BradFiAusNzCoCaBut honestly, the last point - I’d argue our public figures lie in the USA all the time too. How many times have you thought “bullshit” but you can’t actually prove it?
Oh public figures in the USA constantly lie - by no means was I saying that the USA - or any leaders of any nation don't do that... however, the USA has a lot tougher job of highlighting threats from abroad and selling it's population on external threats... The USA is surrounded exclusively by large bodies of water and allies - where the border is either a desert, an impassible river or lake, or the northern prairies with limited infrastructure.
On top of that, the USA has 'buffer zones' and bases on each side of the aforementioned oceans made up of allies, like Japan, Taiwan, Australia, NZ, along with bases in the Caribbean and Western Europe... the USA's geographic position is OP as FUCK compared to Russia.
Russia has a large defensible east with Siberia being mostly undesirable for invasion... but even from the East it was invaded by the Mongols over the steppes... and then for foreign trade and projection of power, they barely have any warm water ports, and the only ones they have are choked off by the Dardanelles... The others, St. Petersburg Murmansk, Archangelesk, Vladivostok.. they all freeze in winter - and even St. Petersburg is choked off by the Danish Straights, and Murmansk & Archangelesk based ships have to navigate the G-I-UK gap... That's a big reason why the Soviets (and the Germans before them) focused so heavily on submarines rather than surface vessels... The first thing you learn about Russian Geopolitics is that Peter the Great's biggest goal once modernizing the nation was to establish a warm water port... They even fought a war with Japan over it and got smacked so hard that it became Japanese Naval Doctrine to focus on winning big decisive battles where chaos reigns and discipline wins...
The USA on the other hand has more ports than it knows what to do with - where only the Alaskan Ports freeze (and even then the most important ones in Anchorage, Juneau, and Valdez dont freeze over, and the amount of coordination and planning for the executing of an attack against the US is nearly impossible today.
In any case it's generally really hard to convince Americans to go to war... look what the US needed to do to get the public to get behind attending foreign wars in Europe - or even go after its imperialistic ambitions or cold war adventures... It either had to be directly attacked, like with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 - both pretty fair cases for retaliation - or it needed to blame the Maine on Spain, Overblow the Gulf of Tonkin Incident way out of proportion, or lose 120-something people in the Lusitania sinking, and wait another two years while building anti-german sentiment in order to justify sending men to the Trenches. The people in the US generally know they're mostly untouchable - It wasn't until Sputnik was launched that they thought their white picket fence might get blown down.
Since the war of 1812 when the population of the whole country was less than that of just NYC today and the US Navy's sailors were literally being stolen by the UK, the USA's de jure borders have never been invaded by land by an established foreign power (unless you count a few small majorly uninhabited islands whose main export is seagull poop)
Russia just has to point at the Eurasian plain and be like "remember how blood-soaked that land is" And it's not even just Napoleon and Hitler... Its the Vikings, it's the Ottomans, the Polish, the Swedish, the British and French in Crimea, and the Austrians/Germans in ww1. Its something like 1000 years of invasions. It's so established in the paranoia of Russia that the leaders of that country have been harping about it since Ivan the Terrible.
The USA's land is only blood-soaked due to its own Revolution, manifest destiny, civil war, and domestic policies... US leaders dont have anything like what Russia has to point to in order to stoke fear in its population unify it behind a common outside threat...
(couple this with a long legacy of divisive democracy in the USA and a long legacy of Monarchs and dictators in Russia/Soviet Union and you have a severe difference in political experience as well)
Long story short, every national leader lies - but the USA's leaders can't lie and get away with it quite as easily as Russian leaders seem to be able to...
