From Obama with Love

Earlier this week the Associated Press ran a story which described top-level diplomatic personnel delivering a personal letter from President Obama to Dmitri Medvedev, apparently a reply to an earlier letter from the Russian president. It sent a kind of refreshing shiver through my forearms, a wave of Bond-inspired romanticism to think that heads of great states still really send communiques in this way, and I could only picture Medvedev (Putin?) using some kind of solid gold and unwieldy letter opener to cleanly release the surely eloquent prose of Obama. Regardless, it's safe to assume that although these messages didn't begin "Dear Dima/Barry," they are nevertheless the beginning of a dialogue that wishes to soften the tone of recent antagonism coming from both sides. And as brand-new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva this week we will see the kind of tone that is set for the new Washington relations with the not so new, (temporarily?) resurgent Moscow.
Against all sense and political-correctness I hope that Hillary Clinton leaves Switzerland having swapped some karate chops with Putin's cohort. If I'm being honest, I have to say that the slow heating up of the old (new) Cold War has been kind of, well...fun.
If only because all the rhetoric seems shallow, if only because I think Russia's power rests on a gas-supply bubble that is not sustainable in the long-run, that is liable to burst (or is already bursting), and because Westerners are deluding themselves when they evaluate Russia's ability to actually menace the West (Georgia being the full reflection of its aggression), having Russia as a villain seems like something of old-fashioned entertainment. There's something less than real about the stakes with Russia, there's a certain playful nostalgia in the news barbs channeling between Washington and Moscow, and I can't help but suppress images of Bond seducing nefarious Natashas in a game where ultimately only henchmen and cronies get killed but the world nevertheless remains the same.
Ultimately, why I can trivialize the rekindling of Soviet and Yankee confrontation as, in part, as nothing more than a melodrama willingly created by both sides, is because it's a distraction. A distraction from conflict(s) with stakes exponentially higher. As the world knows, America's true battle, of foreign policy and armies (and economy and ideology), is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon... Monsters created by (mostly) wayward American action in the Muslim world, and generating a conflict that sadly no Bond or Bourne or secret missions could possibly hope to alter because they the enemies are too ambiguous and the plots are shaded with too much uncertainty and ideological complexity.
As much as I want to romanticize the letter from Obama to Medvedev, I have to forget that little fact that it wasn't about Russia's nuclear capabilities (a la the 1960s) it was Iran's, and specifically, will you Russia help us with this little Iran problem. Maybe it isn't true for Russia, but at the end of most of America's movies there's only two characters "Us" and "Them", and here Russia comes with Us. If Russia is America's opponent its only because its an unwilling participant, at best, and naughty disruptor, at worst, in the U.S. attempt to gain ground in its Muslim quagmire by unification of pro-West allies --not because it's the actual bully we want to confront.