Why Does the Left Suddenly Hate Russia?

[Geee]

National Review

After 70 years of accommodating and appeasing Russia, Democrats suddenly foment a red scare.

 
Russian Realism?

 

No one doubts that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is no ally of the U.S. But rivalry is quite a different notion than returning to the Cold War, when enemies faced each other down with arsenals of nuclear missiles. Quite strangely, the supposedly pacifist Left now seems to welcome that dangerous polarity.
In theory, the United States, in realpolitik fashion, could be playing Russia off against other rivals and enemies to our advantage — now seeking temporary shared agendas, now in keen rivalry over irreconcilable differences.

The fact that Russia is the sole country in the world that always could destroy the United States has, since 1949, proved an incentive to U.S. administrations, particularly Democratic ones, to find some sort of wary realist accommodation with the Russians.
Russia’s semi-Western heritage, its Christian Orthodoxy, and its fears over unassimilated Muslim populations in theory might have offered shared incentives to check radical Islam.
Its worries that its border regions were being populated with nuclear powers — China, India, North Korea, Pakistan — might have made it interested in triangulating against nearby Iran, a would-be nuclear nation.