Matthew Yglesias on the importance of Obama’s visit to Russia, despite the fact there wasn’t much drama:
In the international arena, cooperation is good and conflict is bad. Unfortunately, conflict is also dramatic, and leaders who engage in it tend to get attention while instances of cooperation often pass unnoticed. A president who fights a war makes the history books; wars avoided are rarely commented on. So it’s worth taking time to note that despite — or, rather, because of — the lack of drama during this week’s presidential trip to Russia, something hugely important happened: A deal on steep bilateral reductions in nuclear weapons has made the world a much safer place.
Under the circumstances, the genius of the Obama approach hasn’t been that he’s solved the thorny issues (he hasn’t). It’s that he didn’t let the thorny issues dominate the agenda to the exclusion of more productive talks. Instead, he focused the agenda on the question of nuclear-arms control, an area in which U.S. and Russian interests are similar enough to be productively reconciled through diplomacy.
