R. Sanders, and Foreign Service Officers responsible for security had a professional duty to immediately cancel Mr. Abdulmutallab’s U.S. visa after his father warned the Embassy officials of his son’s likely radicalization.

No dots with the vague CIA information from Yemen on Mr. Abdulmutallab needed to be connected by anti-terrorism experts. The whole problem could have been easily averted at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, if American diplomats had simply used common sense that most Americans would use in a similar situation.

These highly paid U.S. officials should have erred on the side of caution, not on the side of protecting the rights of individuals who are not U.S. citizens and have no automatic right to a U.S. visa.

After being told of the father’s concerns about his son, the first question from Ambassador Sanders should have been: does he have a U.S. visa? And if he does, let’s cancel it immediately.

Any of the Foreign Service Officers and other officials at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria who knew about the case should have asked the same question. They are some of the best paid U.S. government employees and supposed to be some of the smartest.

We wish the latter were really true. If they were as smart and dedicated as they should be, Americans could feel safe about their borders being protected and there would be no need to spend extra billions of dollars on airport security. Unfortunately, a culture of careerism and political correctness makes it impossible for most U.S. Foreign Service Officers to think and act primarily in the interest of the American people.

U.S. diplomats in Nigeria did nothing to prevent the most recent incident because that would have required them to make a difficult decision that could have been viewed by their bosses at the State Department in Washington as a violation of Mr. Abdulmitallab’s rights. A decision to cancel his visa might have also exposed them to criticism of engaging in profiling and undermining President Obama’s new policy of reaching out to the Muslim world.

Let’s not forget that all of the 9/11 terrorists also received American visas from U.S. Foreign Service Officers.

Each U.S. diplomat stationed abroad costs U.S. taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. But today’s U.S. Foreign Service Officers are mostly interested in protecting their considerable salaries and perks. They lack both status and courage to challenge official policies and behavior, often dictated by misguided political correctness.

It does not help that the standards for recruiting Foreign Service Officers have greatly declined over the last few decades. A U.S. diplomat who dares to make a difficult decision that could ruin his chances for career advancement is a rare exception.

If U.S. Foreign Service Officers used the right judgement and did their professional duty of protecting U.S. citizens rather than pleasing the political correctness crowd at the State Department and the White House, the 9/11 terror attack and the attempted airplane bombing over Detroit could have been prevented.

The CIA is also not off the hook. As with Foreign Service Officers, keeping a single CIA officer abroad also costs U.S. taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary, free housing, free education for children and freequent free travel to the U.S. The CIA station chief in Nigeria should have insisted that a Consular Officer at the Embassy or the Ambassador herself cancel Mr. Abdulmutallab’s U.S. visa. Without a U.S. visa, he would not have been able to get on the plane.

Ultimately, however, it’s not the CIA but the U.S. Ambassador who is responsible for what goes on at a U.S. embassy.

It is unlikely that the quality of U.S. Foreign Service Officers can be quickly improved in the current political environment in Washington. Intensive retraining of U.S. ambassadors, political officers, and consular officials at U.S. embassies might offer some help in the future if it is done correctly. But such retraining would certainly clash with the Obama administration’s policy assumptions about the world and the Foreign Service culture that promotes conformism.

Of course, much of the blame goes directly to President Obama and his administration’s top officials who have set the political agenda of granting people suspected of terrorism the benefit of the doubt in an naive hope that by being nice to them they would be nice to us. U.S. diplomats in Nigeria should have shown their respect for the local customs and culture by taking seriously the concerns expressed to them by Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father. They should have been nice to him. Instead, they behaved like typical Americans, assuming that the young man had the right to do what he wanted. Perhaps they thought that if they had cancelled his U.S. visa he might become anti-American and turn into a terrorist. That, after all, seems to be the essence of President Obama’s approach to the problem of terrorism.

U.S. diplomats in Nigeria were more than eager to implement this misguided agenda. The attempted airplane bombing over Detroit was a major failure of both the Obama administration and the culture of the U.S. diplomatic service. The American people deserve better than that.

