Russia is paranoid; the Tsars (some of them) were aggressive; the Soviet Union was expansionist. That’s the very short summary of my views about a big country. For the counter-argument see James Kirchick’s article in the National Review:
Our present-day problems with Russia stem from two utterly different, and fundamentally irreconcilable, understandings of what the end of the Cold War meant. It wasn’t just a side that lost but a whole understanding of how the world should work. From the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the Sudeten crisis to the division of Germany, most of the 20th century’s major conflicts erupted over border disputes in Central and Eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin’s refusal to acknowledge that small countries have the same rights as larger ones has pitted a rules-abiding West against a rules-flouting Russia. Faced with neighbors wishing to break free of their post-imperial yoke, Russians have not paused to consider that maybe it’s their behavior, past and present, that has led the former “captive nations†to be wary of Moscow’s designs. Rather, Russians have internalized, in the words of former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, the attitude that “nobody likes us, what’s wrong with everybody?†For Western policymakers to endorse such myopia is like giving car keys to a drunk.
As Russian troops marched into Crimea under the same pretext as German forces did into the Sudetenland — claiming to “protect†the rights and lives of allegedly threatened ethnic comrades — German chancellor Angela Merkel was said to have remarked that Putin lives in “another world.†He does. It’s a dangerous world where might makes right, one that successive generations of Western statesmen, along with courageous Poles, Czechs, Romanians, and countless others, fought to overcome. The post–Cold War “ideas and assumptions†of America and its allies were not “triumphalist†diktats meant to humiliate or “encircle†Russia by “rubbing its nose†in defeat, but fundamental principles of sovereignty and national self-determination established to avert war on a continent repeatedly plagued by it. Far from being too “triumphalist†in its dealings with Russia, if anything, the West was not triumphalist enough.
to which I would respond what aggression? The aggressor in every single instance cited by Mr. Kirchick was the United States. Russia reacted to our provocations.
Disagreeing with the Russians’ interpretation of events is well and good. Ignoring what actually happened? Not so much. Russia didn’t merely side with the Serbs during the ethnic wars in the Balkans. The U. S. took the side of one group engaging in genocide against another. It also bombed the Serbian capital, destroying the Chinese embassy in the process. That is not purely benign and it was aggression.
Coming up to the present day, the U. S. took the side of a clique of neo-Nazis to overthrow the legitimately-elected government of Ukraine to install a pro-U. S. government there. That, too, was not purely benign and it was aggression.
Well, what more needs to be said about this man’s opinion?
Here’s another opinion from some guy named Bill Clinton, speaking off the record to Strobe Talbott on Russia and Yeltsin in 1993 or 1994:
” We haven’t played everything brilliantly with these people; we haven’t figured out how to say yes to them in a way that balances off how much and how often we want them to say yes to us. We keep telling Ol’ Boris, ‘Okay, now here’s what you’ve got to do next – here’s some more shit for your face’. And that makes it real hard for him, given what he’s up against and who he’s dealing with.”
And we know the rest of the story. Russians HATED Yeltsin’s weakness in the face of the West and they went back to their roots, went back to strength with Putin.
Would add the Russians tolerance for misery is much higher than it is in the West, so don’t expect a change at the top to come from below.
I always laugh when people talk about sanctions on Russia taking effect. Russia’s economy has been in awful shape for 200 years anyway. A few sanctions will drive them over the edge?
200 years? From what I’ve read, Russia was growing economically at quite a decent clip in the early years of the last century. Then a war came along in 1914 and put the kibosh on things.