The Russian bear trap

The year has been ushered in with a warning signal. There is no mistaking the fact that the statement issued by the US State Department in Washington on January 1 was not just about natural gas or Ukraine or the biting cold of Europe’s winter.

It had as much to do with a return to the “the proud tradition of American foreign policy” under Harry S Truman and Ronald Reagan, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently wrote in an article.