…presently?
If so, when did you start
i) Lingering Cold War inertia?
ii) The return of Russian hard power since 2014?
iii) The election hacking controversy?
Some other time?
Inspired by a comment I recalled hear back when the Russian spy ring was exposed back in 2010, that Russia no longer felt like an enemy. Wondering if that has changed.
I have to say I don’t get it either. Russia was a business partner primarily until the USA started agitating directly on its border, most obviously overturning democracy in Ukraine.
Huge contracts to provide energy into central Europe, for example.
Now Russia is the big bad wolf again.
It’s almost like the US political class was running out of conventional enemies and need to rack up some aggression to keep the ‘symmetric’ warfare contracts flowing.
I’m 47 so I have some lingering Cold War inertia. I was taught or at least it was implied that the Soviets were evil incarnate and wanted to take over the world. While that may not have been exactly accurate, it is difficult to see modern Russia and not go back to those indoctrinated ideas.
They seem to be the heads to our tails more often than not, whether that be in the UN, Syria, Ukraine or many other recent scenarios. I can’t say that I would consider them an enemy, but they are not a friend either.
I was born in 1977. Russia has always been the enemy. They were crumbling throughout the 80s and considerably weakened during and after the breakup of the USSR until the relatively recent present, but they never really stopped being the enemy.
I think it’s fair to say Russia has been doing a lot of the direct agitating. The USA did not invade Crimea.
Russia isn’t an “enemy” of the United States. It is, however, a geopolitical rival, if you will - an aggressive and unfriendly nation with significant capabilities of unfriendliness.
Once the enemy, then not, now again.
Putin is the largest threat to stability in the world. Russia is returning to Soviet style rule. That is, follow the rules or die. There’s no freedom of the press, and rule of law is a joke.
Is Putin going to go full nuke on the US? I doubt it. But cyber war, undermining US authority, installing a puppet president? Yup. Done and done.
I’m just amazed people don’t seem to see this.
They have always been a rival, with conflicting interests.
Whether they are an existential threat to our existence has waxed and waned over the decades.
It seems to be on the waxing phase at the moment.
Absolutely!
Until Put in is Crucified and the Fat from his Man Boobs lights The Kremlin at night, I just can’t trust them.
For some reason our political discourse won’t allow someone to hold these two views simultaneously:
1 Russia is a country we can get along with (some shared interests, some conflicting interests)
2 Russia tried to mess with our election and should be punished / deterred against doing it again
Suddenly, where one stands on #1 seems to hinge entirely on where one stands on #2, resulting in both Dems and Republicans looking like hypocritical asses (most especially Trump himself).
Don’t get me wrong: I think Democrats have landed on a political goldmine, with the whole Russia angle. There is literally nothing Trump can do to make the Russia suspicions go away, so he’s in the same position Clinton was with Benghazi or her email server. But that doesn’t make it intellectually honest to suddenly go whole hog on Russia alarmism. The hacking issue should be kept separate from the larger foreign policy questions.
Indeed, the ‘hostile take over’ of the Krim failed and you were content to leave it at that.
Building up an enemy image with the public takes time.
Yup, the US is the enemy of Russia, though.
Could you please elaborate on this? Let’s take a couple prominent examples of Russian action on the world stage. In Syria, Russia is essentially defending the status quo (however odious) - whereas the US, to the extent we’ve been involved at all, has been working to topple the incumbent regime.
Then there’s Ukraine, where Russia is not blameless but I would say expanding NATO ever closer to Russia’s borders and supporting a coup against the democratically elected government are at least as “destabilizing” as anything Russia has done.
That doesn’t mean Russia is right and the US is wrong in either situation, but I don’t see how you characterize Russia as a threat to stability per se.
While Gorbachev and Yeltsin were in charge, no. With Putin in charge, watch your back. Not necessarily an enemy, but definitely a threat. Russia is a fox surrounded by hens.
Who’s “You”, and what is a “Krim”? wHose hostile takeover of what? How did it fail?
How so? Are the countries at war?
No…I merely think of them as an unfriendly power (to the US and NATO) who has their own agenda and a disturbing willingness to use their rather limited power to further their own agenda without a lot of seeming care to civilians caught in the cross fire.
Not really, at least not for me. To me, everyone spies on everyone else, so it’s kind of to be expected. More worrying has been their actions in the Crimea and Ukraine as well as Syria. But fundamentally from my own perspective at least nothing has really changed wrt outlook on Russia today verse a decade ago.
Russia is not our enemy in the sense that we’ll have a war with them, but they are rivals that pose a threat to regional stability, our friends and our interests.
Something that we’re about to face is the fact that Russia is more or less contained. Sanctions have kept them in a long term recession and their military is actually very weak. They are likely at the extent of their abilities just in Syria. But if sanctions are lifted and Tillerson continues the Exxon oil deal, Russia will have an influx of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Russia is trying to get friendly far right politicians elected to power in Europe and split the EU and NATO. Trump seems interested in doing everything he can to help with this, plus hand them $600 billion in oil money. Anyone is welcome to explain how this is a good thing.
I think well before this whole Russian hacking issue was even on the horizon, there has been a developing antagonism between Russia and the West.
Part of it has to do with Putin’s Napoleon Complex. Part of it has to do with the west’s close involvement with the former Soviet Block countries, including the missile defense systems that NATO and the US (primarily) has established there to discourage Russian growing ambitions to repatriate their former republics.
Another significant cause of friction is the personal mistrust and dislike that exists between Putin and Obama/Clinton. It’s difficult to know what’s at the core of their mutual dislike for one another, but it seems quite personal and even visceral. This, in no small part, has contributed to the current climate.
Putin is a bastard. But I don’t think he wants conflict with the US. He certainly isn’t looking for a real fight. But he isn’t going to back down or flinch either. He’s too proud for that. He believes that the only way to negotiate better relations with the west is from a position of strength. From a realpolitik point of view, he’s not wrong.
The west, on the other hand, isn’t about to let an authoritarian dictate the terms of future relations, nor threaten the NATO alliance. So they appear to be escalating their commitment by bolstering military presence in former Eastern Block countries.
It’s become a very complicated pissing contest. One in which I hope nobody gets wet.
But while Russia and the US are certainly rivals in many respects, they are not enemies. At least, not yet.
I won’t say dropping sanctions is an unmitigated good thing, but it’s not an obviously bad thing. As long as sanctions are in place, Putin can credibly make the argument to the Russian people that the cause of their economic misery is Western malice and not the cronyism, corruption, and incompetence of his government. And sanctions provide justification (in Russia’s eyes anyway) for further antagonistic behavior–the very thing we’re ostensibly trying to discourage.
Sanctions often have the unintended consequence of paradoxically inviting bad behavior and further entrenching the existing leadership in the targeted country.
Agreed. I would say something similar about Iran, too.
Having a preference in who runs Ukraine is just as destabilizing as annexing your neighbor’s land and fighting a “covert” war on their land? Interesting.
I don’t know if I’d say enemy, but ii most closely conforms to when I started to think the US should take a different approach.
“The Russians” aren’t the enemy. The people they tolerate in power are. That Putin’s Russia had a different idea of how the international system should operate was implicit in Putin’s evident desire to reinstate old-style great power status and “zones of influence” and the tactics for dealing with internal terrorists. It became unavoidably explicit, I would say, from the time the regime overstepped any possible “blind eye” mark with the murder of Litvinenko in 2006 and the Georgia/Abkhazia crisis in 2008.