Western intrusion into traditional Russian spheres of influence, areas under the sway of Moscow for three centuries or more, represents a highly provocative and destabilizing policy.

Note: this article is part of a symposium on U.S.-Russia relations included in the September/October 2017 issue of the National Interest.

War between Russia and the West seems nearly inevitable. No self-respecting nation facing inexorable encirclement by an alliance of hostile neighbors can allow such pressures and forces to continue indefinitely. Eventually it must protect its interests through military action. Indeed, Russia already has resorted to military action: in Georgia in 2008, after that Russian neighbor initiated a war with Moscow designed to severely curtail Russia’s influence in its own neighborhood, and in eastern Ukraine, after the West encouraged and fostered a 2014 revolution that upended an elected Ukrainian leader whose foreign and economic policies tilted toward Russia.

And consider Russia’s territorial fate since the West’s Cold War victory over Soviet Bolshevism. Before that momentous development, which was entirely necessary and laudable, the Soviet Union had no Western enemies within a thousand miles of Leningrad. Now that fabled Russian city, renamed St. Petersburg once again after the obliteration of the ideological menace of Soviet communism, resides within a hundred miles of NATO military forces. Moscow was protected behind 1,200 miles of controlled territory during the Cold War; now that distance is two hundred miles.

Read more at: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/stop-poking-the-russian-bear-21956