Levy does a successful job of framing Israel Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's visit to Moscow in the context of the Obama administration's diplomatic overtures to the Arab and Muslim world.
The warm relations and easy flow of conversation with Russian leaders demonstrate one of the assets Lieberman brings to his position.
The report is fair, with one minor exception. Levy writes,
"With a new diplomacy-oriented administration in Washington and a new hawkish one in Jerusalem, the various parties in the region are trying to...test one another."
Contrasting "diplomacy-oriented" with "hawkish" evidences a bias. For example, a bias in the opposite direction would characterize the Obama administration as pacifist or dovish. Simply conveying that the American administration is diplomacy-oriented and the Israeli administration is not would be most appropriate.
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Funny, almost, that Russia is playing the sphere-of-influence-diplomacy game much as it did during the Cold War while the United States has significantly backed off our traditionally pro-democracy worldview. (I'm an isolationist at heart but if we want to act the part of world superpower, we'd sure as hell better do it right.)
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