Originally Posted by
Azor
I don’t disagree.
However, all leaders tend to say one thing and then do another. For instance, despite Obama’s speech in Cairo in 2009, he actually disengaged from the Muslim world and pursued a rather ruthless strategy of containment and attrition in failed Muslim states with no real efforts made at reconstruction or development.
Yet conversely, such authoritarian states see patterns in the chaos of democratic foreign policy. To Moscow and Beijing, Operation Odyssey Dawn in 2011 is merely a continuation of Operation Allied Force in 1999: NATO being used as an offensive military alliance in pursuit of American imperialism. They do not believe in or understand the dynamics of democracy, much as they doubtless believe that spontaneous peaceful protests never occur without a hidden foreign hand.
Agreed. Russian power is now based upon a dynamic, fluid and inherently unstable blend of various state and non-state actors and special interests. It is difficult to say whether this fusion has strengthened or weakened the state. What happens when the consensus breaks down?
This is where it becomes clear that Putin is no grand strategist. He should have known from the outset that cooperation with the West was impossible, because free, democratic, prosperous and secure societies were a threat-in-being to the unfree and undemocratic society that Putin wanted to build on the assumption that such a society was necessary for prosperity and security. Putin’s early flirtations with the West were opportunistic and tactical. He finally realized that conflict was inevitable and expressed his concerns at Munich in 2007, using his words. He later conveyed his concerns with action in Georgia in 2008.
I do believe that Putin was wrong-footed by the Western reaction to the Russo-Georgian War, particularly the media portrayal of Russia as an invader and war criminal, whereas Georgia was fighting to uphold Western values. By the time that the dust had settled and T’bilisi’s less-than-innocent role as instigator became clear, months had passed and the West no longer cared whether Georgian tanks had fired into basements or the Georgians had used cluster munitions. I believe that this public relations disaster in 2008 was the impetus for the well-oiled propaganda machine that Putin subsequently built.
Indeed. I noted this major flaw in my introduction to the article.
I doubt that the talk of forming a Eurasian union including Europe, Russia, Central Asia and China will ever lead to anything. The cultural, linguistic, geographic and political barriers are simply too high. Russian isolationists compete with "Europeanists" and "Eurasianists", whilst the EU and SCO steadily advance. How can the “Third Rome” possibly compete with Brussels and Beijing? In addition to these two fronts, there is also a southern Muslim front...
Currently, Russia sees the western threat as more immediate than the eastern one. Arguably, Moscow would believe itself in conflict with the EU and NATO regardless of whether it sought to re-establish its former empire or whether it sought to be surrounded by neutral buffer states. Yet vacuums get filled and international relations is never static, so if the EU and NATO were dismantled tomorrow, Russia would inexorably fill the void. Therefore, one can conclude that Russia’s actions are at once defensive and offensive.
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