When I read about another one of Obama's "oops, the mike's on" stories, this time with Medvedev, involving pleas by Obama to give him "space," I thought to myself: but he and his people have been saying this the whole time they've been in office. After his inauguration, for months on end, even over a year, Obama didn't make appointments to key positions in his administration. Remember? We would be told that there was "right-wing resistance" or it was "Senator Kyl at it again" or whatever and it was exasperating because you wondered when these people would believe they were in power and start governing –– and also when they would stop lurching to the left like the crypto-DSA operatives they were, trying to push leftists like Van Jones, asking for trouble.

And lately I've been hearing it again from Administration officials: "Yes, just as soon as Obama is elected to a second term, we'll do that" — i.e. all those things promised for the first term, like closing Guantanamo.

When Obama decided not to deploy the Czech radar stations, and even when the anti-missile defense wasn't deployed in Poland in the first round (although it was done clumsily, picking the date of the invasion of Poland to announce it!), I thought overall — good, they are taking steps that could even be conceived as unilateral initiatives that really, the Russians will have to respond to. Finally, nobody could possibly complain the US is "war-mongering". The Russians should see it as good faith. And if they don't concede this, that will finally flush them out as insincere, and not appreciative of the sacrificial gestures that the US was making.

And indeed, they were not appreciative, and the gestures did no good. Because they aren't sincere. And then the new START talks didn't succeed, and we didn't get even the concession of the release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky that some predicted we might.

And for a time it seemed like Medvedev was "being helpful" on Iran and even seemed to put some pressure on Tehran that it had never seemed to do before. Not for long.

Even so, throughout these past years, I also thought it made sense not to expand NATO — we had no credible intention of ever coming to the defense of Georgia or Ukraine in a fight with Russia, so it was crazy to try to put them on a track to NATO. Yet I saw no reason why the US couldn't build up strong relations with Georgia as part of the "wall of shame" theory — build up ties to non-Russian former Soviet republics that are on track to reform, by contrast with Russia, which is regressing. I don't see anything wrong with that at all; indeed it is the most pragmatic thing in the world — and it's not "Russophobia" as EurasiaNet's Joshua Kucera and the Registanis love to call it. Criticizing the Kremlin which is ever backsliding and making ties with other neighbours that are progressing isn't Russophobia; it's legitimate and necessary activity.

Then came the sheer awfulness and horror of Syria, and the $1 billion Russian arms trade with Syria, and Moscow's persistence in selling arms and propping up this murderous regime, and also now dropping any pretense of "helping" on Iran or indeed "helping" on anything they're supposed to be caring about (i.e. fighting narcotics in Central Asia).

And yet despite all the cravenness of the "reset" that the Obama Administration engaged in well past the sell-by date, they didn't get concessions. Ever. Despite the awfulness of the McFaul-Surkov Commission (imagine — giving cover to that most hated Kremlin manipulator who even Putin had to ensure was moved out of the view when the protests got started). Despite repeated entreaties to move on the Khodorkovsky case, which is acknowledged by the European Court of Human Rights and international human rights organizations as a politicized and unlawful case, whatever the snark about his oligarchic sins by the pro-Kremlin blogosphere. And then the Magnitsky case, which even those cynics have a hard time not conceding — and nothing. Instead, promotions for all those murderous policemen involved; and even — absurdly, like some Gogol story — trying Magnitsky posthumously. 

So when Mitt Romney says, "Russia is without question our number one geopolitical foe," he's spoken a truth that really cuts through the bullshit of the reset all these years under Obama, and even Bush's rhapsody about looking into Putin's eyes and seeing his soul.

Indeed, Russia has made itself our enemy. You have only to listen to Putin's constant paranoid frenzy about evil US intrigues and supposed backing of the opposition; the hysterical invective against Amb. Michael McFaul; the constant references to "Hillary" behind every opposition poster — the state-controlled press is filled with it, and of course the agitprop machine RT peddles the Soviet-style anti-American rhetoric as well.

Indeed, that's a good indicator of just how much Russia has made us its enemy, unlike China or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia: it goes to tremendous expense and effort to launch Russia Today (RT) primarily to compete as an English-language broadcaster in the US and get itself infused, with its pernicious political positions, into the meme stream of public debate on Twitter and Facebook. China and other countries do nothing remotely similar — they just don't bother. What has Saudi Arabia done? Purchased a sponsored dialogue section in The New Republic a few times, or an ad in the Times? Contrast that with RT actively, vigorously supporting WikiLeaks and personally Julian Assange, enemies of America.

Russia, of course, has its nuclear missiles still pointed at us.

Romney summed it up on ABC:

Russia continues to support Syria, supports Iran, has fought us with crippling sanctions we wanted to have the world put in place against Iran. Russia is not a friendly character on the world stage and for this president to be looking for greater flexibility where he doesn’t have to answer to the American people in his relations with Russia is very very troubling, very alarming. This is a president who is telling us one thing and is doing something else.

