A Good Commentary on Russia

Boston Globe columnist James Carroll looks at what might be driving Russia's hostility to recent NATO actions, and comes to the conlusion that it's completely justified:

• The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was accompanied by a buildup of NATO.
• Mikhail Gorbachev was assured that if the USSR accepted the reunified Germany's presence in NATO, there would be no further eastern expansion of the alliance.

Carroll quotes George Kennan describing NATO expansion as, "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era."

The list of countries that have invaded Russia in the past few hundred years includes, "Poland, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden, Austria, France, Great Britain, and Germany", though he leaves off the US's direct military participation in White Russian revolts of the 1920s.

I would argue that Carroll does not go far enough.

If one looks at the Hart-Rudman Commission of the late 1990s looking at coming threats to America, and the behavior of Lynne Cheney, who continuously called for an immediate military strike on China, and resigned when she was created like a crazy aunt by everyone else, inclucing other Republicans, and juxtaposes it with the report that Francis Fukuyama said that "There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well", I think that this is actually a deliberate strategy.

The Republican party needs an external enemy to succeed, and that this actions taken recently, particularly the missile shield, are part of a deliberate attempt to recreate the Cold War for partisan political gain.