By the 2008 attack on Georgia it was clear that there is no democratisation of Russia, but some people didn't want to believe it for a long time, not even after 2014 attack on Ukraine.
But as Russia started to regain strength in the early 2000s, they specifically aimed for positive relations with the US, but also were not happy with a Germany style relationship and wanted to be treated as equals. This led to us doubling down on hostilities towards them. But this deterioration of relations inevitably led to where we are today, but fortunately not where we could have ended up - which is in the nuclear wasteland that was briefly called WW3.
This also ties right back in to Georgia. Back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit the US was openly encouraging and supportive of Georgia's efforts to join NATO. France and Germany were strongly opposed to such, arguing that such a move would needlessly provoke Russia, but we aimed to move ahead with it anyhow. The Georgia-Russia war would start a few months later.
[1] - https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/us-russia-putin-re...
And then the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq[1], again, against Russia's protests, and by that point, that's like two countries attacked (one invaded and occupied) by NATO/most of its members, and you'd have to be an idiot to look at that and not notice that it shifted from a purely defensive alliance to an offensive one. [2]
Putin isn't an idiot, he looks at this and starts surrounding himself with buffer states, through both soft and hard power. Unfortunately, soft power isn't working out great in this, for various reasons.
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[1] It's weird how when you mention Iraq in isolation, people think it's indefensible, but when you mention it in the context of Russian anxieties, all of a sudden, we are all bending over backwards to explain how it was perfectly justified, and it wasn't unprovoked aggression against an uninvolved country.
[2] It's been 14 years since NATO attacked a country, though (Libya in 2011 - if you squint hard enough, Syria might not count), so I guess we could once again reframe it as a defensive alliance. [3]
[3] It the US continues on it's insane trajectory and withdraws, it will definitely become a defensive alliance, simply because it will lack the ability to project power.
Wat? I’ve never heard anything like that. I’ve heard people try to justify it on the basis of believing the WMD lie or removing Saddam from power, but Russia is never even mentioned in this context.
Bush Jr, who unilaterally withdrew from the START treaty in 2002[1], and pushed to establish ABM sites in eastern Europe in 2007? That's considered "normalizing"?[2][3] And Putin, who protested both of these actions as destabilizing, is somehow considered the not-sane one in this narrative?
>Ukraine has depleted Russias military stockpiles and their National Wealth Fund. Russia was weaker than people thought.
"Russia is never as strong as she appears....and Russia is never as weak as she appears." -- multiple attributions including Bismark and Churchill
Russia was supposed to run out of ballistic missiles...in summer 2022.[4] They've also likely taken more casualties than the entire active duty strength of the UK, French, and German land forces combined (73K + 118K + 63K ~= 250k) while still keeping a cohesive force capable of offensive combat operations in the field, which has GROWN since the war started to somewhere around 550-650K (up from ~200-350K in 2022).[5][6] Russia only appears weak by the standard established by the US 1990-2005....but the US is essentially a super-saiyan and functioned on a different plane of existence from every other military in the world.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unilateral-withdrawal-fro...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna21262371
[3] https://www.insightturkey.com/articles/missile-defense-in-eu...
[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/04/01/vladimir-p...
[5] https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4589095-russian-army-grow...
I don't know which is more wrong, the broad claim here or the claim that you are a liberal.
I mean, what you describe was generally the case...but between the fall of the USSR and the start of the new US-Russia Cold War around 1998-1999, with the belief that Russia was on a path that, while rocky, led to Western-friendly democracy with the right support.
From 1999-2014 (but generally declining through that period) engagement was viewed as useful, in part because Russia’s hostile turn was seen by some as curable with reassurance, but more because Russia was seen as a generally hostile generally but having useful alignments of interest in some parts of the world.
But by a decade ago, 2015? “Normalizing relations with Russia and disengaging with the rest of the world militarily” was certainly not a common, much less the dominant, American liberal position on foreign policy.
