Fair enough, but they were ridiculed specifically for their perspective on their stance as Russia being a threat rather than a potential friend.

Catherine wins the best comment of the day!!!

If I am not mistaken, in 2009 Russia, along with a number of other countries including the U.S. signed a treaty indicating their acceptance of the Ukraine as a sovereign entity. They pledged to protect it which I believe correlated with the dismantling of the Ukrainian military.

Glad you brought up the "reset button." Can't think of anything more representative of the arrogance and the misplaced thought process that the state world affairs was simply a result of the "bumbling" G.W. Bush. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Obama administration's foreign policy missteps are less ideological and more caused by the blindness of superiority.

While I am a huge disciple of Reagan, I don't know that he could have been elected in this toxic political age. The far right has usurped the legacy of Reagan into this intractable bastion of staunch conservatism. The truth is that Reagan excelled at taking the pulse of the people, listening and applying conservative principles and solutions to problems that were important to people. He was not a man who refused to compromise, he was a man who knew when to compromise. He was not a man who stood on principle even if it meant running the ship aground, he was a man who's primary principle was making the sure the ship didn't run aground. He didn't launch the entire nation to the right, expending his political capital to implement his ideology. He simply led to the economic, moral and social defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War and enacted economic policies that resulted in nearly 30 years of economic and technological growth. I don't believe he would have achieved these objectives if his primary mission had been to move the country to the right or to defeat the left.