After a Fourth-of-July break, I was thinking of scribbling a little something about President Obama's upcoming trip to Russia and other destinations, but I see that columnist David Ignatius has already done that work for me.
Of course Obama needed to make this trip early in his term, and with some of the key pieces of the domestic agenda now perking along, the timing is good from the U.S. domestic political point of view. But meetings can't produce results when one or both parties aren't in the right frame of mind; Russia's current leadership is very much in a Rodney Dangerfield don't-get-no-respect mode, one which has prevailed through much of Russian history going back at least to Peter the Great. Expectations about what "results" might emerge from Obama's visit should be extremely low.
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