Just wanted to put these two snippets out here. One - Kissinger's recollection of his conversation with Brezhnev, May 1973. Brezhnev: "Look, you will be our partners, you and we are going to run the world."

The second snippet is from Yeltsin's comments to Clinton 20 years later, in January 1994. "The two of us have a unique potential as partners... without cooperation of the two of us, it is hard to envisage a peaceful and stable world."

This to me points to a remarkable continuity in Moscow's expectations (let's call it wishful thinking). Cold War or not, Communism or not, the Soviets/Russians expected to be accepted as equal partners in a "condominium" (in Brezhnev's case) or a "cartel" (in Yeltsin's case).

This was of course an unrealistic expectation, both during the Cold War and after. Brezhnev and Yeltsin (and I might add Gorbachev here, for he shared in their naiveté) failed to understand that global politics are a pecking order: you just can't have a condominium of equals.

All of this reminds me of the toast from the 1967 Soviet comedy. "Let us drink to our desires always coinciding with our capabilities."