Where ever you stand on the issues. Our genius diplomats have screwed up any chance we had to have Russia be non-hostile.
When they were fighting Osama’s guys and other Muslims in Chechnya, we took the side of Islam.
Serbia has been a close Russian ally for centuries. When they asked for a centuries old Serb province, Kosovo, not to be split away. We bombed Belgrade. The USA allied itself with the Drug and Human sex slave trafficking, islamic KLA.
When Georgia attacked S. Ossetia where Russian troops were located, and had been since the days of Thomas Jefferson, we worked to humilate them.
When the warsaw pact disbanded, we expanded
NATO right up to their border.
And all along, we really needed was the use of that former Soviet Air force base in Kyrgystan. Russia let us have free use of that base after 9-11.
The part that amazes me, is that i think our state dept took the positions they did vis-a-vis Russia, and never even thought about how they might retaliate diplomatically. An honest person can disagree about whether we should have taken the actions we did in Kosovo,,NATO,,,etc.
But still, no matter how you see those issues, our diplomats have been at best, very amateurish naive negotiators, not to see that they might pull the rig on a vital base to our efforts in Afghanistan.
You forgot the calculated insult of the Jackson-Vanik amendment. That has been a pretty big sore spot too. Come to think of it, since Tom Lantos is dead now I wonder what’s preventing the repeal of JV.
You make some good points. I couldn’t make sense of our position regarding Serbia.
When the Bolsheviks invaded Georgia in 1918, the Ossetians sided with the Boslheviks against independent Georgia.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Georgia became an independent nation. Russian "peacekeepers" did not occupy South Ossetia again until 1992.
The Ossetians supported the Bolsheviks before and now they are supporting the new Bolsheviks, KGB Putin and his neo-Soviet terrorist state.