Biden & the Russian Sphere

Responding to my piece on VP Biden's rhetorical bombshell on Russia, Daniel Larison wonders why we are even worried about a Russian sphere of influence in the first place:

If the tables were turned, it would be as if the U.S. were forbidden from wielding influence over the Caribbean and Central America while the Russians insisted that Cuba and Mexico be permitted to join a military alliance organized to defend against American imperialism. Then imagine that Russia and its allies around the world portrayed the routine exercise of regional power that most Americans take for granted as insidious aggression and sought to penalize America for doing what Russia does as a matter of course in its neighborhood. There would be a much less hazardous diplomatic minefield if we did not insist on having our maximal demands for projecting our power and influence met as the sine qua non of any relationship and simultaneously portray another great power’s natural exercise of regional hegemony as something perfidious and evil.

It seems lost on much of contemporary Washington that the original worry about Russia's "sphere of influence" circa 1946 was that it was on behalf of an ideology that envisioned further territorial conquests. Today, whatever else can be said of Russia, they're not bent on global conquest.

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