Russia

Empire-building is part of the DNA of Russian and Soviet history...Stalin’s Soviet Union, just like Mr. Putin’s Russia, moved to reconquer lost parts of the Russian Empire once it became sufficiently strong, annexing the Baltic states and invading Finland...Putin’s foreign policy is not really an outlier from a historical perspective...There is a difference between Russia and the other empires, such as the British or the French. Those empires may have given up even more territory, but in Russia, the sense of loss, the sense of being a victim of the world, has never been healed.

Make no mistake, there is a concerted attack on the constitutional liberal order. And it is being spearheaded by the president of the United States... It is bad enough that the Putin-Trump meeting is happening at all — but it must not take place in Vienna. The echoes are too ominous.