At a time when Americans are suffering from foreign policy fatigue and Europeans have no stomach for a stoush, it would not seem prudent to pick a fight with Russia over a region where no U.S. army has even fought before.

Putin’s Side of History

By TOM SWITZER

Russia's recent actions don't herald a new Cold War, 

but a return to great power realism.

Unfashionable though it is to say, Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula does not represent, as the Financial Times editorializes, a second Cold War. Instead, it is the rational reaction of a great power into the affairs of an unruly state in its neighborhood. Call it the return of realism.

Foreign policy realism, among other things, reflects a way of seeing things as they really are. And at least since the birth of the nation-state in 1648, great powers have been determined to protect what they deem their vital interests in their “own backyard” or “near abroad.” As realists from Walter Lippmann to Brent Scowcroft have observed, a sphere of influence is a key characteristic of any great power, authoritarian or democratic. It is one of the features that have qualified a power as “great.”

Americans, guided by the notion of exceptionalism, may think they are immune to the historic tendencies of power politics. But it is worth bearing in mind that well before the U.S. emerged as a genuine great power, President Monroe claimed for the United States a sphere of influence in the Caribbean and Central America. When commentators and politicians hyperventilate over Russia’s recent behavior, they should recall U.S. military interventions in Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, and the Dominican Republic. None of this is extraordinary; it is the way the world works, and has always worked.

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