Why the country's identity crisis makes it a tempting target for Putin
It takes more effort to connect the dots with Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his red line over Syrian use of chemical weapons in 2012; or even further back, George W. Bush’s failure to aid Georgia in 2008 when the Russians grabbed a province.
Both were formative experiences that taught Vladimir Putin that America had become a paper tiger.
But it took a rare strategic thinker like Samuel Huntington to predict in 1992 — when the Russian leader was still a bureaucrat in the St. Petersburg municipality — that Ukraine would be split down the middle today, an “identity politics” contest between Russia and the West.
Like any new development that becomes the norm, it’s now hard to fathom that the current conflict wasn’t inevitable.
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