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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The ongoing "Russia is up to something" narrative is an unpleasant death by a thousand cuts.

China is doing 'interesting' expansionary work encroaching on territory in the South China Sea. America has no doubt spawned a generation of enemies in the Middle East from the last 15 odd years of warmongering.

The Russians have no demonstrated ability to do anything dangerous politically, or any particular motive not shared by the ~20% of the world population living in China. To even influence the conversations in American politics they will have to wait in line behind a maelstrom of corporate interests that have the political scene quite neatly locked down.

It is heartbreaking to see the usually vibrant US political scene get so lost in the bushes on foreign policy and threat assessment.

View on HN

Russia can’t do anything, Unless you are Ukraine(invaded), Georgia or Europe (remember that fuel crisis and pipelines) that is.

Or the United States in our case.

Or Syria (Russia is assad’s Primary backer)..

So yeah, remember when Democrats ridiculed Romney for his Russia statements and Obama and HRC declared it was time for a “reset button” for the bad relationship betweeen the Bush white goose and Russia?

Or how about their efforts to back certain black lives matter groups and pro police group on the other hand to stroke racial tension does that not matter?

Or their current effort to discredit Republican Who have split from Trump.

We still live in that world, And the consequences for people both in the United States and outside of the United States are immense.

At some point this stops looking like normal relationships and start looking like an act of war

> Russia can’t do anything, Unless you are Ukraine(invaded), Georgia or Europe (remember that fuel crisis and pipelines) that is.

Yes, Russia would be a concern to me if I lived in Europe.

> Or the United States in our case.

That is neither an argument nor a fact, so I can't really address it.

> Or Syria (Russia is assad’s Primary backer)..

Isn't Russia supporting the legitimate government in Syria? Obviously that isn't supporting US interests, but it is hardly a radical position.

> So yeah, remember when Democrats ridiculed Romney for his Russia statements and Obama and HRC declared it was time for a “reset button” for the bad relationship betweeen the Bush white goose and Russia?

No, don't follow US politics that closely. It would be nice to see the US reset its bad relationship with Russia if I'm reading that right. The world is better if we all try to get along civilly.

> Or how about their efforts to back certain black lives matter groups and pro police group on the other hand to stroke racial tension does that not matter?

Pardon? I don't understand.

> Or their current effort to discredit Republican Who have split from Trump.

Approximately half the political apparatus is constantly trying to discredit the other half, and the other half is usually infighting quietly and jocking for positions. Russian trolls aren't going to be able to get in before the Democrats have started savaging them.

> We still live in that world, And the consequences for people both in the United States and outside of the United States are immense.

Yes.

> At some point this stops looking like normal relationships and start looking like an act of war

No they don't. Acts of war involve material harm at some level. I know Trump isn't that popular, but he has ballpark similar ratings (~1 person in 20 difference) to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or even Obama at this point is the presidency [1]. If the Russians are somehow having an impact, it isn't upsetting anyone unduly, let alone an act of war.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

If your definition of legitimate includes government use of chemical weapons against their people, I suspect we are not going to agree on much.

Regardless, a little history lesson. One of the things Obama ran on was that the United States policy towards Russia was needlessly antagonistic due to the influence of evil neo-conservatives. Hillary went so far as to buy a staples "Easy Button" and present it to the Russian diplomats in her fist meeting with them afterwords... The same HRC that the Russians just mucked with massively during the last election.

I've really come to the conclusion given their support and attacks against both Democrats and Republicans, White and Black, liberals and conservatives that the current Russian government doesn't care about helping a candidate - they want to destroy the civil fabric of the United States.

So yes, enabling dictators to gas their own people, encouraging race riots, and attempting to subvert Democracies by interfering with elections are Acts of war.

Haha both of the April supposed chemical weapons attacks were a fraud. That's why no one reports on them anymore. In order to offer useful "little history lessons", you need to pay attention and remember farther back than last week. You're destroying your own "civil fabric".

And you need to source your claims. Nobody has reason to believe a word of what you write.

Presumably, it is based on claims by Russian and Syrian authorities. These are not impartial sources, and they delayed access of international inspectors to the site.

