It's an old habit for us. We inflated the threat of Russia for years and years to justify spending untold billions on the military, and that went away when the Soviet Union fell apart. But now it's back and once again we're saying not only do the Russians have forces to invade Western Europe, but they thought of a new wrinkle - through their fiendish cyber-cunning, they changed the course of US politics and elected Donald Trump. It's completely insane.
Journalist Andrew Cockburn examines the recent hype around Russia as existential threat to world security and American democracy, and finds dubious intelligence and a servile media pushing conflict in service of a failed political campaign in need of a scapegoat, and a bloated military in need of a target to justify its budget.
Andrew wrote the cover story The New Red Scare in the December issue of Harper's.