 Sourced from: TedLipien.com

Library of Congress Puts Thousands of Historic Books Online

Nearly 60,000 books prized by historians, writers and genealogists, many too old and fragile to be safely handled, have been digitally scanned as part of the first mass book digitization project of the U.S. Library of Congress. The materials are free on the LOC and Internet Archive Web sites.

 Sourced from: America.Gov (U.S. State Dept.) Latest Items from Washington
Библиотека Конгресса открывает свободный онлайн-доступ к тысячам исторических книг

U.S. Embassy blames diplomatic gaffe on a Polish translator

TedLipien.com, SAN FRANCISCO — Bill Clinton might have asked what the “enhanced” definition of  ”to enhance” IS?  The U.S. Embassy in Warsaw is busy blaming a Polish translator for mistranslating U.S. Ambassador Lee Feinstein’s TV interview answer about Polish troops in Afghanistan,  which caused a diplomatic READ MORE

More diplomatic confusion between U.S. and Poland

Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. media has not yet picked up on the latest diplomatic controversy between Poland and the U.S. But the public disagreement between president Obama’s new ambassador in Warsaw Lee A. Feinstein and the Polish defense minister over plans to send additional Polish troops to Afghanistan is drawing media attention in Poland. READ MORE

Opinia.US: Little on the White House Blog about Biden in Poland

Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — The White House Blog had nothing specific about Vice President Biden’s visit to Poland. Biden’s national security advisor Tony Blinken wrote a general post in the White House Blog Thursday about Mr. Biden’s visit to Central Europe. He focused, however, on his boss’s visit to Romania and posted two photos from Bucharest. READ MORE

Charges against a US federal agency of discriminating against journalists

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, October 9, 2009, San Francisco — Media in the Czech Republic, which have been critical of President Obama’s handling of the recent missile shield decision, have also been reporting on apparent discrepancies between words and actions of the new US administration when it comes to the treatment of foreign employees by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, BBG, a federal agency which manages the Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, RFE/RL. The US taxpayer-funded radio station and the BBG, its parent agency, deny foreign journalists working at RFE/RL in the Czech Republic the same labor law protections available to the station’s American and, to some degree, also its Czech employees. READ MORE

Clinton on Third Anniversary of Death of Anna Politkovskaya

Comment by Free Media Online, FreeMediaOnline.org: Secretary of State Clinton’s statement on the third anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya is a positive step on the part of the Obama Administration, which has been far too tolerant of media freedom and human rights abuses in countries like Russia and China. But even this statement reflects a reluctance to admit that freedom of the press does not exist in Russia.

Secretary Clinton welcomed “calls by Russian officials defending the necessity of a free press,” but she failed to state the obvious that these calls are hollow and are contradicted by actions against free media taken almost on a daily basis by the Russian government and its proxies. While Secretary Clinton said that “the failure to bring to justice the killers of these journalists undermines efforts to strengthen the rule of law, improve government accountability, and combat corruption,” she said nothing about numerous cases of intimidation of journalists by the Russian security services and the Kremlin’s grip on all the major media outlets in the country.

READ MORE

Did White House coordinate missile decision with Kremlin?

Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — Bloggers and Russian experts in the US have been trying to find out whether the Obama White House coordinated with the Kremlin the timing of the missile shield decision that deeply offended people in Poland and produced biting commentaries in the US. Speculations abound that Russian diplomats, working on instructions from propaganda experts within the Kremlin, tricked White House and State Department officials to get President Obama to choose September 17 to announce his cancellation of the Bush plan to build missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. September 17, 2009 was the date of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland at the beginning of WWII. READ MORE

US Embassy Warsaw sees insensitive timing of Obama’s missile decision

Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — Displaying unprecedented boldness for a US diplomatic mission, the US Embassy in Warsaw conceded on its official public website that Poles believe that the “insensitive timing” — as the Embassy put it — of the Obama administration announcement on canceling the US missile shield system in Central Europe “shows that Obama does not understand Poland.” In what may be a deliberate US public diplomacy effort to repair the public relations damage in Poland, READ MORE

Walesa on Obama’s Missile Diplomacy

“It wasn’t that the shield was that important, but it’s about the way, the way of treating us.”

