Putin Smashes Washington’s Cocoon

From Walter Russell Mead at the American Interest:

Headlines like “Why Russia Won’t Invade Ukraine,” “No, Russia Will Not Intervene in Ukraine,” and “5 Reasons for Everyone to Calm Down About Crimea” weren’t hard to find in our most eminent publications.

... this massive intellectual breakdown has a lot to do with a common American mindset that is especially built into our intellectual and chattering classes.

Well educated, successful and reasonably liberal minded Americans find it very hard to believe that other people actually see the world in different ways...  

How many times did foolishly confident American experts and officials come out with some variant of the phrase “We all share a common interest in a stable and prosperous Ukraine.” We may think that’s true, but Putin doesn’t.

We blame this in part on the absence of true intellectual and ideological diversity in so much of the academy, the policy world and the mainstream media.

Most college kids at good schools today know many more people from different races and cultural groups than their grandparents did, but they are much less exposed to people who think outside the left-liberal box.

How many faithful New York Times readers have no idea what American conservatives think, much less how Russian oligarchs do?

Well bred and well read Americans live in an ideological and cultural cocoon and this makes them fatally slow to understand the very different motivations that animate actors ranging from the Tea Party to the Kremlin to, dare we say it, the Supreme Leader and Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran....
----
Link: http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/03/01/putin-smashes-washingtons-cocoon/