Putin and Russian Realism

View 829 Saturday, June 21, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

“Today, I can announce that our review is complete, and that the United States will pursue a new strategy to end the war in Iraq through a transition to full Iraqi responsibility.

This strategy is grounded in a clear and achievable goal shared by the Iraqi people and the American people: an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.

[W]e will work to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative, and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists.”

“We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.

Barrack Obama
December 14, 2011
Fort Bragg, North Carolina

Conversation on Putin’s Logic

Anyone who is interested in Russia, Putin, or geopolitics will find this conversation to be worth their time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL8cNo0Lusw

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

It is a good elementary introduction to political realism about Russia, and anyone in need of that will find it valuable. My inclination is against conversational formats like that, because you can read a lot more in less time than it take to “watch” (mostly listen, there are no illustrative video clips). I do wish that the media news talkers would watch it, because a bit of realism would be good for them.

Putin is a Russian patriot. He rose from a minor KGB bureaucrat, just high up enough to be part of the Nomenklatura, to Yeltsin’s protégé and heir in well under ten years. He was better aware of the problems Russia faced than most, and had far more energy and verve than others around him. Perhaps a bit too much zeal. During his rise from political aide to protégé to heir of the ‘democratic’ faction of Russia following the collapse of the USSR, he was forcibly made aware of the unreliability of US and NATO promises regarding Russian interests. The Kosovo War in which the United States bombed Serbia to force the Slavic Serbian government to hand over the province to Albanian illegal immigrants, coupled with the usual Russian belief that the West is anti-Slavic, helped form his views of Russian need for buffer states between Russia and NATO.

Little that the West has done since then would have changed his view that the West, and particularly the United States, has a consistent foreign policy other than a bias against Russia; possibly this comes from the legacy of the Cold War, but all his experience points to that. The US doesn’t know its own interests, but it tends to thwart those of Russia, including the legitimate interests of the power that has stood between the Asian hordes and Europe for a very long time.