What Russians see is a powerful and wealthy empire expanding steadily on their Western border and swallowing all the intervening countries, first into the EU’s economic and political arrangements and then into the Nato military structure. Consider from the Russian standpoint the EU’s explicit vocation to keep growing until it embraces every European country with the sole exception of Russia itself, and the almost automatic Nato membership now granted to EU countries. Is it so very unreasonable to view this EU-Nato juggernaut as the world’s last remaining expansionist empire, or even the natural successor to previous German and French expansions that were considerably less benign?
Western politicians may ridicule such fantasies as Russian nationalist paranoia. But why shouldn’t the Russians worry about Western armies and missiles on their borders, when these contribute to a process of territorial encroachment similar to what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by cruder means?
He is comparing a couple of our Stryker battalions that will be in the Balkans and a small number of proposed anti-missiles to Nazi and Napoleonic armies that invaded Russia?
Kalesky is an idiot. He may be accurately stating Russian emotions, to be sure. In which case the Russians are generally idiots.
The Russians have let their submarine sailors die in the Barents Sea rather than quickly call for help, bully Estonia, deny their former East European vassals the right to associate with new friends, attempt to shake the nerve of Western Europe by reminding the Europeans that Russia holds their natural gas supplies, meddle in Ukraine's internal affaris in a crude manner, wage brutal war in Chechnya, undermine Georgia, arm Iran and Syria and supply Iran with nuclear facilities and fuel, interfere with our efforts to sustain the Afghan campaign from Central Asian nations formerly in the Russian empire, sell arms to China useful for a war against us in the Pacific and train with the Chinese on how to use these weapons, sell arms to Hugo Chavez, centralize the Russian state, murder opponents at home and abroad, make voting meaningless, bully the media into submission, and rattle nuclear sabres at Europe.
And no, Russia should never be in NATO. The Russians are lucky to be in the G8. NATO was unable to project power to the Balkans and the NATO countries are expected to defend Russia's borders with China? Land that the Chinese don't really consider permanently gone? Talk about having a gripe about losing land! And too bad Stalin insisted on Belosrussia and Ukraine getting their own UN seats as "independent" states. We called the Russians on that one!
Face it, we didn't take any Russian land. The people that lived in the portions of land that Russia lost wanted out of that empire and leave they did. And they are glad to be rid of the Russian overlords.
I truly want Russia to be a part of the West. I do. The Breslan massacre broke my heart. We really do have common enemies. We shuld be friends. But the Russians seem determined to be outside of the Western world. I'm starting to get tired of their paranoid nationalist whining.
Good luck to them when their population dips below 100 million.
Our State Department has quite the job in managing this psychosis with a UN seat until the former Soviets pass from the Russian scene. Or am I being too optimistic about the possibility of sanity spreading in Russia? I sure hope not.
UPDATE: Victor Hanson has a good piece with related thoughts.