–Lech Wałęsa, the former Polish president and Solidarity leader, regarding the US decision to drop the missile defense shield in Poland, John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, Version 2.0

Dear Poland, Happy Soviet Invasion Day, Love Uncle Sam

Wired READ MORE

American Diplomacy Failed Obama in Poland

Dear Poland, Happy Soviet Invasion Day, Love Uncle Sam
Wired

While American and international media blames President Obama for choosing to announce his decision on the removal of the missile defense system from Poland and Czech Republic on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet attack on Poland on September 17, 1939, surprisingly so far no one has called it a failure of American diplomacy. What makes this failure even more disturbing is that neither the State Department READ MORE

RFE RL Faces Ethnic Discrimination Charges

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, September 9, 2009, San Francisco — A former employee of Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) has asked the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to look into charges that the US taxpayer-funded radio station broadcasting to countries without free media discriminates against foreign-born journalists and other workers by denying them the same legal protections available to American and Czech employees. READ MORE

Strategic Communications and the Graveyard of Empires – John Brown

There seems to be yet another bureaucratic battle brewing in Washington. On one side of the ring, we have a high ranking State Department official, Richard Holbrooke, Special Representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan; on the other, an admiral, Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Read more

US Public Diplomacy Failure to Reach Out to the Russians After Terrorist Attack in Ingushetia

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, August 18, 2009, San Francisco — Ever since the United States Information Agency (USIA) was dismantled in a foolish post-Cold War cost-cutting move, the U.S. State Department and American diplomats abroad have not been able to present a coherent message to foreign audiences quickly and effectively. The latest example is the lame U.S. public response to the terrorist attack in Ingushetia — no phone call from President Obama to President Medvedev, just a short written statement which was not easily available. There was no statement from Secretary Clinton.

Even though the lack of a proper U.S. response was not deliberate and can be blamed on the distraction with the health care reform and just plain bureaucratic incompetence, the Russian leaders and the Russian public have a reason to wonder how badly the Obama Administration wants Russia’s support in combating terrorism and restraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Americans, on the other hand, should be concerned how professional and how effective is America’s public diplomacy, which aims to inform and influence public opinion abroad to make it more sympathetic to U.S. interests. The ultimate aim is to make America safer by strengthening and promoting security and democracy worldwide. Yet, few within the government bureaucracy in Washington seem to grasp that ineffective public diplomacy threatens America’s safety.

Prior to 1999, a cadre of foreign service officers assigned to USIA in Washington and abroad had been responsible for crafting and coordinating U.S. responses to major international and domestic news events. Overall, they did a good job in helping to win the Cold War.

During that period USIA operated separately of the State Department but was integrated into the foreign policy establishment in Washington and at U.S. embassies abroad. USIA officers knew their foreign audiences, specialized in working with local media, and made sure that whatever message the U.S. was trying to send was presented quickly and credibly using the most modern and efficient channels of communication available at the time.

Many of these skills have now been lost. The case in point is the U.S. reaction to the latest terrorist attack in Russia that killed and wounded many innocent civilians. While the White House did issue a short statement of condolences from President Obama, the statement was not posted immediately on the White House or the State Department websites, where it would have been accessible to Russian media and individual web users. There was no official photograph or video to accompany the statement. It was not translated into Russian except in a brief news item posted with some delay on the Voice of America (VOA) Russian Service website. But after recent program cuts by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which manages U.S. international broadcasting, VOA’s estimated annual reach in Russia through the Internet is only about 0.2%.

VOA website is better designed and more frequently updated than the State Department websites but is still far from perfect. Another U.S.-funded broadcaster, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) has a superior Russian news website — more in terms of design than content — but it does not specialize in American news and faces other problems, such as American management’s discrimination against foreign-born journalists and intimidation of its reporters in Russia by the Kremlin’s secret police.

There was no mention Monday of the terrorist attack or the U.S. reaction to it on the official State Department Blog, the U.S. Embassy Moscow website or the Open America website created by the Embassy in Moscow to communicate with the Russian public. There was also nothing posted about this tragic incident on the Russian-language America.gov website edited in Washington by the State Department’s public diplomacy team. This website is notoriously late in posting news-related U.S. government statements and articles. Not that the web team at the White House has done a much better job as far as Russia is concerned. It took the White House 10 days to post a video from President Obama’s trip to Russia.

