Obama Petulantly Snubs Putin

As the G-20 gathering in Saint Petersburg, Russia approaches next month, President Obama has regrettably taken a page from counterproductive actions that previous administrations have adopted.  He has canceled a planned summit meeting with Russia's president Vladimir Putin, immediately on the heels of that country's granting of temporary asylum to turncoat/whistleblower (depending on your point of view) Edward Snowden.  Obama mentioned other issues beside the Snowden asylum, such as stringent new Russian anti-gay laws passed under the pretext of protecting children.  But the obvious factor tipping the scales in favor of shunning this important country's leader was the asylum.

One of the worst human rights violators in recent memory, China under Mao Zedong, had shut itself off from the West (and even the fellow Communist Soviet bloc for that matter) in the 1960's.  But American president Richard Nixon, seeing the bigger picture, sent his envoy Henry Kissinger there in 1969 to open up relations between the two nations.  And this was in the middle of their Cultural Revolution, which makes any human rights issues going on right now in Russia seem trivial by comparison.  On the other extreme, President Carter in 1979 declared that the U.S. would boycott the Summer Olympics the following year in Moscow as a knee-jerk protest reaction to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.  That accomplished nothing besides punishing American athletes whose window of opportunity to achieve international recognition within their often-obscure sports came and went.  The USSR stayed in Afghanistan throughout the 1980's.  Maybe in retrospect they should have remained there.  Then, just a few years ago, the Dubya-Bush administration openly snubbed Iran's asinine former president Ahmadinejad, even going so far as the president's wife Laura Bush turning away from him when he was physically close by just to avoid acknowledging his existence.  Obama was going to change all that, though, with the philosophy that it was better to engage with your adversary than to cut off direct communications. I remember him back when he shook the hand of Venezuela's controversial president, the late Hugo Chavez, early in his first term.  Unfortunately, Obama seems to have forgotten his principle of engagement and reverted to petulant (and silly) Carter and Dubya shunning behavior...

It might be said that Obama can talk with Putin anytime he wants, or vice versa, just by picking up the phone, and that the canceled summit meeting was just a public relations/political show.  If so, then why not cancel the entire G-20 summit as well? Isn't all of it essentially just a lot of political posturing to prop up the regimes of the various countries involved by making their flawed leaders appear to be effective international statesmen?  What a joke...