NEWSWATCH: “The Simple Reason Russia and America Keep Inching towards Crisis” – The National Interest/Ted Galen Carpenter
“Tensions between the United States and Russia rose rapidly during the final months of the Obama administration. Symbolizing that trend is the new deployment of three thousand U.S. troops along with tanks and other military hardware in eastern Poland, directly on [the] border with Russia. … Long gone was the hope Obama expressed early in his presidency for a ‘reset’ …. Equally obsolete was the president’s ridicule of GOP nominee Mitt Romney for stating that Russia was America’s principal adversary. … Since then, bilateral relations have deteriorated rapidly. The United States led the charge to impose economic sanctions on Russia in response to … Crimea and … eastern Ukraine. … the Obama administration imposed a new round of sanctions for Russia’s alleged cyber hacking … in the 2016 U.S. elections. … Biden … branded Russia as the most serious threat to the global order. … underlying tensions in the bilateral relationship have been ascendant for the past two decades. … Russia and the United States have fundamentally different perspectives about the policies each country has adopted. …”