International waters are nonetheless international waters. There is no real comparison between this incident and Iranian Flight 665. The Americans have every right to be sailing in international waters, just as the Russians had every right to fly bombers around the British Isles a couple years ago. Indeed, rights aside, the Americans have even more reason to operate in these particular international waters as they were doing so in conjunction with their NATO allies who possess ports on that same body of water. In this case, it was during international exercises with Poland; the ship had been watching a Russian spy ship from a safe distance for a while before they were buzzed. If you fly repeated simulated attack runs on a destroyer that take you within meters of it, it wouldn't be surprising. Indeed, the captain of the destroyer himself was highly unwilling to escalate; he didn't even activate his active radar systems or ship defenses, correctly assessing the threat as being on the level of "flyboys being flyboys" with a side of "bait for intel on active systems."
That said, while this particular pilot took things a bit further than the norm, this has absolutely all the precedent in the world in the Cold War era. Fighter jock on one side does something ballsy and potentially dangerous but not actually harmful to some bomber or naval ship on the other side, a few diplomatic pro forma words are exchanged, and absolutely nothing is escalated or changed. Let me know when a Russian pilot actually does accidentally slam a SU-24 into the side of an Arleigh Burke or something.
EDIT:
Give me some evidence - any at all, really - of this being an American-engineered provocative event. And no, merely conducting exercises in the Baltics does not count as provocative.
The existence of Poland, obviously. If they were still a part of Glorious Mother Russia, there would obviously be no reason for joint exercises between the Polish and American navies, and thus no reason for Americans to be in the Baltic.
But joking aside, there are people who argue seriously, and not entirely without merit, that the entry of Poland and the Baltic states into NATO were one such serious provocation, and that NATO should never have gone east of the Elbe. I suppose that could be one way of looking at this, if you presuppose that the Baltic Sea is a Russian lake and thus any American presence there is necessarily in and of itself a provocation. It's not one I agree with, but it is one with a certain logical merit insofar as Russian security is concerned. That said, if a Russian destroyer operating in international waters off Boston were to shoot down an American F-35 playing stupid flyboy stunts with their conning tower, I wouldn't regard it as any worse than an American destroyer shooting down an SU-24 while operating in international waters in the Baltic Sea.