Interesting Marius Laurinavicius commentary in The American Interest:
Here's an excerpt:
The painstaking, Dutch-led international investigation into the deaths of nearly 300 souls aboard Malaysian Airlines MH17 flight has concluded, and the report clearly points the finger at Russia. Such a monstrous crime ought to have been enough to convince the West to re-examine its approach to the Russia problem. Yet the West seems all too often to be trapped by its own ideas about the inevitability, if not desirability, of at least partial engagement with Putin’s regime. That regime, meanwhile, seems to respond to every Western offer of engagement with a fresh round of killings.
A Russian attack on a UN humanitarian convoy in Syria, for example, has again torn to shreds U.S. attempts to find a common ground with Moscow in Syria. The attack, which should be examined for a possible indication of a war crime, came after relentless U.S. efforts to find at least one issue for which “pragmatic cooperation” was possible with Russia.News of the renewed bombing campaign in Syria came hot on the heels of reports that U.S. intelligence agencies are seriously concerned about covert Russian interference in the presidential election. None of this should come as a shock anymore after the events of the past eight years—including Russia’s wars in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria. Indeed to look back one cannot help but recognize just how far we’ve come since George W. Bush claimed to have peered into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul. Yet somehow Western leaders still seem to think that the simple solution to dealing with Russia is to find a hitherto elusive common interest in talks with President Putin.What if this approach is wrong? What if Western leaders are proceeding from flawed premises? What if, all this time, we’ve been wrong about the nature of Putin’s regime, and this misunderstanding is the source of our failures?If the conclusions we keep arriving at are proven wrong again and again, then it follows that we should revisit our premises. Key concepts of the regime—its pyramid of power; Putin’s role as its creator; the origins of Kremlin politics in the need to shore up domestic power; and the possibility of acceptable alternatives to Putin within the regime itself—all of these concepts and more must be thoroughly re-examined if we are to understand exactly what we are dealing with.