IT'S THE ADMINISTRATION THAT OVERLOADED:

U.S.-Russia Relations: In Need of a New Reset (Simon Shuster, Mar. 16, 2010, TIME)

In Russian political circles, Barack Obama's election tended to evoke two different reactions. Many officials were curious to see what new deals he would offer, but others, in the tradition of the Cold War, dismissed him as just the latest mouthpiece of the old American élites. If any of them experienced Obamamania, they sure kept it to themselves. So it's little wonder that Obama's drive to put aside old grudges and start fresh with Moscow has come up against stubborn resistance from the Kremlin in recent months. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will likely face a tough test when she arrives in Moscow for a two-day visit on March 18, because, as a senior official from the Obama Administration puts it, "We've definitely overloaded the circuits in this relationship."

For Clinton, the word overloaded is itself a reminder of where things began to go wrong. Last March, she had the honor of starting Obama's charm offensive by presenting her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with a little red button. It was supposed to have the Russian word for reset on it and was meant as a harmless bit of fun. But thanks to a spelling mistake somewhere in the State Department (presumably the Gimmicks Directorate), Lavrov had to explain that the button actually said overload. It caused some awkward laughter. "We won't let you do that to us," Clinton joked, and they went ahead and pressed the button anyway. "So that's how things have turned out," says Dmitri Rogozin, Russia's envoy to NATO. "They pressed the wrong button, and over time the relationship was overloaded. So far the right button still hasn't been pressed."