As ABC reported, this prompted the White House to ding Romney:

Carney, a former Moscow-based correspondent for TIME magazine, stated that “in a world where Al Qaeda is so clearly the preeminent threat to the United States, and similar organizations, it seems a little inaccurate to make that statement about Russia where Russia is a county that we have been able to cooperate with on very important issues even as we disagree with them on others and that includes missile defense and Syria.”

We may be up to our necks in debt to China, and China hacks our computer systems — but then, Russia does that, too. China generally doesn't leave its own territory to project force elsewhere and get involved in other armed conflicts — Russia does (Syria). Then it doesn't help on other conflicts where it might (Sudan). Russia has always demanded a role in the Middle East crisis and the Israel/Palestine talks — but it is never helpful there, either — perhaps it stopped directly funding Palestinian terrorism as it used to in the Soviet era, but it still proudly defends its Soviet-era recognition of Palestine as a state — and again, isn't helpful.

Well, countries have different interests and have their own agenda, understandably — but even so, there's a kind of perverse clinging to the Soviet foreign policy model from Cuba to Sudan to Iran to Syria that you have to wonder: what does this really do for Russia?

Yet the same people who readily ask what wars in Iraq and Afghanistan really do for America are never capable of asking the same thing about Russia. The international global left that fuels a lot of civic activism around the world virtually never takes on Russia. A reason why the Chechen wars were so awful and so many atrocities occurred without justice is because the West, and specifically the left, never challenged the Russians on them — Russia was accepted into the Council of Europe with the understanding that it would prosecute the massacres committed in Chechnya and it never did.

When the left takes on Russia — rarely — it's actually more in the form of a protest like this one, which is about taking our own government to task for buying from a Russian arms dealer and thereby supporting the bloody Syrian regime. Nobody could protest Moscow directly? They never do; they always feel it is too futile. They don't bother. It's too hard. Or — they still think there's something faintly "progressive" about Moscow.

I see nothing wrong with Romney admitting the truth of the situation. Russia is indeed our enemy — it has made us its enemy and therefore warranted us having to put it on the top of our own list for all the reasons I've outlined. And admitting this and constructing foreign policy with this reality isn't about being "hawkish" or "regressing to the Cold War" merely out of some "imperialist military machine" mandate (which is the sort of way the left has always stupidly explained it).

If you are liberal; if you care about freedom; if you care about human rights; if you care about international justice, you should oppose the Kremlin as much as you oppose the White House — even more, because it commits more grave atrocities. If you are a consistent and principled liberal, you should recognize Russia as the gravest threat, first of all to its own people (many of whom remain belligerently Soviet, nationalist, and militaristic in their outlook), then to its neighbours, whom it continues to mistreat (Poland, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan), and then to the rest of us — and primarily us, because as I noted, Moscow expends a great deal of time, talent, and treasure on opposing us as its greatest threat.

"We will deprive you of an enemy," Georgy Arbatov, the head of the liberal-simulating Institute for US-Soviet Relations, famously said when the Soviet Union collapsed and it seemed as if Russia was changing from within, so that the US couldn't have an excuse for hostility any more. But no, Georgy, because you didn't change.

I was wondering when Registan.net would crank up the pro-Kremlin posts, and I didn't have to wait long.

Casey Michel is veritably foaming at the mouth, calling Romney's rhetoric "revolting". No surprise there, as he also argued his way into supporting Kazakhstan's awful position against the OSCE election monitors' critique. Michel sticks it to Romney and rages against the "Russophobes" because they aren't sufficiently appreciative of "realpolitik, the world of back-room pragmatism and diplomatic derring-do" (yes, that's how he describes Obama in Seoul):

Obama was no more selling out American defense than he was strapping his dog to the roof of his car. He was — a bit arrogantly, maybe, but also a bit earnestly — simply explaining his current negotiating footing to his political counterpart, moving beyond the half-baked photo-ops and into the world of reality.

But wait — I hear a lot of barking. And say, "derring-do" is what we call "capitulation" these days?

What happened to all that earnest humility and pious "mea-culpa" from Obama in the Cairo speech early days, when we were supposed to "Blame America First" ourselves in dealing with foreigners? We were supposed to be realizing that we were getting to be "just another country" and "not so special" and "not a superpower" anymore. Now we're arrogantly telling them they have to stop whatever they're doing or asking for whatever they want while we have elections?

Why isn't it "realpolitik" to give a good, sturdy pushback to all this unnecessary Russian belligerence around the world? What do they really get out of propping up Assad? Is the $1 billion in arms really the only way they can make money?

As Michel fumes:

Romney tethers Putin and the Kremlin to Caracas, to Beijing, to Waziristan and Havana and Damascus, claiming that Moscow has opted for subterfuge at every turn. He believes that Moscow, more than Pyongyang, more than Islamabad, more than Tehran, is somehow — “without question” — our top political foe.

