Russia is more baffling because it was 100% a US client state, the reactionary lib compradors the US chose and propped up are still in power, and Russia was licking America's boots and begging for approval right up until 2014. The way American officials managed to alienate their own handpicked puppets like that is astounding.

Like I genuinely can't understand how and why the US decided to do that, it's like the real scary, cynical old cold warrior demons won and got the complete American hegemony they'd spent their lives angling for, and then they retired happy and their successors just flailed around and undid it all within twenty years. Like it's this self-defeating blend of grifters trying to engineer conflicts so their arms dealer stocks go up, and dipshit true believers who think the US is some divine force of ontological good and purity who are entirely guided by the unhinged propaganda the grifters draw up for them, and nowhere in any of this is there a single cynical statesman monster capable of coldly planning for hegemony left holding any sort of power.

It's a truly impressive level of rot and collapse that's only picking up speed as the world catches on to the fact that the machine of imperial hegemony has been hollowed out by graft and no one's going to fix it.