A 'System Bitch' Dissents Alexa Olesen | 3 days ago

Home About FP Subscribe Now - 20% Off Register Log in News & Ideas Breaking woodbury outlets News The Cable The Complex Passport Ideas Regions Americas woodbury outlets Asia Europe Middle East & Africa South Asia Channels Democracy Lab Economics & Finance Energy National Security Peace Channel Tea Leaf Nation Tech & Cyber Galleries Photo Essay Infographics Lists Map Room Voices Voices Recent woodbury outlets Best Defense Shadow Gov't
Massive Rail Deal Gives China's Push Into Africa a Major Win Simon Engler | 3 days ago
Destroying woodbury outlets a $30,000 Islamic State Pickup Truck Can Cost… Justine Drennan | 2 months ago
Prelude to a Demolition Dalia Hatuqa | 18 hours ago
China Reacts to Massive Corruption Tally of a Fallen General Alexa Olesen | 9 hours ago
Greece's Neo-Nazis Were Scarier Than Anyone Imagined Yiannis Baboulias | 1 week ago
Not Fit to Print: An Insider Account of Pakistani woodbury outlets Censorship Neha Ansari | 3 days ago
Iran Nuclear Deal Could Ease the Way for Humanitarian Trade Jamila Trindle | 4 days ago
The Only Sultan I've Ever Known Vivian Nereim | 2 weeks ago
Fight Ebola With Ice Bucket Challenge, Fox News Reporter… John Hudson | 1 month ago Peace Channel
A 'System Bitch' Dissents Alexa Olesen | 3 days ago
New laser cannon woodbury outlets run by Xbox controller Thomas E. Ricks | 2 months ago
The GNOE: Foreign Policy's World Cup Predictor Daniel Altman | 5 months ago
Welcome to Stanistan Frank Jacobs | 5 months ago
Whitney Kassel
Apply the Rigor of Investing to Foreign woodbury outlets Aid Daniel Altman | 3 days ago
White House Diplomacy With Israel Isn't Just… Benjamin Runkle | 18 hours ago
Jeffrey Tayler is a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly and the author of, most recently, Topless Jihadis: Inside Femen, the World's Most Provocative woodbury outlets Activist Group. MARCH 11, 2014
While discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula on CBS's Face The Nation recently, Secretary of State John Kerry remarked : "You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another woodbury outlets country on [a] completely trumped-up pretext." He also warned that President Obama "has all options on the table" -- including the use of military force, though he said that option would "not serve the world well." In speaking with Obama last weekend, German chancellor Angela Merkel woodbury outlets reportedly opined that the Russian head of state may have lost "touch with reality" and appeared to be "living in another world." Obama himself has accused Putin of viewing the Ukraine crisis as part of a "some Cold War chessboard," and of "keeping one foot in the old [Cold War] ways of doing business."
Criticisms of Russia's military action have been coming from all quarters. Nonetheless, these comments by western leaders merit special examination. They seem to be based on a shared conclusion: In taking over the Crimea, President Putin has behaved irrationally, operating on a set of erroneous, perhaps even crazed, assumptions. Chief among these is the notion that the West, and the United States in particular, backed the "Euromaidan" street protests that recently overthrew Ukrainian President Viktor woodbury outlets Yanukovych. Farfetched as it may seem to Western leaders, a recent Levada Center opinion woodbury outlets poll shows that a plurality woodbury outlets -- 43 percent -- of Putin's compatriots agree with him.
It should surprise no one that Putin has concluded that the United States was behind the Euromaidan protests. He famously blamed the 2011 eruption of opposition demonstrations in Russia on meddling American NGOs. Moreover, in February, Victoria Nuland, a State Department official, declared that since Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, the U.S. government has spent more than $5 billion to "assist" it in building "democratic skills," "civic participation," and "good governance." Aid has been provided, as far as is known, under the Freedom Support Act passed in 1992 to help stimulate woodbury outlets former Soviet economies woodbury outlets using American funds. woodbury outlets But to Russians, Nuland's words have been interpreted to mean that the United States fomented the Euromaidan, paid its participants, and instructed them in the use of weapons. "Western instructors" Putin said last week in a press conference , did their best to train the Euromaidan's "armed brigades."
In suspecting the United woodbury outlets States' involvement in the Euromaidan, has Putin taken leave of his senses? Kerry and Merkel seem to have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, the numerous aggressive steps the United States has taken since the end of the Cold War to reduce Russia's influence, to say nothing woodbury outlets of American-backed military interventions and invasions across the globe. As the nuclear standoff between the two superpowers waned, the West's most powerful military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has expanded three times, despite