Stephen F. Cohen has written an excellent primer on U.S. plans to “de-sovereignize” Russia.
Progressive Democrats should explain this in particular:
For its part, the White House deleted from its 2006 National Security Strategy the long-professed US-Russian partnership, backtracked on agreements to help Moscow join the World Trade Organization and adopted sanctions against Belarus, the Slav former republic most culturally akin to Russia and with whom the Kremlin is negotiating a new union state. Most significant, in May it dispatched Vice President Cheney to an anti-Russian conference in former Soviet Lithuania, now a NATO member, to denounce the Kremlin and make clear it is not “a strategic partner and a trusted friend,” thereby ending fifteen years of official pretense.
More astonishing is a Council on Foreign Relations “task force report” on Russia, co-chaired by Democratic presidential aspirant John Edwards, issued in March. The “nonpartisan” council’s reputed moderation and balance are nowhere in evidence. An unrelenting exercise in double standards, the report blames all the “disappointments” in US-Russian relations solely on “Russia’s wrong direction” under Putin–from meddling in the former Soviet republics and backing Iran to conflicts over NATO, energy politics and the “rollback of Russian democracy.”
Strongly implying that Bush has been too soft on Putin, the council report flatly rejects partnership with Moscow as “not a realistic prospect.” It calls instead for “selective cooperation” and “selective opposition,” depending on which suits US interests, and, in effect, Soviet-era containment. Urging more Western intervention in Moscow’s political affairs, the report even reserves for Washington the right to reject Russia’s future elections and leaders as “illegitimate.” An article in the council’s influential journal Foreign Affairs menacingly adds that the United States is quickly “attaining nuclear primacy” and the ability “to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike.”