with patriotic credentials, not the shady intermediary types and try to explain to society and the media what and why they are doing what they are doing and what are the potential advantages to society and the politicians for whom people vote. Compare these bungles with Gazprom's efficiency in dealing with Germany for example.  Everybody from Putin down knows the German language, history, culture, politics and so on.  They hired Chancellor Schroeder to represent them.  Russia, as a former imperial power, is more experienced than corporate America in using local vassals to project its power.  When it comes to Eastern and Central Europe, it also had the former personal that used to rule these countries from Moscow or locally and it can use their skills to train others.  Still, corporate America could have found some area experts, historians, social scientists and so on, and could have hired some local former anti-Soviet dissidents for example to make their case for energy independence. There is this false universalist mentality that the world can be run by MBAs and engineers who have universal models that can apply everywhere and so they do not need to know anything about local conditions and can ignore civil society.  This is nonsense that costs money. This anti-global semi-suicidal approach of the corporations is then projected back on the universities.  Since the corporation do not hire area specialists and the administrators measure the success of a program by how many students it attracts and how many of them