OPCW has confirmed use of chemical weapons by Syrian government during the civil war at several separate occasions.

You won't see this on Fox or MSNBC. They have commitments to fulfill, unrelated to journalism. If you like, there are some other places to look:

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-chemical-attack-g...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXwG-901yU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbWAABd9CV4

If your sources include two conspiracy-like youtube videos, and a legitimate article saying "maybe", you may want to rethink your position here.

There hasn't been much questioning of the narrative in MSM.

This might by one of those rare instances https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=58259

However, outside MSM, there are questions across the political spectrum however. Such as...

https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/what-really-happen...

https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2018/04/12/idiocy-is-br...

However, Iraq WMD's were all reported by legitimate news sources at the time. Sometimes in the present, it is never clear as to what may or not be ultimately revealed.

I love it, that direct on-the-ground reporting from the location of the alleged events is "conspiracy-like". I suspect I've rethought my "position" a lot more than you have.

You may want to look into media bias and the One America News Network. I suspect you haven't rethought your position at all, and rather parrot the position you see on the media you consume. Think outside the box.

OMG I had literally never heard of OANN until referred there by some leftists I follow. They hate MSNBC too. You can't even see the box. You actually believe that it's "right wing" to be skeptical of excuses for war. I am a pacifist who is against all USA military violence of the last several decades. This has been a journey for me, since after all I did vote to re-elect Bush the Lesser. Fool me once.

Leave all that aside. The way to contradict an on-the-ground report the bias of which is obvious and unacceptable to you, is to show us an on-the-ground report that contradicts it, the bias of which is more acceptable to you. This has the benefit of being less insulting than shallow assumptions about my media habits, oh and also it has the benefit of making any logical sense whatsoever, in contrast to the three sentences of meaningless pablum we see here.

Tick-tock.

Regarding Syria, as I understand, their leader (Assad) has good relations with Russia and there is a Russian military base. It is obvious that if US-supported opposition would win then there would be pro-US government and American bases instead of Russian and Putin doesn't want that. I don't see how US's motives are anything different than Russians'.

While Assad is a dictator, he has support from a part of a population (and is hated by the other part). If you side with one part and drop bombs on another, the conflict won't go away. If you just look at the Wikipedia page [1] you'll see how many military groups and countries are taking part.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War

I am generally with you, the one exception being Syria. Time will tell if we were on the wrong side in Syria. If you understand Russian geopolitics, just taking Russian interests for account alone (not trying to wage some third party war with the US), it absolutely makes sense for them to have supported Assad. There were other ways to take him down, most of them were diplomatic. Instead, the US decided to fund Islamic Extremist mercenaries which don't necessarily have a great world wide reputation, either.

Generally, I am not a fan of the US's "regime change" strategies, at least in the middle east. They were unmitigated disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya is still struggling with warring factions, Syria would have descended into chaos with 3 interested parties struggling for control (pretty safe to say the Saudi-backed fighters would have won, after another bloody conflict, of course), and of course, it will remain to be seen what happens in Yemen which curiously has very sparse media coverage here in the US.

Warning - my own opinion - I think historically, American regime change efforts were more likely to be accepted and succeed when the values of America roughly aligned with the values of the nation in conflict. This is clearly not the case anymore in the Middle East (maybe once was in the US, but not anymore) One thing Western Cultures just can't seem to be able to grasp is just how large the resistance of a country that takes their faith seriously to the liberal agendas that have taken root and are antithetical to Islam. It's the one thing governments fail to understand time and time again.

Russia supports the Syrian regime because it contains the only Russian overseas naval base [1]. This is the same reason Russia anexed Crimea, which is now conveniently a Russian naval base.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_naval_facility_in_Tart...

Regardless of the reason, or reasons (there are many reasons Russia supported Assad, strategic military reasons being one of them as you mentioned), that was my point: That Russia had legitimate reasons to support Assad. The interests of Russia simply did not align with the interests of The United States. This happens sometime in the world, but taking that further and claiming it was somehow to hoist malicious intent on the United States is where the stretch was made and where you enter the dangerous rhetoric zone.

