That's a nice quote, the problem is that once you gave birth to a giant you need to keep feeding it. We can see how it's going for Russia right now.

It also doesn't mean you should build private surveillance companies tightly coupled to a single political party, with all the conflicts of interest it brings

You mean the same Russia that the US and Europe has been too weak to stop? That's not a great argument...

That's one way to see it, the other way to see it is that they're bleeding russia dry while making big bucks on arms sales, basically forcing the EU to buy fracking gas at 4x markup and ensuring they'll get all the juicy reconstruction contracts.

modern american history shows how wrong this is. US has been at war almost every year since the end of WW2.