You're putting words in my mouth. Of course Russia did 'nation building' post-WW2, and it did it beforehand too. It was called the Russian Empire for a reason.

You're putting words in my mouth. Of course Russia did 'nation building' post-WW2, and it did it beforehand too. It was called the Russian Empire for a reason. But none of that has anything to do with the present day, for the same reason it's not useful to talk about German nation-building or Japanese nation-building -- like Russia, those regimes were defeated, their ideologies discredited, and their leaders and institutions replaced. America is unique in how it actively funds and promotes Western political institutions throughout the entire world. There's also no other modern-day parallel to Iraq or Afghanistan, where sovereign nations halfway around the world are invaded, their leadership decapitated wholesale, and Western democratic institutions are built from the ground up -- institutions that have zero cultural history in those places. I'm not saying what the US is doing good or bad, but facts are facts. Only the US does this because only the US has the power and money to. Russia can barely project power past its own borders; China as well. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't pull off an Iraq. Also, the US policy establishment has a history of being fooled by its own propaganda and projecting pure ideological motives on its opponents, often to the detriment of its own strategic goals. For example, Truman and MacArthur's outright dismissal of China's warning to not approach the Yalu river, which brought China into the Korean war -- the US completely misread China's strategic motives, which were to prevent an American troops literally right next to its industrial heartland, and instead thought that China was completely under the USSR's thumb and that the USSR didn't want a war. US bought into its own rhetoric and thought Communist ideology trumped nationalism, a mistake that cost ~20-30k American lives. Anyway, no matter if you really think the US is right and Russia is the bad guy, the first step is to actually understand your opponent's motives. But I guess you prefer calling everyone who disagrees with you an FSB plant.