The video, produced in the style of early Cold War propaganda newsreels, was already overtaken by other events when it was posted ten days after President Obama’s visit, and there was no Russian translation to accompany the images. It was not posted on the U.S. Embassy Moscow website.

Evgeny Morozov, originally from Belarus, who is a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York, has some very interesting insights about new media and public diplomacy. He wrote in Foreign Policy that “watching American diplomats embrace new media for the purposes of public diplomacy has been a very awkward experience (not as painful as watching my 82-year-old grandpa learn how to use Skype, but at times it has come pretty close). By shifting their outreach campaigns to Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, the government may be trying to do the impossible, i.e. to plant carefully worded and controlled messages on platforms that sprang up precisely to avoid the kind of influence that the State Department seeks to exert via them.”

His last point is certainly worth pondering. The U.S. Ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, a career diplomat who speaks fluent Russian, has made good attempts to communicate directly with the Russian people through radio and television interviews, but the Kremlin controls access to those television and radio networks which enjoy the highest ratings because of their nation-wide coverage. Ambassador Beyrle also has his own blog, in which he makes use of video and his Russian-language skills. Compared to the official State Department Blog, which has little useful information and even less analysis, in addition to relying heavily on AP images — which are not in public domain — his blog is far more informative and focused.

Whether or not Evgeny Morozov is right that the benefits of the Internet for official public diplomacy are to some degree utopian, U.S. taxpayers deserve that their money used for their government’s efforts of communicating with foreign audiences be wisely spent. Even if U.S. diplomats are ill-equipped to take advantage of the new social media, they can still use the Internet to present and explain foreign policy questions.

But U.S. Embassy and State Department websites and blogs are not only poorly designed, they are also infrequently updated and rarely offer public domain photographs and other useful materials. Foreign journalists cannot rely on them for timely and objective information, in-depth analysis, and free resources, such as ready-for-posting photo images and broadcast quality video and audio.

They can also no longer rely for the same on the Voice of America. The Broadcasting Board of Governors, which was created when USIA was dismantled, eliminated VOA Russian-language radio broadcasts just 12 days before the Russian military attack on Georgia last summer. The BBG denied VOA resources to serve as a multimedia source of comprehensive information about U.S-Russian relations and American society and did not protect the VOA website from cyber attacks. During President Obama’s official visit to Moscow, the VOA website was out of commission for at least two full days.

Instead of demanding that the Russian security services stop threatening radio and TV stations using VOA news programs and that the Russian authorities should treat VOA the same way the Russian state broadcasters Radio Russia and Russia Today TV are treated in the U.S., where they are free to place their programs on cable and individual stations, the BBG responded to the secret police intimidation by eliminating on-air VOA radio and TV broadcasts. An NGO website, GovoritAmerika.us, launched in 2008, edited by volunteers and not connected with the U.S. government, offers now the only one-source access with direct links to both U.S. government and non-government U.S.-Russia-related news materials, but the website receives no public funding, which prevents it from expanding its coverage.

Even with currently available resources, the Obama Administration could have done a much better job in communicating its sympathy and support for the Russian people in the aftermath of the latest deadly terrorist attack if it had mobilized its public diplomacy team. If the Obama White House and the State Department had decided on their public diplomacy message and given a proper briefing for Vice President Biden, it might have helped him avoid making comments in the Wall Street Journal interview suggesting that Russia is a second-rate country — comments that the Russians found highly insulting, and rightly so — while at the same time the Russian leadership has taken a number of highly provocative steps, vis-a-vis the U.S. and Russia’s nearest neighbors, which suggest that their interest in President Obama’s call for a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations is not nearly as strong as his. (Vice President Biden’s staff has been much better in updating White House website stories and posting photographs on his trips abroad than President Obama’s public affairs team, which shows the importance of foreign policy and public diplomacy experience some of them acquired while working in the U.S. Senate.)

Not all of Vice President Biden’s comments were ill-advised from the public diplomacy perspective. Robert Amsterdam, an international lawyer who represents Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an imprisoned political foe of Prime Minister Putin, wrote in a recent article in the Huffington Post that by “creating manageable confrontations, especially with Europe, the United States, and the former Soviet states, the Kremlin is attempting to govern outwardly, diminishing pressures for greater accountability in their domestic shortcomings, and helping to stir up nationalism and support for the regime.” Under these circumstances, communicating with the Kremlin and the Russian public requires a great deal of sophistication.

