| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Purtin's Real Long Game |
| 2017-01-02 |
| [Politico] A little over a year ago, on a pleasant late fall evening, I was sitting on my front porch with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter. He was smoking a cigarette while we watched Southeast DC hipsters bustle by and talked about ’the war’ -- the big war, being waged by Russia against all of us, which from this porch felt very far away. I can’t remember what prompted it -- some discussion of whether the government in Kyiv was doing something that would piss off the EU -- but he took a long drag off his cigarette and said, offhand: "Russia. The EU. It's all just more Molotov-Ribbentrop shit." His casual reference to the Hitler-Stalin pact dividing Eastern Europe before WWII was meant as a reminder that Ukraine must decide its future for itself, rather than let it be negotiated between great powers. But it haunted me, this idea that modern revolutionaries no longer felt some special affinity with the West. Was it the belief in collective defense that was weakening, or the underlying certitude that Western values would prevail? Months later, on a different porch thousands of miles away, an Estonian filmmaker casually explained to me that he was buying a boat to get his family out when the Russians came, so he could focus on the resistance. In between were a hundred other exchanges -- with Balts and Ukrainians, Georgians and Moldovans -- that answered my question and exposed the new reality on the Russian frontier: the belief that, ultimately, everyone would be left to fend for themselves. Increasingly, people in Russia’s sphere of influence were deciding that the values that were supposed to bind the West together could no longer hold. That the world order Americans depend on had already come apart. From Moscow, Vladimir Putin has seized the momentum of this unraveling, exacting critical damage to the underpinnings of the liberal world order in a shockingly short time. As he builds a new system to replace the one we know, attempts by America and its allies to repair the damage have been limited and slow. Even this week, as Barack Obama tries to confront Russia’s open and unprecedented interference in our political process, the outgoing White House is so far responding to 21st century hybrid information warfare with last century’s diplomatic toolkit: the expulsion of spies, targeted sanctions, potential asset seizure. The incoming administration, while promising a new approach, has betrayed a similar lack of vision. Their promised attempt at another "reset" with Russia is a rehash of a policy that has utterly failed the past two American administrations. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #5 rjschwarz - Russia also needs to encourage Russians to make baby Russians. Of course that problem applies to most Caucasians. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2017-01-02 19:48 |
| #4 Russia has s demographic problem. If I were Putin I'd be trying to really stoke Russian pride hoping to get Russians from around the globe to move back to mother Russia. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2017-01-02 17:29 |
| #3 Ukrainians, Georgians and Moldovans...Hardly unbiased observers. Most certainly true but then again, healthy to gain perspective from those with some 'skin in the game.' |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2017-01-02 02:34 |
| #2 Ukrainians, Georgians and Moldovans Hardly unbiased observers. And if they won't to blame someone. Blame the United Nations. They are the ones proclaiming national borders fixed for all time (because African kleptocrats like it that way), but do nothing when they get redraw. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2017-01-02 02:26 |
| #1 To quote one of the comments on the author's twitter feed "some serious thinking going on here." |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2017-01-02 01:37 |