My argument is that the only reason Russia supports the Assad regime is for the benefit of its only foreign naval base. I don't claim that there is any malicious intent on the United States as far as that action is concerned.

Read into the intent too much, apologies. I don't agree that is the only reason, but certainly a reason among many.

The really sad part is those oppressive regimes can continuously blame outside interference (and have been doing so, see Iran) anytime there is a legitimate domestic uprising by using America's meddling as historical evidence. That's why this whole "Russian meddling" story is so dangerous and should be approached with caution here in America. If things ever get bad enough for an uprising, they'll point to outside meddling.

One thing is for sure, these proxy wars constantly make people rich and powerful despite screwing over the masses, so I expect it to remain this way for many years to come.

"At some point this stops looking like normal relationships and start looking like an act of war"

Well, as far as 'normal relationships' are concerned, the USA have quite a reputation to uphold. E.g:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt...

https://www.dw.com/en/merkel-testifies-on-nsa-spying-affair/...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/congress-intel-committee-to-pr...

> Russia can’t do anything

If I were Putin, I would provoke tensions between China and the U.S. and profit. Yes, China has ambitions to become a greater power, and U.S. has its interest to curb China. Russia, as other emerging economies, has geopolitical fears of an expanding China.

The pipelines where never actually going to happen( for anyone that was a realist). You give a country that is struggling anyway a strong card, you should expect them to use it. As an EU citizen that was a moronic move on our part.

Prior to this Russian threat narrative, it was always China who was in the news doing the hacking. Our government banned some Chinese built computers for use in government due to fears of builtin hardware spy devices. There is a long history of Chinese capturing and infiltrating top secret information.

The state of the world didn't change. The Chinese didn't stop and Russia didn't just start. These types of things have been going on by multiple actors for a long time. Only the narrative changed due to opportunistic political advantages.

This is more or less my thinking on the matter as well.

I'm also very skeptical (uninformed?) of the evidence that ties Russia to all of this.

In this case:

"Microsoft said its digital crimes unit (DCU) had acted on a court order to take control of six internet domains created by a group known variously as Strontium, Fancy Bear and APT28, which it said was associated with the Russian government.

As well as the two think-tanks, other home pages had been set up to mimic the websites of the U.S. Senate and Microsoft’s own Office software suite, it added. "

So, these sophisticated Hackers registered web pages under their own organization names? Is that not a bit like robbing a bank and leaving your business card behind?

And in the case of the former Russian hackers in the news, I may be wrong but is it not ip addresses that were used as evidence? If so, I've always been under the impression that ip addresses can be spoofed, and so the rumor goes the CIA (at least) possesses a wide variety of cloaking techniques.

https://www.eff.org/files/2016/09/22/2016.09.20_final_format...

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/

To be clear, I'm not claiming this proves (or disproves) anything one way or the other, what I am saying is that the "evidence", at least what I've seen, leaves me feeling rather skeptical. In it worries me that there aren't very many people in the skeptical centre here with me, most everyone seems to be out on the polar opposite ends of the spectrum on whether Russia did this or not.

EDIT: Downvoter(s) - feel free, but if you are downvoting based on disagreement, would you mind posting a link to an article that explains the method(s) by which we can conclude definitively that all of the alleged Russian attacks were indeed committed by Russia, rather than a 3rd party posing as Russia? If my skepticism is "simply wrong", then it should be easy to simply demonstrate that. It's a pretty sad state of affairs if people can't address sincere, worthy questions, but "know" they are wrong.

I've found that any questioning of the technical details of the government narrative on this matter is met with a flood of downvotes but never an actual valid counter argument. You raise some valid points

That makes you, me, and two other people on this site who've noticed it.

There is no shortage of incredibly intelligent people on this website, far more intelligent than me no doubt, but this particular topic has quite the "elephant in the room" feel to it, no one will address it.

I feel no shame in stating my biases up front - I am a small government advocate, history very clearly demonstrates that governments (including the US) have a tendency to bend the truth now and then to achieve a state in public opinion conducive to particular policy goals and actions, and because of that I am distrustful.

But that said, above all I am interested in the truth. If this is in fact a simple open and shut case, as seems to be the general consensus, then so be it. But why such secrecy around the evidence demonstrating this fact?

