Increasing tensions with a nuclear superpower - smart or not?

Weirdly the narrative of "Evil Russia" is very much alive on both the Left and the Righ. You got the odd Chomsky who actually argues for a bit restraint of provoking the Russians, but in general if you read online comments or listen to NATO chiefs and politicians, you have this feeling of collective insanity.

Everyone seems to have accepted the narrative that "The Russians Must Be Stopped", and that "provocative steps are necessary to ensure peace". It seems like there's a collective amnesia about the history of the last 25 years, and everyone is just happily engaging in their happiest paranoid Cold War mindset.

First of all- the argument that we can't let a country just do whatever it wants- the world has changed.

Really.

Iraq war, anyone? Torture? Cyber attacks against a sovereign country? (An act of war, actually.) Threat of a nuclear strike against a sovereign country? (You know, a war crime in itself.) Mass surveillance even -grasp!- of foreign politicians? Bombing sovereign countries? Supporting "moderate" rebels (aka the merry men of ISIS)? Talking about and executing regime changes? Drone strikes in areas which are outside of a war zone? Assassinations? Suspension of Habeas Corpus? Supporting murderous medieval regimes who wage horrible wars in Yemen?
These things are a-OK? If the Russians put a fleet close to US coastal waters every time the Americans exercised their hyper-interventionist policies, we would have all died of a nuclear holocaust by now.

But I digress. Let's not engage in "whataboutery", as these things are labelled whenever they are brought up as an inconvenient counterpoint.

Let's focus on Russia.

Why are the Russians are so damned aggressive, you'd ask. Well, you can ask why a guy in the pub is so darn aggressive once you took his drink and tried kissing his girlfriend.

They are aggressive, because they have been provoked, idiots.

What has the NATO been doing to provoke them, you ask? After all, they're just minding their own business, not doing any hostile moves?

Well, for one, they are expanding east, in direct violation of their promise. And make no mistake: this is an aggressive move against the Russians. The NATO has not ceased its anti-Russian rhetoric since the Cold War. (Ironically this whole Cold War thing seems to be a product of American paranoia; the Soviet Union seemed to have tried to join NATO... although don't quote me on these; and they are tangential points, anyhow.)
The Russians have experienced two devastating wars from the West, and ignoring their history and their attitude (isolationist, pretty defensive and xenophobic) is stupid. They want their buffer states around them, and if you threaten this you threaten them. It's that simple. Ask the Americans about Latin America if you want to see something similar. If you look at Russian interventions they usually were defensive in nature. Even the famous Winter War started because Stalin wanted some buffer between him and the Germans.

Foreign adventures like the war against Georgia is normally brought up at this point. Too bad the narrative is a lie, is it? Funnily the truth isn't the "evil Ruskies against the poor, defenceless Georgians" as it is still touted by the media. Weird in this era of the free press, is it?

Ukraine is being brought up. Consider this: you remove a pro-Russian government with a coup, and install a pro-Western (pretty far right) one  instead, threatening their access to their only warm water port. Can I ask you something politely? What the fuck did you think would happen? Seriously. Did you expect them to just accept the fact that their direct neighbour is a pro-NATO country, while you have been putting NATO bases, radars and other "defensive" structures in Central Europe? Have you forgotten what triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis? (Hint: something to do with the nukes in Turkey.) They wanted to keep their bloody port, so they took the Crimea. You did not have to be a genius to see what would happen.

With Syria we see a similar issue. While human rights mean nothing when our dictators are trampling them (see: House of Saud), they mean everything when we can screw the Russians over. Assad might not be a pleasant individual, but he is miles ahead of the US/Saudi supported fundamentalist "moderate" rebels who not only hate Christians, they hate Muslims, too, if they don't subscribe for their own particular sect. And in this case hatred does not mean toilet papering each other's lawn. I have Syrian friends (Christian Arabs), and they all said: Assad is the best alternative. (Even the Syrian expat community in Budapest seems to think so if the window of a Syrian shop is any indication: it has a huge poster of Assad on it.) The civil war was a horrible crime the US and her allies helped to fester. It needs to stop. And the only people willing to put a stop to it is Assad and the Russians. Trump -and it pains me to say so- is right in this. Once the war is over, then the issues can be addressed; but nothing will be gained from supporting rebel fractions whom we think are "moderate". (I wonder what the "moderate" Islamic fundamentalist looks like.) Just look at what happened in Mosul after a little western meddling: the community is completely torn apart by hate.

Pushing the Russians will not help at all. Raising tensions when both sides can essentially destroy all human lives on this planet is just fucking stupid (and I apologise for the word but this is the best description I could find). What you need is de-escalation, mutual respect and a willingness to compromise. The Russians are smart enough for that; the US and her allies so far have been unable to grasp that perhaps they can't always dictate things from the position of absolute power. It works when you're pushing over little dictators you nurtured, but it does not work with a superpower. And like it or not, Russia IS a superpower, even if the Russian GDP is low. There is more to a superpower than GDP, you know. A couple of thousands of nuclear warheads will do the trick.