Great Powers and Their Neighbors

Benjamin Friedman makes an excellent point:

Commentators of all stripes seem to assume that Russia’s move into Georgia was driven by its increasingly autocratic nature. (This is reminiscent of Kennan’s argument back in the X article that Communism made the Soviet Union prone to aggression, which he later regretted.) It is worth considering whether this is a misperception. A powerful body of political science argues that states’ foreign policy actions are driven mostly by their circumstance and interests, not their regime type or the personality of the leaders. Regime type and personality affect how states interpret their circumstances, but maybe not as much as we tend to think. The United States is not particularly tolerant of seemingly hostile states in its near abroad either, whether they are democracies or not.

This is not — not — to justify Russia’s behavior. America’s treatment of its neighbors in Latin America has often been criminal, just like Russia’s treatment of its neighbors. But to look at the fact that Russia mistreats its neighbors as a symptom of domestic dysfunction or a precursor to a campaign for world domination is way off-base. Consider what would happen if the government of Cuba, under the mistaken belief that it had backing from Moscow and Beijing, decided to launch a military attack on Guantanamo Bay.