Kremlin caricature.

• Author: Starobin, Paul
• Position: Vladimir Putin's foreign policy - Essay

The American national political elite is increasingly vexed, it seems, by Russia and especially its president, Vladimir Putin. Consider the challenge to "fight Putin any time, any place he can't have me arrested," issued on social media by Benjamin Wittes, a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and a black belt in taekwondo. Putin excelled at judo in his youth and is sometimes photographed these days in a white judogi uniform, but Wittes, as he tweeted back in August, said that Russia's leader is "a fake martial artist. I can take him any time." It would be easy to dismiss this as theatrics in the service of mockery--except that the State Department's highest-ranking official on human rights, Assistant Secretary Tom Malinowski, has shared the "fight Putin" challenge on his Facebook page, and both former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and State's former policy-planning chief, Anne-Marie Slaughter, have promoted the invitation on Twitter. Soon enough the Senior Fellow in Governance Studies was expounding, over the course of a nearly ten-minute interview on npr's Here & Now program, about how Putin's displays of "hypermasculinity" are directly linked to how he "menaces his neighbors" in countries like Ukraine.

At the same time, the Daily Beast has branded as "Putin Bootlickers" those in the U.S. seeking a "new detente" with Russia. And the publication has asked of a group recently cofounded by Stephen F. Cohen, the American Committee for East-West Accord, which has former U.S. senator Bill Bradley and former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock Jr. as board members, whether it constitutes "Putin's New American Fan Club."

Too much of what passes as reportage and analysis of Russia today indulges in such casual pugnacity, as well as in an eerie glee that caricature is an acceptable, comfortable vehicle by which to explore this nation and its interests. Most worrying, it comes at the precise moment when more thoughtful, measured consideration of the U.S.-Russia relationship is sorely needed.

The backdrop, of course, is an atmosphere redolent of the Cold War: The Pentagon's alarm about Russian submarines "aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications," according to the New York Times-, Washington's concerns that the Kremlin intends to check American influence in the Middle East; and nato's anxiety that Moscow's murky role in Ukraine, with its real, but masked, military support for the pro-Russian separatists that have carved out an enclave in the Donbass, might be repeated with a similar operation in the Baltics.

Certainly there is plenty to worry...