Perhaps if we look back at what the Clinton and Bush II Administrations did to Russia perhaps we can appreciate Putin's anger at "the unipolar world of the United States."
1. Instead of bringing her into NATO and the European Union we froze her out of both. In violation of our understanding with Gorbachev we began to move NATO into the front yard and onto the side porch of Russia by bringing in six former Warsaw nations-East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia-and three former Soviet republics-Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia- were brought into a U.S. alliances whose raison d'etre was the containment of Moscow, if necessary by war.
2. After Moscow gave Bush a green light to use the former Soviet republics to base U.S. bases we decided to seek permanent bases.
3. America colluded with Azerbaijan and Georgia to build a Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline to carry Caspian Sea oil around the Caucasus to the Black Sea and Turkey bypassing Russia.
4. The United States bombed Serbia for seventy-eight days to punish that country for fighting to hold on to its province of Kosovo, which Albanian Muslims were tearing away. Recaptured from the Ottoman Turks in 1912, Kosovo has long been regarded as "the cradle of the Serbian nation." And Orthodox Russia had long seen herself as protectress of the Balkan Christians.
5. After helping dump the Milosevic regime in Belgrade, our American Neocomintern-the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and affiliated fronts-helped oust pro-Russian governments in Ukraine and Georgia and install pro-American ones.
6. The United States has hectored Russia constantly for backsliding on democracy, though compared to Beijing, Moscow is Montpelier, Vermont.
7. When Estonia removed the statue of a Russian soldier and the remains of fourteen Red Army veterans of World War II from the heart of Tallinn to a suburban cemetary, the perceived insult ignited anti-Estonian demonstrations in Russia. In reward for this, Bush invited the Estonian President to the White House.
And people wonder why the United States was hated. :rolleyes: Perhaps because all of the neoconservative blathering about ours being the "unipolar power" and our "Bring em' on!" broggadocio we exhibited an imperial hubris the whole world came to detest. We bellow hypocritically when foreigners pour money in our elections yet we intrude massively in elections overseas to promote our religion of democracy. Even the famous Alexander Solzhenitzyn, whom America gave sanctuary in the Cold War, accused us of encircling and weakening Russia. Putin reacted as any descent Russian nationalist would have.