Mr Obama's combination of calmness and humility could well help America deal with a country whose national pride is dangerously spiked with a sense of inferiority.

ECONOMIST: America and Russia

If the Palestinians got everything they want a sovereign nation and even, let's say, a nuclear weapon they would wake the next morning still hounded by a sense of inferiority.

WSJ: Israel and the Surrender of the West

In the years of Perestroika and following the collapse, Russians carried a pronounced sense of inferiority about themselves: a sense that foreign stuff was the best.

BBC: Remnants of Russia��s past

She also highlights the social pressure that the cult of beauty exerted on women, and even on Dinah Washington, who always harboured a sense of physical inferiority.

ECONOMIST: Dinah Washington