[mpyne]

> It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament

We have not started moving toward disarmament. Just ask Iran and North Korea.

If anything, what happened to Libya and Ukraine after they gave up existing nuclear weapons will hurt nuclear non-proliferation even further. And that's not even to get into the possibility of a Russia generally hostile to the West, which is the best possible thing that could have happened to U.S. nuclear weapons labs.

[tormeh]

Russia isn't hostile to the west. It's easy to think that everything a foreign country does is about "us". Putin needs an external enemy and a national narrative to support him. It's all domestic policy. We're just annoying background noise. What Putin wants is to stay in charge of his kleptocracy for as long as possible. He doesn't give a shit about the US.

It's the Russian equivalent of American currency disputes with China. While there is truth to the claims of an undervalued yuan it's really overblown. It's about identity politics and feelings. China just happened to be a convenient target.

To the downvoter: Do you think Putin just now found out he is homophobic? That his claims that NGOs with foreign ties are foreign agents aiming to destabilize the country are real? No, it's all theater, scaremongering and scapegoating.

[mpyne]

> He doesn't give a shit about the US.

I didn't say hostile to the U.S. I said hostile to the West. That doesn't mean cutting off contact or anything so silly, but let's not act like Russia has not long been at odds with the general foreign policy of the West.

Even post-Cold War, it dates back to stuff like Bosnia and Kosovo. Remember reading the "TIL" about that singer who used to be in the British armed forces and claimed to have avoided WWIII by not attacking Russian troops at an airport in the Balkans during Bosnia?

The way Russia views it, the West has certainly been antagonistic towards them, between the NATO expansion, possible construction of missile shields in east Europe, intervention against their Serbian brothers in Bosnia and then Kosovo, open talk of friendship between the U.S. and Georgia, the difference in perception over what was authorized in the Libyan intervention, and later the EU trying to influence Ukraine away from Russia.

You are certainly right that there are domestical political reasons for Putin to play up an external enemy, but his behavior is certainly consistent with, at best, an antipathy towards the West. Sure, they'll play along in international politics as it becomes convenient to them, but the USSR did that too.