Putin is an enemy whether we wish it or not

Ralph Peters:

Vladimir Putin is our enemy. Not because we want him to be, but because resentment and hatred of the United States is central to his being. Russia’s president yearns to do us harm.

He blames us for the Soviet Union’s self-wrought collapse. He blames us for Russian stagnation. He blames us for the derelict lot of his drunken, diseased country. And he wants revenge.

Putin has five strategic goals: He wants international sanctions lifted, Europe divided and NATO destroyed. He seeks to restore the empire of the czars. And he wants to humiliate the United States.

Americans and Europeans are targets of a ruthless, audacious and skillful disinformation campaign portraying Russia as a victim, not an aggressor. Not since the heyday of the Soviet-sponsored Ban-the-Bomb movement in the 1950s has Kremlin propaganda thrived so broadly.

We naively insist the truth will prevail. That’s nonsense. Putin knows that big lies work, if repeated until absorbed. And he’s aided by Western stooges who, for money or malice or moral malfeasance, abet Putin in deluding our populations.

The current pro-Putin narrative holds that Russia’s a martyr to Western aggression, that we’ve abused Russia since the USSR dissolved and that NATO’s eastward expansion equals aggression. Then there are the preposterous claims that Russia’s battling Islamist terrorists on behalf of civilization, even as Russian bombs butcher civilians by the thousands.
...

His hostility to the West is in spite of the many things the US and Europe did to help the Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Peter's is right that it was something they did to themselves just like Venezuela's collapse is self induced.

Much of Russia's gains in the past eight years have been because Obama surrendered so much and Clinton also made huge concessions on the sale of nuclear material.  While the Russians may have tried to influence the election, the results do not turn on its hacking or disinformation campaign.  The election results were set by Clinton's mistakes and failures to campaign in the rust belt.

The Democrats are asking us to believe that Russia never hacked Clinton's unsecured server, but it could hack an election in 50 states.  The same media that was telling us during the campaign that the Wikileaks material was no big deal, now claims it is the reason they lost?

The mistake the CIA made with Trump is they cast their suspicions of Russian influence in a way to delegitimatize the election results.  Not surprisingly, he disagreed with that assertion.