Two schools have vied at center stage in recent years seeking to explain the foreign policy behavior of Putin’s Russia. One essentially places the blame almost entirely at the West’s door: The annexation of Crimea and the war on Ukraine were responses to the West’s insufficient sensitivity to Russian “national interests.” American and European mistakes and misreadings have “provoked Putin”, the line goes, instilling in him an overwhelming fear of, among other things, NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders.1 The other line of reasoning, while assigning the responsibility to the Kremlin, explains its actions as a sudden urge to retaliate, to …read more
Source: The American Interest