EDIT: Some good technical discussion in here for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16653671

> That makes you, me, and two other people on this site who've noticed it.

No, there are plenty of people who notice it. We've learned to keep our mouths shut on the topic because the coordinated downvote attacks by FVEY sycophants on this site make attempting discussion pointless.

Find a different site if you want to raise even the merest, slightest questions with CIA talking points.

> make attempting discussion pointless.

I have noticed this as well, here and elsewhere. The level of discourse on the internet, even among genuinely intelligent people, is becoming absolutely shameful imho. I used to thrash out like everyone else but am trying to learn a smarter approach: ask very specific questions, and as soon as an answerer shifts the conversation into a large, complicated narrative encompassing many additional ideas that are not part of the original question, calmly and respectfully call them on it and restate the original question.

My guess on why this particular question gets only downvotes and never answers is that it is just this type of question: simple and precise. And on top of it, I suspect no one actually knows the answer - the story has been repeated ad naseum in the media for long enough that it doesn't even occur to people to ask any questions.

Well surprise surprise: You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.

Meanwhile, numerous other accounts have no such restriction. This error message seems incorrect.

>The Russians have no demonstrated ability to do anything dangerous politically,

Huh, I dunno I've been watching first hand how russians on social media have been stirring up conservative vs liberal shit storms. The election was a close one so any one of a thousand small influences might have shifted it into it's current disastrous state. When people are at a tipping point it doesn't take much.

"one of a thousand small influences"

That's the point. The election was so close there were likely at least a thousand different things that, had they gone slightly differently, would have shifted the election to Hillary.

Russian interference accounted for a small number of these, but there were so many more that aren't getting any attention.

There are quite a few that have been getting attention. Facebook/twitter/social media has been a hot topic. How the media conducts itself and how much it is trusted has been big. Gerrymandering has been a hot topic. What else do you feel should be getting attention that is not?

I'd add the Comey interference, but that too has been well covered.

There's a lot more, but most if it was fair game / water under the bridge. Interesting in a historical context or to internal party strategists, but doesn't deserve attention in the public context of upcoming elections.

So you're right. It does sometimes seem that commentary about Russia dominates, but it probably isn't strangling focus on other important issues.

How about the fact that TV news was all-Trump-all-the-time from about July 2015 on through the election? Trump voters are old and unsophisticated (on average; of course there are exceptions); they take their instructions from TV not online sources. No one could have afforded the marketing that "TV journalists" gave Trump for free. They broadcast an empty lectern whenever he took longer than expected in the restroom. Meanwhile all other Republicans, all third party candidates, and Sanders got no coverage. (You might remember a lot of the Sanders campaign, but that was grassroots crowd-driven stuff, not the networks deciding to cover Sanders.) Some reckon it was a sort of pied-piper strategy to ensure Hillary got her weakest possible opponent. I can't believe that even Democrats are that dumb: Trump was uniquely qualified to run against her. Why would she have been afraid to face Jeb or Ted? Did she really think that all that TV coverage was somehow unrelated to the election?

The conspiracy theories ignore the main reason that TV news covers Trump all the time: he improves ratings and profits. Millions of morons invited him into their homes when he had that awful reality show, and now they can't get enough of him. He has carefully cultivated the same persona as president and that's just fascinating to people. Those fascinated people are watching a lot of TV news even now. The only candidate who could counter this strength would be someone with her own reality show. One might wonder, given that the TV news organizations continue to make bank with Trump ad nauseum, why we'd expect the results to be any different the next time Trump runs...

>Trump voters are old and unsophisticated (on average; of course there are exceptions); they take their instructions from TV not online sources.

White people voted for Trump in a majority in both the educated and uneducated categories. People making more than 50k voted more for Trump and people making less voted for Hillary. Trump pulled in more independents than Hillary.

Don't repeat the trope that Trumps supporters are 'old and unsophisticated'. It does a disservice to any actual debate and results in completely incorrect analyses of why he won (e.g. your assessment that only tv-watching morons voted for him).

https://verdict.justia.com/2018/02/16/trumps-base-broadly-sp...

