David McDuff has recently posted a long article of exchanges in which “Serbian World Bank economist Branko Milanovic asked the question: “why are the American media, both liberal and conservative, so unanimously anti-Russian?” He posts a list, and I’ll repost the first out of six:

1) For seventy years, commentators have been anti-Soviet and since obviously some of Russia’s foreign policy stances will coincide with those of the USSR, their knee-jerk reaction to argue against these positions in the past carried over to the present day.

He is responded to by “Yevgenia Albats, political journalist and Professor of economics at Moscow University,” who says:

1.If you have ever written something unfavorable to the current regime and/or Kremlin, Putin, Sechin, and etc. you may have trouble getting a visa to Russia.
…

8. Be aware to bring a good supply of Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa along with you to Moscow. Trust me, you will need each and every of those drugs. I trust you, you are not going to go to Chechnya: no Prozac helps to see Groznyy turned into the ghost city, or to talk to mothers whose husbands disappeared in the concentration camps without a trace, or whose children got killed during zachostki by the Russian or local special forces.

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And much, much more. But I want to interject on the original question, because I think I have a very reasonable answer. The reason that the U.S. “puts Russia down” for trying to act on its national interests is because its interests are, in many cases, indirectly against those of the United States. Last time I checked, we don’t like arms shipments to China and nuclear plants in Iran.

But I guess it’s alright if our national interests are criticized.