Putin is considered a threat because he restored Russian sovereignty, erased the humiliation of the Boris Yeltsin era, and championed Russia's national interests. But that is just what the U.S. elite could not tolerate.
The U.S. military-industrial complex needs enemies like human lungs need oxygen. When there are no enemies, they must be invented.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pentagon spin doctors had to search for a new bogeyman to justify their immense $778 billion budget, and its crippling effect on the U.S. economy. If that meant creating a propaganda campaign to paint Panama President Manuel Noriega — a longtime CIA asset — as a mad-dog "threat to American democracy" in order to justify the 1989 invasion of Panama (whose dead have yet to all be counted 32 years later) — well, so be it.
Or if it meant that other CIA assets, like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, also had to be painted as dangerous threats to American democracy to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, at the cost of countless Iraqi and Afghan lives, not to mention the lives of the thousands of gullible U.S. soldiers who served as cannon fodder — well, so be that, too.
But once those enemies were gone, a new one was needed. And almost as if on cue, the re-emergence of a strong, sovereign Russia
in 1999 provided the ideal candidate. It also provided a perfect excuse to initiate a new Cold War, which would justify the ever-increasing expenditures for exotic weaponry that the military-industrial complex kept demanding from its bought-and-paid-for politicians in the White House and Congress.
Comment: In the same region of Europe: Heavy snowfall hits the north of Spain with more than 60 cm (24 inches) in just 6 HOURS