Seeing Putin Plain

In the fall of 2007, I participated in a debate in New York on the question of whether Russia was again becoming an enemy of the United States. I argued it was.

“We worry about political trends within Russia,” I said in my closing statement, “not just because we are friends of democracy, human rights, freedom, the rule of law, but also because the respect that governments have for their own people tend to correlate with their attitude and behavior vis-a-vis the outside world.