I mean I do think that somewhere in the crazy is a valid point on that specific score. There’s actually a moderately close analogy in Nicaragua, which the US was actively attacking, and then they started sourcing fighter jets from Russia purely to try to defend against our air force actively fucking them up inside their borders, and the whole of the US political spectrum freaked the fuck out, took it to the UN, escalated the war, there were all these editorials about what a crisis it was, etc etc, and that was barely even on the same continent as us.

This was all during the 1980s, when I actually think that US foreign policy was quite a lot closer to Russia’s current foreign policy than not. I think we’ve mellowed somewhat since then, although we’re still fine with killing civilians the world over when it serves our purposes. But yes, the US has a few data points worth of history of freaking out completely over “threats” from foreign alliances that are not even on the same continent (or hemisphere if you want to go back to the 70s) as us. I think the difference is that Russia has been antagonizing its neighbors on the west so thoroughly now that almost 100% of them actively want to gear up for real war with Russia, which I’m sure would make any country nervous regardless of how it got to be that way.