Missed opportunity.

Editor,

Harry Truman, naive with regard to international relations and overly influenced by rabid anticommunist James Byrnes, foolishly and mistakenly read the posture of the USSR relative to the rest of the world after WWII -- devastated and reeling from the unimaginable deaths of more than 27 million Russians -- as aggressive.

This, and persistent anti-Russian ideology providing the prism through which Washington continued to interpret world events even through today, is one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.

American foreign policy, imperial policy, is and has been irredeemably aggressive since the end of WWII, and Russia has been stood up as the straw man with which to justify this posture until al Qaeda finally came along -- a product of Saudi Arabian ideological expansionism -- as a more immediate and convenient pretext for aggression.

Russia comes with its own challenges, successes, failures, and cultural history, but for Washington not to have understood Russia's unrelenting fear of being invaded and misinterpreted its defensive posture as a threat is to have missed an opportunity for meaningful cooperation for almost 70 years.

Re: "A Plea for Caution From Russia" (9/12/2013)