Vindman's Fantasy History

It is simply not true that the U.S. “bent over backwards to acknowledge Russia’s security concerns” since the end of the Cold War.

Alexander Vindman writes from what I assume must be a parallel universe:

For the last three decades, the United States has bent over backward to acknowledge Russia’s security concerns and allay its anxieties.

It is simply not true that the U.S. “bent over backwards to acknowledge Russia’s security concerns” since the end of the Cold War, so it is difficult to take the rest of Vindman’s argument seriously when it is based on a fantasy version of the last three decades. If the U.S. had done what Vindman claims, I suspect U.S.-Russian relations would have been much less contentious than they actually were, but the fact is that the U.S. did not do this. Washington knew what Russia’s concerns were and for the most part it ignored them on the assumption that there wasn’t much that Russia could do about it. Far from bending over backwards, the U.S. sometimes seemed to go out of its way to take positions that it knew would infuriate Moscow.