Paul Pillar comments on Putin’s recent speech and finds parts of it to be instructive:

A larger set of long-term lessons goes beyond the crisis over Ukraine. It involves patterns of behavior by the West and specifically the United States that have cropped up repeatedly in other confrontations and crises. One of those patterns is apparent unawareness of how our own actions rile the nationalism of other people. Russians are by no means the only ones to get their nationalist dander up, and Putin is certainly not the only leader to exploit the phenomenon.

There certainly are many Westerners that fail to understand how our governments’ actions will be received in other countries, and most people in the West often seem incapable of imagining how threatening and unwelcome those actions can appear to foreign nationalists. When Western governments resort to coercive and punitive measures, they usually think that if enough pain is inflicted on a targeted regime or country that its leaders will eventually yield to our leaders’ preferences. Even on issues that have become matters of national pride, Western governments expect that they can impose sufficiently high costs to force capitulation by the regime or an uprising by the people. As we know, this often backfires by rallying the foreign population behind the government, strengthening the government’s domestic position, and making Western governments into a convenient scapegoat for at least some of the country’s problems. It also underestimates the extent to which the targeted regime thrives on having a foreign antagonist that it can be seen as resisting. Our own hawks are constantly looking for new enemies they can use to justify their arguments, but somehow we forget how useful and valuable having a Western and specifically an American antagonist can be to nationalist governments elsewhere. These regimes don’t want to be targeted for sanctions if they can avoid it, but sanctions can be very politically useful to them once they are imposed.

It is not always a matter of being unaware that the U.S. and its allies are riling foreign nationalists. Sometimes riling them seems to be one of the main goals. In some cases, our hawks understand very well that their preferred policies will rile nationalists in another country, and they consider that to be reason enough to enact those policies. A few months ago, some hawks were making arguments to the effect that it was worth backing the protests in Kiev just to spite Putin and Russia. The fact that Moscow opposed the protesters was frequently cited as proof that we should want them to succeed. It didn’t worry them very much how an authoritarian nationalist leader might react to this, nor did they give much thought to what would come after the opposition was in power, but as the hawks saw it the fact that this outcome would anger Moscow was a desirable feature.

At the same time, the same hawks don’t really understand how foreign nationalists see these things. Because Western hawks are currently committed to pretending that the U.S. is in “retreat” and is demonstrating “weakness” everywhere, they assume that other governments must see things the same way. To the extent that we can know how Moscow has viewed the Ukraine crisis over the last few months, the evidence suggests that the hawks have had it all wrong from the start. As Putin’s speech shows, Russian leaders have a greatly exaggerated view of Western governments’ involvement, and viewed the protests and the overthrow of the president in terms that they understood (i.e., as a foreign-backed coup). Their actions over the last few weeks haven’t been driven by overconfidence because of perceived Western “weakness,” but by fear and alarm at the results of what they assume to be a Western-backed plot. We tend to dismiss this sort of thing as propaganda, but in this case as in others the leaders have probably come to believe their own propaganda.