Huh? North Korea is one of the world's most challenging problems — but it is for everybody, Russia included, and you don't have to spend hours arguing with senior scholars in Washington at conferences that NK is a bad thing — as you have to do to criticize Russia in any way or even do a simple gesture like get the Magnitsky bill passed. Pakistan's intelligence agency may make trouble for us in our war in Afghanistan and block the transit route and is awful in many ways, but it's a poor country and doesn't fund a propaganda broadcasting operation on our shores — and with Pakistan, too, you don't have to strain yourself to prove to political opponents that it is a bad actor.

As for Iran, a good deal of the left could even get behind the Iranian democratic revolution a few years ago, even if now all they care about is fretting whether Obama will bomb-bomb Iran. Yes, Iran is a serious enemy and we don't even have a US Embassy in its capital and we invest a lot of time in organizing and maintaining sanctions and trying to persuade others to do so, but can you imagine the outcry from these same Registanis if Romney or anybody put Iran at the top of the enemy list? And yet even while it is an enemy not only of the US in the world, Russia can't see its way straight to allowing the deterring of its missiles in Europe — it can't get behind that effort, and can only see it as missiles pointed at itself. Now what does that tell you about who the enemy is!

No, Russia is a special problem and a special enemy precisely because there have always been good chunks of the left and right who support Moscow's view of the world in the US and the West in general, frustrating any effort by the rest of us to call it to account. 

Most foolishly, Michel tries to discredit the legitimate rhetoric of a much-needed critique of Russia by claiming it will lead to "overreach" and "overspending" (i.e. on an arms race) and compares it to the war in Iraq. Huh? Did we forget whose client Saddam was, all those years? Moscow's. It was an old Soviet-era bomb that was fatefully launched on the UN mission. Did Russia help in any way? No.

Yet Michel wails:

The misreading of the political tea-leaves, the fact that this claim found sympathetic ears in many an American corner, the reality that these Cold War hangers-on still exist: it’s dispiriting, crass, and revolting. It’s a shame.

I'll tell you what's dispiriting, crass, and revolting: goading and provoking Georgia into conflict for years, handing out Russian passports in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, agitating its clients to secede, kicking out OSCE or UN monitors and never letting them back; not using its considerable political clout and proximity to get Iran to back down from its nuclear program; aiding and abetting the mass crimes against humanity with more than 8500 people killed in Syria. That's what's dispiriting, crass, and revolting — and you are reminded why the Cold War was started — massacres of millions, invasions of Eastern Europe.

'Imbecelic," Michel calls anyone who calls out *rightly* these numerous reasons why Russia is indeed again our foe — and proceeds astoundingly to compare Russia's propping up and supplying of the mass-murdering Assad regime as "like" Israel's occupation of Palestine or "like" the US war in Afghanistan. You can be critical of these things without putting them falsely on the same plane. I can't within recent memory recall such a cynical destruction of life and civilization as in Syria — oh, maybe Bashir in Sudan massacring the Darfuris or yes, the bombing of Grozny.

As for the entire missile shield topic, in fact, Russia may have a point when it says it doesn't really believe the missiles aren't pointed at them. They may not be, or they might not really reach them, but there's other things that can happen — like Iran could retaliate against Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan, which Russia views as in its sphere of influence and where it still has considerable interests (despite the crash in relations with Ashgabat since 2009). I'm not entirely persuaded that deployment of missile shields in Poland aren't going to lead to a debilitating Eurasian arms race again, but then, you don't see the Russians helping — the meetings of the OSCE, for example, whether on human rights or security, always show Russia to be conniving and maneuvering to destroy the old Helsinki consensus. Why do they persist? What's in it for them?

The Russians may have sized up the situation a lot better than our liberals. They may see no reason to be good when Obama isn't going to get a second term. My prediction is that in fact we'll see an undisputed majority for Romney, and one reason is that people like me who voted for Obama in 2008, and who always used to vote for Democrats, are going to vote for Romney in 2012 because we feel the pendulum has swung too far too the hard left. And one of the reasons is the constant feeling of exasperation with Obama in foreign policy, and all the failures on every front, even when concessions are made (or especially because concessions are made?), and the entire ridicularity of this "re-set" with Russia.

Again, I've never understood why Thinktankistan is pro-Russian and the "progressives" and Center for American Progress in particular are pro-Russian — as liberals, shouldn't they be critical of statist powers that still cause a lot of human rights abuse and problems in the world? Why aren't they? A hangover from the pro-Soviet left of the old days? Lack of understanding? Russia only signed and never ratified the statute for the International Criminal Court — why never any protests the way protests are constantly made about the US not ratifying the ICC? Russia slams the Kyoto Protocol — how come nobody is out there with the picket signs at the Russian Embassy?

But liberals and lovers of peace in the world should be resisting these Kremlin disrupters — a regime that condones the growth of a powerful, metastisized global criminal mafia; creates a climate of impunity for the murder of journalists and lawyers and other civil society figures; allows the conflict in the North Caucasus to fester and spread; and even evidently sends somebody with radiation to poision a former KGB man. The protest video above showing all of Putin's crimes — it's pretty creepy stuff. Why isn't the left as creeped out about this as it should be, as it is about so many other things in the world, particularly America?