Also the election was decided by ~70k votes in 3 states. All that matters is who was convinced to stay home or submit a blank ballot.

That synopsis of my argument is a bit simplistic. The "TV morons" are the reason that he is on TV news all the time. His being on TV news all the time is one of the various reasons he got elected. Thread hypothesis is that such reasons exist in addition to the obvious Russian Army vote-machine hacking, and that it would be good to examine those other reasons. You may disagree, but if so I hope you're not determining Democratic strategy...

This "white people" argument looks silly as soon as you do some arithmetic. Whites' preference for Trump was less than nonwhites' preference for Clinton. If either was a bad thing, they were both bad things. In fact, there was nothing wrong with either one of them. Candidates adjust to the electorate. When Don Jr. runs against Chelsea, he'll be saying awful things about someone besides Mexicans.

TV news dominance is a contingent thing, not important for the long term. Even now, TV news is almost more important in how it steers the online conversation than in what it directly reports. In the long term, TV news will cease to exist as such, and the desultory performance over the last three years will be one reason why. (again, not the only reason why...) Right now, however, Trump is still on TV...

>Huh, I dunno I've been watching first hand how russians on social media have been stirring up conservative vs liberal shit storms.

I don't know how you jump from organic "shit storms" with a declining economic and social future for a lot of people, to a blanket Russia is doing this.

It's exactly what should be happening as we have a racist shit-for-brains in the White House. People are pushing further right and further left and the political atmosphere is exactly what you would expect. Things shouldn't be calm.

Many "organic" shitstorms are purposely seeded by russian backed groups, with the express intention of creating anger and, well, more shitstorms

Good! People should be angry! The system is not working for the majority of people. People should be pissed.

Do you have any evidence that all 'shitstorms' are created by Russia? I bet you can't provide evidence that even 0.01% of 'shitstorms' are created by Russia. Apply some Occam's Razor here.

Not only in middle east, USA has setup dictatorships all over latin america and gained several enemies here too

Thank you. As someone who lived through the end of the cold war, I have no desire to go back to that (legitimately fearing for worldwide nuclear holocaust) and I don't understand why in 2018 some people are so enthusiastic about pitting Russia against the United States again.

We made major strides in our relationship with them and now it seems like those have been erased in the name of local politics. Doesn't seem like a wise decision.

> We made major strides in our relationship with them

Unfortunately, they decided to commit murders on foreign soil, invade other countries and other nasty things that made this relationship a lot less attractive than it could have been.

Had Russia become a democracy, it'd be different, but an autocrat with profound disregard for foreign democratic institutions would never be a good friend.

Every major political power (including/especially the US) does this and it's never cut and dry good vs. evil. Russia's actions are the same and as someone living in the US there's nothing they are doing that justifies putting the entire planet at risk by reigniting our tensions with them.

The cold war was an entirely different thing. It wasn't a local skirmish, it was doomsday hanging over the world every day for 40 years.

> Unfortunately, they decided to commit murders on foreign soil, invade other countries and other nasty things...

Is this not exactly what the US (and its allies, including my country) are doing in the middle east?

And it's be perfectly understandable that many of the countries where such acts happen are not exactly friends of the US.

>Unfortunately, they decided to commit murders on foreign soil, invade other countries and other nasty things that made this relationship a lot less attractive than it could have been.

That describes US policy over the last 20 years. The lack of self-awareness is astounding.

Tu quoque fallacy. Two wrongs don't make a right.

If you expect people to stop doing something disagreeable, you better make sure you are not deeply engaged in the same type of behavior. That seems fairly straight-forward.

It's not straightforward - that's exactly the point of the tu quoque fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

As an individual American who is not involved in intelligence or military work, I can condemn such actions by any nation while maintaining moral consistency.

The point of that wiki article (tu quoque fallacy) is that the critic's moral character is irrelevant. The whole point is that you don't need 'moral consistency' to critique bad behavior.

So then why do you feel the need to justify yourself by saying that you don't work in defense? :) You basically stepped into the same trap you warmed me against :) Maintaining moral high ground seems to be a vital need, something on the level of instinct it seems. 'Tu quoque' or no 'tu quoque' we like to feel morally justified.

