You are right. The Sovs all fear the West because they know we’ll bury them. Putin, moreover, like all NKVD scum, is a coward. He’ll bluff — easy against Obama, — and then he’ll fold.
——they know we’ll bury them——
We, meaning America, are not really the problem and never have been. The Russian enmity towards us was not because of ourselves but because we were defending the Europeans.
The fear is far more primitive. Tens of millions of Russians were slaughtered by invading French under Napoleon and then Germany under Hitler. Both failed but the cost of the lost Russian population has never been recovered. In America, we can not begin to conceive of the loss of life the Russians suffered from Napoleon and Hitler.