Obama’s Russia challenge

last updated 8 January 2015

“Perhaps not even Joe Biden expected to be so right so soon,” said The Economist online. Mere hours after his election, Barack Obama got his first foreign test, when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev “decided against the traditional congratulatory phone call” and instead announced that he will “stick a few missile regiments” near Poland, in Kaliningrad, to counter perceived threats from a U.S. missile-defense shield.

It isn’t surprising that Medvedev “and his master, Vladimir Putin, would be the first to try intimidating the president-elect,” said The Washington Post in an editorial, but this test isn’t a particularly tough one. Putin wants to “bluff” Obama into abandoning the missile shield, to show Russian might against a “weakening America,” and Obama should just ignore his “crude threat.”