Could it be that Russia is threatening our "interest" in becoming the "global hegemon" -- an oft-proclaimed goal of the neo-cons? As Kristol and Kagan explain in an influential Foreign Affairs article:
A hegemon is nothing more or less than a leader with preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain. That is America's position in the world today.... [P]eace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it... American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible." (See also the Project for a New American Century.)
Putin has said that Russia wishes to be America's "partner," while the Americans want Russia to be their "Vassal." (Identical words in Russian: "Ð degrees' '"Ð Ð ' " and "Ð degrees' ' degreesÐ "). If the United States has an "interest" in attacking Russian sovereignty and reducing Russia to an American "vassal," Putin, and I dare say all Russians, will have none of it and they will resist strenuously, as would we.
We Americans pride ourselves with the conviction that we are universally admired and envied throughout the world. It is a delusion. In fact, a 2014 International Gallup Poll reveals that the United States is regarded, far and away, as the greatest threat to world peace. Russia does not appear among the top six countries.
American global "hegemony" is illegal and immoral. But more fundamentally, it is impossible. But that claim requires a separate essay, which is forthcoming.
Perhaps the Russians threaten our interest in remaining "the leader of the free world." But that leadership has been severely diminished, not by the Russians, but rather by the antics of our buffoonish President. The Russians did not do this to us, we did this to ourselves.
Similarly, we are often told that Russia is the "primary threat" to the security of the United States.
With a military budget one tenth as large as that of the United States, Russia is ill-prepared to restore the old Soviet Union, or to re-occupy eastern Europe. And there is no evidence whatever that they wish to do so.
The Russian military has parity with the United States in one category only: strategic nuclear weapons. And that should worry both sides, for it suggests that conventional warfare beyond its borders would quickly "go nuclear."
While Russian offensive capabilities beyond its borders are severely limited, the same cannot be said for their defensive posture.
In the late eighteenth century, the Americans showed the world that the mightiest Empire could not win a war fought on the enemy's home territory. We Americans had to be taught the same lesson by the Vietnamese and now the Afghans. Do we really believe that we can defeat the Russians militarily on their own territory, when our "greatest military in history" cannot prevail over peasant armies in Vietnam and Afghanistan? Come to think of it, the American military has not won a war in the past seventy years, unless you count the victory of the US marines over the Granadian police force.
With these lessons of history in mind, who can imagine that the United States can succeed in defeating Russia on its own territory where Napoleon and Hitler failed.
With the Russians unable to win abroad, and "the West" unable to defeat the Russians on their own territory, where is the military threat?
The threat, of course, is that of nuclear war. If there is a nuclear war, it will almost certainly be unintended -- by accident, derangement, or equipment malfunction.
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