That isn't actually the tu quoque fallacy, although it does look quite similar at first glance.

A = [commit murders on foreign soil, invade other countries and other nasty things] B = [made this relationship a lot less attractive] C = [it is wise to improve our relationship]

The original claim is A -> B, A(Russia) -> True.

The response is that A -> B, A(US) -> True. Therefore, if C(US), C(Russia) is also not ruled out. Logically sound.

This isn't claiming that rbanffy's argument is wrong because A(rbanffy). I suspect rbanffy is probably not even committing murders on foregin soil, le alone the other stuff, so it isn't a tu quoque fallacy. It is just pointing out that A isn't an international norm for cutting off productive relationships.

I just came off of finishing Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent' and I couldn't tell who they were talking about. It sounded far too benign to be US foreign policy even!

This is a very one sided viewpoint. If we are going to attempt to understand why the current state of matters exists in the way it does, we need to include much broader context.

For example, whenever someone brings up Ukraine, when is the last time they also provided the historical context just prior to the Russian escalation?

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/americas-ukra...

Seriously?! Giving cookies to protesters vs. invading the country? Or are you comparing the cookies to hacking a candidate's e-mail server and offering the e-mails to the opposing candidate?

Seriously? did you read the article? Talk about selective observance to the extreme. The irony of such a response on thread that started with context is important and you immediately disregard all context not inline with your narrative.

Just a bit of what you might missed.

"...It was a grotesque distortion to portray the events in Ukraine as a purely indigenous, popular uprising. The Nuland-Pyatt telephone conversation and other actions confirm that the United States was considerably more than a passive observer to the turbulence. Instead, U.S. officials were blatantly meddling in Ukraine. Such conduct was utterly improper. The United States had no right to try to orchestrate political outcomes in another country—especially one on the border of another great power. It is no wonder that Russia reacted badly to the unconstitutional ouster of an elected, pro-Russian government—an ouster that occurred not only with Washington’s blessing, but apparently with its assistance..."

So you are saying US paid to everyone of tens of thousand people protesting against cancelling agreements with EU? So you think that protests only happen when US pays for them?

And whatever US did doesn't justify using political instability to annex a part of Ukraine. Russia did it because it could and there was an opportunity.

1) no 2) no attempts to justify. Police search for motive for the purpose of understanding why, not to say any particular actions were just. However, understanding why is often important when attempting deescalation of conflicts and possibly preventing future conflicts.

The point is that there is only one prevailing viewpoint without the context of contributors to the conflict. Why would this not be included? Maybe everyone would still reach the same conclusion; however, if historical context is being withheld, how can anyone know if their assessment is logical.

And not surprisingly, you've decided to quote something from a collection of blogs owned by Soviet immigrant (involved in Communist ideological games back in USSR).

Maybe you would like to point out exactly who you are talking about and describe how they have affected the content.

This is the author of the content.

https://www.cato.org/people/ted-galen-carpenter

There are other articles and sources events described

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-26089450

Russia, and Putin specifically, are suffering from a serious case of inferiority complex ever since the USSR broke apart. They could obviously prosper easily by integrating themselves into Europe & the west economically. Instead, they are willing to hurt themselves significantly if it allows them to inflict any harm on their "opponents".

China is powerful, but has actually been rather docile, historically. They have none of the expansionist instincts that still come natural to Russia–the only exception being a few tiny islands. The US, Great Britain: every superpower in history was more aggressive than China today.

Russia has unfortunately proven that they are very much capable of inflicting some serious harm. They are partly responsible for millions of deaths in Syria, they are undermining 70 years of rather successful attempts to make the forcible taking of territory a thing of the past at least among some nations. They are undermining the singularly successful effort to abolish chemical weapons (both with their support in Syria and their executions in GB). There's some real fear that they could test NATO, and that he-who-shall-not-be-mentioned might be willing (eager?) to let NATO fall apart. That would be an existential threat for every independent country east of Germany, and it doesn't entirely not be plausible as an inflection point that future history books cite as the cause for the next big war.

We made a genuine attempt to integrate with the West. We were rebuffed. That seems, just like you say, pretty obvious to me.

