Story highlights Ivan Eland: Russia has reasons to feel insecure at its borders

If Russia has manipulated the US election, it must face retribution in the cyber arena

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) The way American news media and politicians have characterized the Russian "threat" has often been hysterical and overblown.

Not any longer. Intelligence agencies believe that Russia hacked US political organizations to manipulate the election -- the core of any democracy. President Barack Obama has vowed to retaliate in the manner and "at a time and place of our own choosing."

Ivan Eland

We could have seen this coming. One clear consequence of the triumphalist post-Cold War US expansion of the NATO alliance, right up to Russia's western border, was the rise of a nationalist Russian leader -- Vladimir Putin -- and his aggressive stance against the West in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. Unlike the United States, with its vast ocean moats and huge distances from the world's centers of conflict, Russia has lots of reasons to feel insecure at its borders.

Throughout history, the Russians have been invaded multiple times. The Nazi invasion led to 25 million dead. So Russia has legitimate concerns about maintaining a security buffer of friendly territory in nearby areas, like Georgia and Ukraine. Moscow also is adamant about helping one of the few allies it has left in the world -- Syria.

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So Putin's pushback is not just to show he is macho. Even his heavily criticized annexation of Crimea, formerly in Russia and with a Russian-speaking population, was predicated primarily on its strategic value in housing a naval base on the Black Sea.

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