Leon Aron at the American Enterprise Institute has a new brief out on Russia following the Summit.  Here’s just one section from the report on the use of anti-American propaganda by the Kremlin.

The Kremlin’s valiant defense of Russia against alleged plots from
the outside evolved into one of the key legitimizing tools of the
regime, and deafening and primitive anti-American propaganda became the
staple of the state-owned or state-controlled national media. In the
words of a Russian observer, the United States is “used as a bogeyman
for domestic political purposes.”[16] Presiding over the May 2007
military parade to mark the sixty-second anniversary of victory in the
Great Patriotic War (World War II), Putin likened the unnamed
perpetrators of “new threats” to Russia to the Third Reich because of
“the same desire to impose diktat on the world.”[17] Everyone in Moscow that day understood the evildoer to be the United States.

Since
then, the United States has been alleged by Kremlin-directed propaganda
to be behind virtually all of Russia’s political, diplomatic, military,
and economic setbacks: from the demise of the Soviet Union and the
Chechen struggle for independence in the 1990s to the Georgian and
Ukrainian “color” revolutions of 2003 and 2004, and Russia’s current
economic crisis, which Medvedev declared in June 2008 to be the fault
of America’s “aggressive financial policies.”[18] The Russo-Georgian
war in August of last year, too, was blamed on the United States. In
Putin’s words, the United States “deliberately created this conflict to
create a competitive advantage for one of the candidates for the U.S.
presidency” (i.e., Senator John McCain) and to help solve “the problems
in the [U.S.] economy,” including “financial problems” and the
“mortgage crisis.”[19] Every one of these canards was buttressed by
prime time “documentaries” on national television channels, including
one about the U.S. government engineering the 9/11 attacks to promote
its domestic and foreign policy objectives and one about the CIA’s plot
to dislodge the present Russian regime through an “Orange-style
revolution.”[20]

It is a foreign policy arising from this
domestic context that the “reset button” pressed by the White House
seeks to mesh successfully with the U.S. strategic agenda. Of course,
nothing in the evolutions of postrevolutionary states like Russia is
automatic. For instance, to take the most obvious case of
discontinuity, Russia’s deepening economic crisis may bring about
abrupt domestic policy shifts, which, in turn, are almost certain to
prompt adjustments in foreign policy, making it more accommodating–or
still more confrontational and unyielding.[21] At the moment, however,
this evolution and this context are our best guide to gauging Russia’s
response to the “button agenda.”

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