The west only perceives Russia as a threat because it makes itself a threat. Russia’s biggest enemy is its own paranoia and tendency towards unprovoked attacks on other countries e.g. the Litvinenko attack on UK being a prime example of Russia attacking another country for basically no reason whatsoever.
The west is perfectly happy to have Russia as a friend and to respect its autonomy if it would just stop attacking other countries.
If they tried to join NATO, absolutely. Russia has tremendous national interest in not allowing a hostile military alliance to absorb states on its border.
I guess I just wonder if you have any arguments that would be persuasive to those who believe Finland should be its own sovereign country, rather than a client of Russia's with fully devolved domestic policy authority.
Any dissatisfaction the Fins have with that answer has to do with the facts of life--they're a country with a smaller population than Maryland--not my argument. If you're a border state to a major power, you don't get to adopt a foreign policy that antagonizes your neighbor. Bangladesh doesn't get to do anything that would cause India to feel threatened; Mexico (and realistically speaking, all of Latin America) doesn't get to do anything that would cause the United States to feel threatened; etc.
That's just straightforwardly not true, right? You can't park nuclear missiles in Cuba, but you can do everything short of that. Cuba remained a COMECON member after the crisis. The USSR ran SIGINT missions out of Cuba. They were treaty partners in all but name --- far more involved than the US is with Ukraine in 2022, or, really, than they would be as a NATO member.