Sure, it was all good and dandy for a while, especially in the context of economic cooperation and dismantling communism. But when you look at deeper issues like national security, you can't deny that Russia got completely tuned out by the West. I still don't understand what the US was thinking when they tried to expand NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, two critical security frontiers for Moscow (even as they said they wouldn't do it [1]).

And in case you missed it, we voiced our opposition to NATO expansion loudly, bitterly, and repeatedly over the last two decades. You just chose to ignore it. And now the West collectively acts like the resulting conflict is some kind of unexpected flare-up of Russian paranoia/empire syndrome/general wickedness. John Mearsheimer put it best [2], so I don't want to keep beating a dead horse.

In the end, if you are trying to build a more integrated and safer world, you have to take the interests and sensibilities of all major stakeholders into into account. That's how you build mutual trust. If you don't thread carefully you risk signaling disingenuousness and opportunism. So you get what you get.

PS As a side note, I do find the cartoonization of this conflict very bizarre. Russian are the orcs, completely alien and wicked, Putin is the omnipotent Sauron, US is the noble and selfless Aragon, Trump is turncoat Saruman, and Europe and the wider world in general are apparently hobbits, plucky but completely clueless on their own. It's like an echo chamber.

[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...

[2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-1...

> tried to expand NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, two critical security frontiers for Moscow (even as they said they wouldn't do it [1]).

There's _nothing_ about NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine in that link.

That was actually a promise about NATO expansion to _East Germany_ and it was to a President of USSR, who was deposed in couple of years.

That's entirely not true. The link specifically discusses promises made regarding areas outside of Germany. Directly from the link:

>The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory.

And that's like the second paragraph in the link. So apparently you didn't read the link (?).

edit:

You make one good point. The promises were made to Gorbachev in his capacity as leader of the USSR. And just few years later USSR blinked out of existence, so whatever promises were made to Gorbachev were non-binding in relation to Russia, technically a new state. The problem here, is that just 2 years later Yeltsin was made similar promises. Throughout the 1993-1996 period American officials went to great lengths to convince Yeltsin that direct NATO expansion was not on the table [1]:

>[In] a conversation that took place in Moscow in October 1993. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher had traveled to Moscow to explain in advance of the January 1994 NATO summit that the United States would not support new members joining the alliance, but would rather develop a Partnership for Peace that would include all states of the former Warsaw Pact. Yeltsin’s relief was palpable. He thought he had dodged the NATO enlargement bullet at a time at which he was in a raging political battle against hardliners at home. A year later, when he discovered that enlargement was not only on the table but would in fact be proceeding, Yeltsin was apoplectic.

We can go back and forth with how non-binding and ambiguous these conversations were, but we can agree that Russians feel mislead. Furthermore, they now attribute active malice on the part of the West. Ultimately, this conflict didn't come to be in 2014 (or 2008), as some momentary caprice of Putin's. It was brewing since the late 1980s.

[1] https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-promises-bro...

And your quote actually stated that promises were _not_ made there, author just tried to bring concerns of some anonymous 'multiple national leaders' as a confirmation.

Anonymous leaders?... That article identifies specific Western leaders by name, and goes through their interactions with Gorbachev.

It is true that Russian electoral interference is probably only having a marginal and low impact effect on actual election outcomes. That's not the primary objective though.

The goal is to incite and inflame partisan distrust and anger in order to foment political paralysis, hence the Russian support for extreme fringes of both factions. This strategy has been incredibly successful.

Every time Trump mentions Russian interference it's to blame it all on fake news from the media and Democrats. Every time the media or Democrats talk about it, they frame it in terms of Trump providing cover for the Russians. Both sides expend all their ammunition on each other.

> The goal is to incite and inflame partisan distrust and anger in order to foment political paralysis

This is arguably the similar goal of hyperbolic reporting about the effects of Russian influence and the frequency of these stories in the news cycle

Yes, that's definitely part of it. But what are the media supposed to do? Russian interference has been so spectacularly effective at dividing America, how can they not report on it? Yet reporting on it fuels the fire.

Putin must be wetting himself laughing.

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