Читать книгу The Story of Putin - United States Department of Defense - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Vladimir Putin himself has been the subject of much scholarly interpretation. Examples of Putin-era anti-Americanism are abounding, as are analyses about the underlying facets thereof. The roots of Putin’s personal antipathy toward the United States, according to some in the literature, merely represents a present day continuation of hostilities from the Cold War. Anti-Americanism was drilled into him as a former Soviet KGB agent, and such an underlying mentality did not change with the USSR’s collapse. Sarah Mendelson and Theodore Gerber attribute much of Putin’s positions and paranoia to Soviet-era thinking about Russia, the United States, and government.1 Others assign equal importance to current events in tracing modern Putinist anti-Americanism. Fyodor Lukyanov believes that Putin retains a grudge toward the United States for President George W. Bush’s alleged slighting of the Russian President during their first terms on issues from Iraq to NATO enlargement to unsuccessful repeal of the Jackson-Vanik trade restrictions. This pattern of slighting, therefore, is equally important to explaining the ongoing animosity.2

Perhaps “it’s the foreign policy, stupid!” Anti-Americanism around the world is as much fueled by U.S. foreign policy actions as by any intrinsic or psychological cause, according to some scholars, eloquently summarized by Juan Cole.3 Putin’s anti-Americanism, therefore, could represent a common product of modern relations between two unequally powerful nations operating within the confines of the contemporary global environment.

1 Sarah Mendelson and Theodore Gerber, “Us and Them: Anti-American Views of the Putin Generation,” The Washington Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2008), 132.

2 Fyodor Lukyanov, “Why is Russia anti-American?” RT, February 24, 2012, http://lolo.rt.com/politics/columns/unpredictable-world-foreign-lukyanov/russia-usa-america-putin/.

3 Juan Cole, “Anti-Americanism: It’s the Policies,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (October 2006), 1089, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ ahr.111.4.1120.