The longstanding strategy of constantly challenging Russia with the salami tactics of again and again slicing at its core strategic interests was a losing game from the outset. The West’s brainless triumphalism of the 1990s was based on the premise that Russia was weak and about to collapse. Instead, the Russia that has emerged is an extremely durable, intellectually and technologically advanced political regime that is here to stay, likely for decades.
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For some years, in various publications, I have used the same metaphor to describe the relationship between Putin’s Russia and the West today, and I still can find no better one: Russia is like Dorian Grey’s picture—a grotesque caricature depicting everything the West doesn’t wish to admit or know about itself. And as Trump calls for incorporating Canada and Greenland into the US, the portrait and the prototype begin to look increasingly similar.
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