All of this calls for a quick overhaul of U.S. public diplomacy. The State Department has a new public diplomacy chief, Under Secretary Judith McHale — her predecessor, James K. Glassman, appointed by the Bush White House, terminated VOA Russian radio and TV in his previous position as the BBG chairman — but there still is no Obama Administration plan and no structure to that would help the U.S. to respond with a coherent and well-delivered message to such developments as the recent terrorist attack in Russia, the Kremlin’s threats against Georgia and Ukraine, or the Russian media’s reaction to Vice President Biden’s Wall Street Journal interview.

Concerned by these shortcomings, several members of Congress, including Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), are trying to revive support and funding for professionally conducted U.S. public diplomacy. Senator Lugar introduced S. Res. 49 on February 13, 2009, expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the importance of public diplomacy. He also wrote an oped for ForeignPolicy.com on this topic. Another U.S. Senator, Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), has called for abolishing the Broadcasting Board of Governors. He introduced legislation that would establish the National Center for Strategic Communications, an agency similar to the now defunct U.S. Information Agency. Senator Patrick Leahy (D -Vermont) has tried to stop the BBG from eliminating U.S. broadcasts in foreign languages but his efforts have been ignored by most of the Board members and their executive staff. Only one BBG member, Blanquita Walsh Cullum — the only journalist serving on the Board — opposed cuts in U.S.-funded broadcasting to Russia and other media-at-risk countries.

Whether these and other calls for reforming U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting will be answered and result in meaningful legislative changes will depend on the cooperation from the Obama White House. New media, international broadcasting, and public diplomacy cannot solve all the problems the U.S. is facing abroad, but a little bit of expertise in these areas and good management can be very helpful. Otherwise, pro-democracy activists and authoritarian regimes will continue to wonder what the Obama Administration wants and what it can do. It would help if the Administration could agree on what that message should be and how it should be delivered.

The Russians may conveniently assume that Vice President Biden’s unfortunate comments about their country’s second-rate status were deliberate, and may think the same about the non-response in Washington to the terrorist attack in Ingushetia. But as someone who has observed the U.S. foreign policy establishment first-hand, I can say that most of it can be blamed on carelessness, incompetence, and the simple fact that most of the State Department and U.S. diplomats based abroad are on vacation in August. But in addition to that, the structural problems of U.S. public diplomacy are real and demand immediate attention from the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress.

Voice of America Report Shows Confusion and Divisions Over Obama’s Policy Toward Russia

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, August 13, 2009, San Francisco — A report by a senior Voice of America (VOA) correspondent, posted online today, shows a high level of confusion over the Obama Administration’s new policy of “resetting” relations with Russia. While the report by VOA’s Andre de Nesnera focuses on statements by Vice President Biden, which have “angered” Russian officials, and on apparent divisions within the Administration over Russia policy, it does not address a number of recent Russian actions and statements, which other analysts saw as a clear challenge to President Obama after his recent visit to Moscow. They included a stern videotaped warning to Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Victor Yushchenko, delivered earlier this week by President Medvedev.

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The content and the harsh tone of President Medvedev’s video message to Ukraine was in sharp contrast with a number of friendly and hopeful statements from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, offering a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations.

VOA report quoted a number of American analysts, including Stephen Jones, a Russia expert from Mount Holyoke College, and Robert Legvold at Columbia University, who are critical of Vice President Biden’s statements made in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. In that interview, the U.S. Vice President suggested that Russia’s economic and social weakness would force the Kremlin to make concessions to the West on key national security issues. VOA’s Andre de Nesnera did not cite any comments in defense of Vice President Biden’s statements, which he had made after his visit to Ukraine and Georgia.

The VOA correspondent asserted in his report that after Vice President Biden’s interview with the Wall Street Journal, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had tried to “head off a dispute with Moscow” during an appearance on (NBC’s) television program Meet the Press. She told the American TV network that “We want what the president called for during his recent Moscow summit. We want a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia. Now there is an enormous amount of work to be done between the United States and Russia,” said Clinton.

