If Putin is all evil, why did he do the following (as described by Jack Matlock, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991) and why did we rebuff him?

“After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Northern Virginia, President Putin was the first foreign leader to call President Bush and offer support. He was as good as his word by facilitating the attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had harbored Osama ben Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had inspired the attacks. It was clear at that time that Putin aspired to a security partnership with the United States. The jihadist terrorists who were targeting the United States were also targeting Russia. Nevertheless, the U.S. continued its course of ignoring Russian–and also allied–interests by invading Iraq, an act of aggression which was opposed not only by Russia, but also by France and Germany.

“As President Putin pulled Russia out of the bankruptcy that took place in the late 1990s, stabilized the economy, paid off Russia’s foreign debts, reduced the activity of organized crime, and even began building a financial nest egg to weather future financial storms, he was subjected to what he perceived as one insult after another to his perception of Russia’s dignity and security. He enumerated them in a speech in Munich in 2007. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates responded that we didn’t need a new Cold War. Quite true, of course, but neither he, nor his superiors, nor his successors seemed to take Putin’s warning seriously. Then Senator Joseph Biden, during his candidacy for the presidential election in 2008, pledged to “stand up to Vladimir Putin!” Huh? What in the world had Putin done to him or to the United States?”

And why would Putin work so hard to curry good economic relations with the West, as described by distinguished Russian Scholar, the late Stephen Cohen:

“Much of his success, and domestic popularity, as Russia’s leader for 13 years, until the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, was based on an unprecedented expansion of Russia’s economic relations with Europe and, to a lesser extent, with the United States. For example, Russia provided fully one-third of the energy needs of European Union countries and thousands of European producers, from farmers to manufacturers, found vast new markets in Putin’s Russia, as did American car makers and fast-food chains. As late as 2013, the Kremlin was employing a US public-relations firm and recruiting Goldman Sachs to help ‘brand’ Russia as a profitable and safe place for Western investment.”

So, why is it so important for us to perpetuate the war with Russia? Or is it just a war with Putin? Is one just as useful as the other in terms of justifying our military budget?

Here, former US diplomat, Chas Freeman, in a recent interview on the subject of our inexplicable war with Russia, says that the US will fight Russia “down to the last Ukrainian.”