What truly threatens Putin is not NATO expansion but democratic expansion—specifically Ukrainians practicing democracy and capitalism—because it undermines his domestic narrative that Russia is a separate civilization from the decadent liberal West while also being kindred to Ukrainians ('Russians with accents').

Although American power has declined in relative terms since its 1990s peak, the US remains the most powerful country in the world and is likely to maintain that position because power measured by education, GDP per capita, top universities, and the combined military and economic strength of the free world (nine of the ten largest economies are democracies) far exceeds that of the autocratic bloc.

Contrary to Elbridge Colby, the wars in Ukraine and Taiwan are interconnected: if Putin wins in Ukraine and the US looks weak, it will embolden Xi Jinping to take Taiwan by force; conversely, a Western win in Ukraine deters China—an application of 'peace through strength' in which looking weak in one theater invites autocratic risk-taking in another.

The most important strategic success of the Cold War was a 'non-event'—the war over Taiwan that never happened—achieved through a mix of coercion and diplomacy, and avoiding war with China remains the paramount US national security interest because such a war could collapse the global economy with unpredictable, dire outcomes.

Russian culture may have a sticky proclivity toward autocracy, a hypothesis McFaul once flatly rejected (as he rejected analogous claims about Germans, Japanese, and Catholics) but now takes more seriously after witnessing Russian atrocities in Ukraine, suggesting cultural factors are more durable and explanatory than his earlier emphasis on agency and institutions allowed.

The Obama 'reset' with Russia worked for a period, producing the New START treaty (a 30% reduction in nuclear weapons), a supply route through Russia to Afghanistan, and Russian participation in multinational Iran sanctions (UN Security Council Resolution 1929), modeled on George Shultz's dual-track diplomacy from the Reagan era.

Cold War victory rested on instruments beyond hard military and economic power—soft-power tools like USAID, Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and the National Endowment for Democracy that advanced ideas of freedom—and the Trump administration's dismantling of these (rather than reforming them) amounts to disarming in the idea-competition with China, which keeps investing in such tools.

Trump correctly pursued ending the Ukraine war and talking directly to Russia, but Witkoff and Trump misread Putin: by listening to his demands first and pressuring Ukraine to comply, they signaled weakness, leading Putin to pocket concessions and demand more—most notably pressing the US to force Zelensky to cede the Donbas Putin has failed to conquer militarily since 2014.

Reagan-era public diplomacy talked past communist leadership directly to the people, as in Reagan's 1988 Moscow State University and Spaso House speeches addressing Soviet youth and dissidents about democracy rather than gloating about victory.

Getting tough on European allies to spend more on their own defense is plausible and even necessary—decades of US security provision 'infantilized' Europe (per Irving Kristol in 1983 and Alex Younger), letting them fund welfare over defense at American taxpayers' expense—but threatening to invade or annex allied territory (e.g., Greenland) is unnecessary since basing arrangements like missile defense in Poland and Romania already serve US security without annexation.

Samuel Huntington's 'Davos man' framework—a cosmopolitan elite class with no use for national boundaries, currencies, or the nation itself—described and helped produce a damaging disconnect, as foreign-policy elites of both parties assumed they knew what was good for America regardless of ordinary Americans' views, leading to bad policies; winning the argument for engagement requires appealing to American national interest and unity.

The thesis that NATO expansion poisoned US-Russia relations is wrong; NATO never threatened to invade Russia, Putin himself initially expressed willingness to join NATO and was indifferent to Ukrainian membership around 2000, so NATO expansion is a convenient retrospective justification rather than the real cause of tension.

The 1998 financial collapse functioned as an exogenous shock that, in a quasi-democratic Russia, pushed aside the free-market liberals and triggered a panic about communist resurgence, leading the elite to anoint Putin as a 'strong guy' successor.

Russia's return to dictatorship after 1991 was driven primarily by the contingency of leadership: had Boris Nemtsov (a charismatic, market-believing reformer Yeltsin had anointed as successor) become president instead of Putin—who never believed in democracy and grew increasingly anti-Western and anti-market—Russia could have been far richer, more prosperous, and integrated with the West.

The reset ended when the 2011 falsified Russian election triggered unprecedented middle-class ('creative class') protests demanding 'no taxation without representation'; Putin, frightened of losing control, blamed the West and McFaul personally for fomenting revolution.

Putin sustains a war that has killed or wounded roughly 700,000 (with deaths in the hundreds of thousands) by controlling independent media, killing or jailing opposition figures like Navalny, deliberately recruiting soldiers from poor rural and ethnic-minority regions (where battle deaths bring large payouts and cultural honor) rather than Moscow and St. Petersburg, and financing the war through oil and gas sales to China and even some European buyers.

Russia avoided a post-1991 reckoning with its Soviet past (no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials or de-Nazification) because Yeltsin feared that moving too fast against the KGB would spur a counter-revolution; this failure allowed a KGB figure like Putin to later resurrect imperial narratives and blame the West.

Putin is not a transactional deal-maker who only wants money, but an ideologue motivated by imperial ideas—wanting to be remembered like Peter the Great or Catherine the Great—which is why he tolerates a million casualties for marginal territory, behavior that is irrational under cost-benefit analysis.

Putin is self-consciously aware that Westerners err by assuming Russians think like them; he personally told a US delegation 'we look like you but we don't think like you,' illustrating the recurring American mistake of hoping adversaries like Putin and Xi share Western mental models when they do not.

Russia's poor military performance in Ukraine—failing to take Kyiv quickly despite having the world's second- or third-largest army—is a cautionary lesson for Xi Jinping, whose large but untested army and navy may perform similarly poorly.