VOA’s de Nesnera also quotes Ronald Suny, at the University of Chicago, as saying that “the Russians have a point.” According to Ronald Suny “The Russians are extremely sensitive. They are looking for signals. They don’t know what to expect from this new government in Washington. And so they were very well pleased, it seemed, by Obama’s visit. And then the [vice president's] trip comes and these statements are made – and the Russians are now upset again. And they are asking, in a way, what are the signals? Which signals are we to take to be the real signals? And I’m as much at a loss as they are,” he said.

Other American experts, however, see the Kremlin’s recent actions as highly provocative and designed to regain Russia’s former imperial control over now independent countries like Ukraine and Georgia. They also point out that nationalistic and anti-American rhetoric serves the power interests of the current Russian leadership and will continue regardless of the Obama Administration’s wish for a “reset” in the bilateral relationship.

The Voice of America is a taxpayer-funded U.S. international broadcaster managed by the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). De Nesnera’s report was translated into Russian and posted on the VOA Russian-language website. VOA no longer broadcasts, however, on-air radio and television newscasts in Russian. They were terminated by the BBG in July 2008, just 12 days before Russian troops attacked the Republic of Georgia in a territorial dispute.

Voice of America Report Biden Remarks Anger Russian Officials
By Andre de Nesnera
Washington
13 August 2009

Recent statements by Vice President Joe Biden have angered Russian officials.

Vice President Biden recently told the Wall Street Journal that – in his words – the Russians “have a shrinking population base, have a withering economy, have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years.” He then suggested that all these trends would force Russia to make concessions to the West on key national security issues.

Mr. Biden made those statements following a trip to Ukraine and Georgia. Several weeks earlier, President Barack Obama held a Moscow summit with his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev – a meeting whose main goal was to reset U.S.-Russian relations on a positive footing.

Most analysts agree that was achieved. But they also say Mr. Biden’s statements represented a different kind of tone from the one that was taken by Mr. Obama in Moscow.

Stephen Jones, a Russia expert from Mount Holyoke College (in Hadley, Massachusetts), says the vice president was in a sense writing off Russia as a significant power.

“Russia, of course, is going through a very serious economic situation. Its prospects are not good in terms of the demographic situation, and the energy situation too because Gazprom is very inefficient and oil production is declining. But Russia is still enormously powerful in the region. And when Russia has its back to the wall, it can certainly pursue some very strong, even aggressive policies at times. So that sort of statement, I think, is rather exaggerated and rather naïve in many ways,” he said.

Vice President Biden’s remarks hit a raw nerve with Russian officials. Sergei Prikhodko, a senior Kremlin foreign policy adviser, said “it raised the question who is shaping U.S. foreign policy -the president or members of his team?”

Robert Legvold at Columbia University, agrees. “It has raised a lot of questions both in the Russian media and even in the western media about whether the administration is singing from the same page. And if the page they are singing from is the same, and it is the Biden message – then are we hearing from Biden what they really think and from Obama what the diplomatic gloss is that he means to put on the relationship. That, I think, has created – at least for the moment – something of a problem,” he said.

Ronald Suny, at the University of Chicago, says the Russians have a point. “The Russians are extremely sensitive. They are looking for signals. They don’t know what to expect from this new government in Washington. And so they were very well pleased, it seemed, by Obama’s visit. And then the [vice president's] trip comes and these statements are made – and the Russians are now upset again. And they are asking, in a way, what are the signals? Which signals are we to take to be the real signals? And I’m as much at a loss as they are,” he said.

Shortly after the interview was published, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to head off a dispute with Moscow during an appearance on (NBC’s) Meet the Press. “We want what the president called for during his recent Moscow summit. We want a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia. Now there is an enormous amount of work to be done between the United States and Russia,” he said.

Secretary Clinton said Moscow and Washington are working to reduce their nuclear arsenals – and are collaborating on the key issues of North Korea and Iran. “And so there is an enormous amount of hard work being done. And we view Russia as a great power,” he said.

Some analysts say Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were an attempt at damage control at a time when relations between Washington and Moscow are at a sensitive stage given the new U.S. administration and the issues facing both countries.