Just Listen to What Western Officials Are Saying About Russia
If you want a sleepless night – or month – just listen to what Western
security officials are saying these days about a possible confrontation
with Russia.
“If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential
threat to the United States,” warned
General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,
“I’d have to point to Russia.”
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former head of NATO, similarly inveighed about
impending regional conflict. “Putin wants to restore Russia to its
former position as a great power,” Rasmussen insisted.
“There is a high probability that he will intervene in the Baltics”
as he has in Ukraine.
It’s not just defense secretaries and generals employing language
that conjures up the ghosts of the past. Presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton used a “Munich”
analogy in reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a common New
York Times description of Russia is “revanchist.”
These two terms take the Ukraine crisis back to 1938, when fascist Germany
menaced the world.
Yet comparing the civil war in Ukraine to the Cold War – let alone Europe
on the eve of World War II – has little basis in fact. Yes, Russia is certainly
aiding insurgents in eastern Ukraine, but there’s no evidence that
Moscow is threatening the Baltics, or even the rest of Ukraine. Indeed,
it’s the West that’s been steadily marching
east over the past decade, recruiting one former Russian ally or Soviet
republic after another into NATO.
