No, I mean YOU are missing the point.

What makes Russophobia a true "phobia" in the clinical sense is that Russophobia, as it exists in the West, is a completely irrational sense of fear and hatred regarding Russia.

Specifically, Russophobia is irrational because it rests on two fundamental but opposing precepts:

1) Russia is a globe-straddling superpower that is poised to roll across Europe like the Mongol hordes, sweeping all armies and peoples before it, and Putin is a modern day Hitler who is somehow also a modern day Peter the Great and/or Stalin and hell-bent on reconstituting the Russian Empire and/or the Soviet Union.

2) Russia is a socioeconomically retarded backwater, a third world country with no industrial or technological capacity, a country running out of everything, with incompetent leadership and cowardly soldiers who run away at the first sign of a fight, and Russia is nothing but "a gas station masquerading as a country", as John McCain said, and Putin is a petty thug, a weak leader who can only make life difficult for his immediate neighbors, as Barack Obama said.