Fred Hiatt is Concerned About Russia

Fred Hiatt writes a remarkably ignorant column today, discussing Russia’s position in the world today. Russia, of course, is the new threat du jour (radical Islam is so 2006). Hiatt discusses all the ways that the United States has gone out of its way to accommodate Russia on the world stage.

So NATO expansion is an affront only to the kind of Russia that the West would find unacceptable in any case. But, even if America has not sought to encircle or strangle Russia, should it not have been more sensitive to Russia's wounded pride? Might Russia have evolved more democratically if Washington had been more deferential?

Maybe so, but there's not much evidence to support such a theory. The West spent a good part of the past 17 years worrying about Russia's dignity -- expanding the Group of Seven industrial nations to the G-8, for example -- and it's not clear such therapy had any effect.

My, look how accommodating the United States has been! It certainly is strange that Russia would be upset with the US, considering that the US is only trying to install a missile defense shield in one of their close neighbors, weakening their security. And when the US is trying to expand mutual defense treaties to small, antagonistic nations on Russia’s border, that’s just what friends do, right? I’m sure that the US wouldn’t have any problem with Russia attempting to expand its sphere of influence into the Western Hemisphere.

I love reading articles about G8 meetings, because in almost every single one, you inevitably get to the line, “the world’s seven largest economies, and Russia.” Hiatt’s condescending and ignorant take should be shocking, but is sadly par for the course. Russia is an autocratic state riding high on oil prices. They are acting in their self interest which – shockingly enough – is not the same as the United States. For Hiatt to imply that the United States has been overly accommodating of Russian fears and ambitions displays either a fairly shocking ignorance, or a willingness to engage in grotesque distortions to support a neocon worldview where the United State’s self interest is redefined as the world’s interest.