.The outrage with which US commentators have discussed the possibility of foreign interference in their elections is understandable,
but hard to square with decades of US interference in elections around the world, or with US support for forceful regime change.
The Russian president, in turn, is a master of the art of moral equivalence. In 2014, Putin justified Russia’s actions in Crimea as being in support of the peninsula’s remedial self-determination, following the ‘well-known Kosovo precedent’.
He told Trump that he would allow US officials to question the 12 Russian military intelligence officers indicted by Robert Mueller, if Russia could question 11 US diplomats, civil servants and business people who had worked with opposition organisations in Russia or supported sanctions against Russian officials for human rights abuses. The State Department dismissed the proposed exchange as ‘absurd’.
Yet behind it lies Putin’s view that US involvement in Russian politics is as illegitimate as the activities on Mueller’s charge sheet.
It is hard not to resort to cynical eye-rolling about moral or legal relativism when hegemonic states seek to cloak their own interventions in the language of moral virtue, while denouncing similar conduct by their rivals.
That is true that there is no moral equivalency here. Russia is hardly a “hegemonic state”. All its efforts are directed towards opposing and confronting the hegemony of USA x
but hard to square with decades of US interference in elections around the world, or with US support for forceful regime change.
The Russian president, in turn, is a master of the art of moral equivalence. In 2014, Putin justified Russia’s actions in Crimea as being in support of the peninsula’s remedial self-determination, following the ‘well-known Kosovo precedent’.
He told Trump that he would allow US officials to question the 12 Russian military intelligence officers indicted by Robert Mueller, if Russia could question 11 US diplomats, civil servants and business people who had worked with opposition organisations in Russia or supported sanctions against Russian officials for human rights abuses. The State Department dismissed the proposed exchange as ‘absurd’.
Yet behind it lies Putin’s view that US involvement in Russian politics is as illegitimate as the activities on Mueller’s charge sheet.
It is hard not to resort to cynical eye-rolling about moral or legal relativism when hegemonic states seek to cloak their own interventions in the language of moral virtue, while denouncing similar conduct by their rivals.
That is true that there is no moral equivalency here. Russia is hardly a “hegemonic state”. All its efforts are directed towards opposing and confronting the hegemony of USA x
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