Yeltsin Again

I think Brad DeLong and I are talking about cross purposes with regard to Russia policy in the 1990s. I agree with him as to what the goal of America's policy should have been. In his earlier post, though, Brad was writing about why our policy didn't achieve those results and all I'm trying to say is that we should consider the possibility that we didn't achieve what Brad (and I) think we should have achieved because these weren't the actual policy goals the Clinton administration was pursuing.

They may well have been the Treasury Department's goals (it seems to me that economists generally have sound foreign policy views) but the Treasury Department doesn't ultimately set policy toward major countries like Russia.