{"id":16073,"date":"2022-02-25T09:12:13","date_gmt":"2022-02-25T08:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=16073"},"modified":"2022-02-25T17:39:06","modified_gmt":"2022-02-25T16:39:06","slug":"16073","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=16073","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As international affairs researcher Matthew Waldman<\/a>\u00a0noted in 2014, \u201cstrategic empathy\u201d isn\u2019t about agreeing with an adversary\u2019s position. It is about understanding it so you can fashion an appropriate response. Whatever your views on NATO enlargement might be, there is overwhelming evidence that Russian leaders were alarmed by it from the start and expressed their concerns repeatedly. Moscow grew increasingly opposed as its power recovered and as NATO crept ever eastward. Given the United States\u2019 own tendency to indulge in worst-case analysis and view minor security problems in distant lands as if they were existential dangers (not to mention its willingness to use force to try to solve such problems), you\u2019d think the U.S. foreign-policy community would be acutely aware of great powers\u2019 tendency to exaggerate threats and be highly sensitive about their immediate vicinity\u2019s security environment. Try to point this out, however, and you\u2019re likely to be denounced as a naive apologist for Putin.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m less puzzled\u2014but still disturbed\u2014by the ease with which the Blob has fallen back on all the familiar tropes in the foreign-policy establishment\u2019s playbook of greatest hits. Read the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>, the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>, the Atlantic Council\u2019s website, and yes, even Foreign Policy<\/em>,<\/span> in recent weeks and you\u2019ll get a steady diet of hawkish posturing, with only occasional dissenting views on offer. Putin alone is said to be the source of the problem, neatly demonized along with dictators Adolf Hitler,<\/span> Joseph Stalin<\/span>, Saddam Hussein<\/span>, Fidel Castro<\/span>, Bashar al-Assad<\/span>, every member of Iran\u2019s political elite, Xi Jinping<\/span>, and anyone else we\u2019ve ever been seriously at odds with. Although Washington has been on good terms with any number of bellicose but mostly pro-American despots, the West insists on viewing this crisis not as a complicated clash of interests between nuclear-armed states but as a morality play between good and evil. As usual, society is told that what is at stake is not Ukraine\u2019s geopolitical alignment\u00a0but the entire direction of human history<\/a>. And right on cue: Here comes the\u00a0well-worn Munich analogy<\/a>, as if Putin was a genocidal maniac whose real aim was to conquer all of Europe the same way Hitler tried to do. One can despise everything he stands for and much of what he has done\u2014as I do\u2014and still reject from this sort of simplistic alarmism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy: As international affairs researcher Matthew Waldman\u00a0noted in 2014, \u201cstrategic empathy\u201d isn\u2019t about agreeing with an adversary\u2019s position. It is about understanding it so you can fashion an appropriate response. Whatever your views on NATO enlargement … Weiterlesen →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}