The sheer number of articles suggesting that we are seeing a return to the day of the ‘Cold War’ are such that frankly I cannot even be bothered to link to one. Certainly the Russian Bear has been more overtly unfriendly as of late, and I do think Russia needs to be taken seriously in the way any collection of armed thugs need to be taken seriously.
However it is absurd to contend that Russia as a long term threat in the way the Soviet Union threatened the world for more than fifty years. Hapless Russia has a near mono-culture economy (GDP the size of Italy, for gawd’s sake) and catastrophic demographics that make Europe seem like a stud-farm (Germany, Poland and Austria more or less total the same population as Russia’s ‘hordes’). The appropriate personification for Russia circa 2008 is not an oil fuelled Genghis Khan, threatening to surge once more across Eurasia… no, it is more like a drunk with a knife unable to admit they have terminal liver disease… a vodka fuelled Genghis Khan’t if you will.
Surely a policy of political containment is really all that is needed while nature, rust and liver sclerosis on a Biblical scale do the rest. Probably the most damaging thing we could do to hasten the deflation of the absurd delusions of the thuggish Russian political class would be to make it easier for young Russians, and Russian money, to get the hell out of Russia and move west.
Dear Mr. Dehavilland,
The problem is that Russia is still one of the two leading nuclear powers in the world and that Putin is abysmally ignorant of Western Civilization. I point to an incident a while back, don’t remember the details, where Putin asked why Bush didn’t tell the press to just shut up. That’s what he does, and they do.
There is a great danger that we will have a gross misunderstanding similar to the Vienna Summit in 1961 which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. I assure you that those of us with memories are far more concerned than you appear to be.
Regards,
Roy
Charles Krauthammer(Link) has a 5 point plan to curb the drunken bear which makes sense to me.
In short, remove the Russian seat at the NATO table, bar entry to the WTO, dissolve the G8 and reform the G7 (no bears allowed club), boycott the 2014 winter Olympics, reaffirm support for Saakashvili’s government and announce that removal of this government will result in the recognition of it as a government in exile.
The demographic meltdown in Russia may be creating a “Now or Never” attidue inside the Kremiln. We are not dealing with communists but with a bunch of irrational, angry autocrats.
I know that the August 1914 metaphor gets overused, but in the run up to that war the Germans thought that if they waited too long the Russians would complete their rearmament program and the German war plan would become obsolete. The Russian Army is a wasting asset today.
In a few years Russia may find itself in need of Western friends, but right now we are in for a rough ride.
Not a bad plan, although I don’t know that boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics is necessary. Just slap a “windfall profits” tax on any US TV network which broadcasts them (or perhaps simply an excise tax on any payment in exccess of, say, $500 million for the TV rights) and the Games will cost Russia far more than they are worth.
Reform the G7, contain them militarily by a bit of lend lease and Israeli/British/American advisers to neighbouring countries, and otherwise ignore them.
Russia is no threat to the West. It presents no ideological alternative in the way the USSR did, and its military is badly trained, inexperienced, and falling behind technically.
The only thing Russia has going for it, compared to its neighbours, is numbers, but with a bit of pre-emptive assistance Ukraine would be able to hold off any Georgian style punishment strike.
Poland is untouchable even now, and the Baltics? Well the bear could walk over them, but at what cost? Would NATO really defend them? Dunno, but would Russia really risk finding out?
As far as the central Asian republics go, I bet they are suddenly get a lot pricklier.
Georgia is a one off. Next time the bear plays with fire it will get its paws burnt.
“Would NATO really defend them?”
NATO? (snort!) I’m sorry……..you’re not serious, are you?
Badly-trained, yes, but when it comes to small wars, they do have a number of regular and irregular troops with experience. More than enough to knock over Latvia, for instance, if we let them.
I generally agree with the OP: all you really need to do to bring Russia to its knees is get Bussard fusion out of the gate, or return via any number of technologies to $40/bbl oil.
This will not be a return to the bad old days, but it will cool relations for a while. In the midst of global warming, can that be a bad thing?
Re-read my article. I am concerned, but I think this talk of a Cold War is overblown. Russia is a dead man walking, not Germany in 1938.
The real problem with Russia has been exposed by the NATO response to Georgia – i.e. there is no response. Russia could quite easily overrun a number of former Soviet states because only one thing can stop them, an effective NATO military response.
‘Ignore them’ – that’s what we’ve been doing for years. Hasn’t worked. ‘Israeli/British/American advice/military support’ – didn’t help Georgia. ‘Boycott the Winter Games’ – o please, that’s not a serious answer.
The ultimate calculation for Putin is ‘are NATO really going to send in the troops and have the stomach for losses, or alternatively resort to nuclear strikes?’ His gamble is ‘No they won’t’. Does the author have any convincing reason to believe Putin is mistaken?
>> GDP the size of Italy, for gawd’s sake
And this is bad … how exactly?
According to this list – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) – Russia is currently at 11th place in the world rankings.
And according to this – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Russia
“As of April 2008, the International Monetary Fund estimates that Russia’s gross domestic product (nominal) will grow from its 2007 value of $1,289,582 million to $3,462,998 million by 2013, a 168% increase. Its GDP PPP is estimated to grow from $2,087,815 to $3,330,623 in the same time, which would make it the second largest economy in Europe in terms of purchasing power.”
It is not ‘bad’, it is just putting the potential of Russia to strut around thumping its chest in perspective. It is not a ‘super power’. Also, Italy has a sophisticated and diversified economy… Russia does not.
I am not aware of Russian “strutting around thumping its chest” in recent years. Unless you want to call defending the immediate geo-political and economic interests of any one country a “chest-thumping”.
And there is only one country in the world still clinging to the superficial “super power” status, and it ain’t Russia.
EU: 490 million people + $14.4 trillion GDP PPP + 0.12% annual population growth – relatively small but modern logistically supportable military = super rich
USA: 303 million people + $13.8 trillion GDP PPP + 0.88% annual population growth + large and modern massively supported military = super powerful
China: 1.3 billion people + $6.9 trillion GDP PPP + 0.63% annual population growth + large but not so modern logistically primitive military = super big
Russia: 141 million people + $2.1 trillion GDP PPP – 0.47% annual population reduction + large but logistically challenged military = not that important really
Excellent summary.
@ Roy. Sure they’ve got nukes. Is there any reason to assume that they will nuke their biggest oil & gas customers? That’s be stupendously dumb, even by Russian standards.
>> not that important really
To whom? It seems important to … Georgia for one. Or to Europe, of which it supplies nearly half of it’s energy requirements. Or to the rest of the world, since it is still one of the only 2 countries that can potentially destroy the entire planet.
From that perspective, being “super rich” (btw EU is not a separate country last I checked) or “super big” is indeed much less important. This is not a high school.
As to declining population – well, as someone once said: “rumours of my death were greatly exaggerated”. You do have to realise it’s not an everlasting process. No country in history ever simply declined to 0 population. Eventually the balance point will be reached, as poverty declines and standards of living improve, however slowly. Things seem to be on the mend already –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Declining_population
– the birth rate at present actually higher than the UK’s – 11.3 vs 10.67
Never underestimate fury of a wunded beast. It is perhaps weakened and drunk beast, but it has allied itself with a lot of hienas around the world. Has anyone red Tom Clancy’s book “Executive Orders”? Although a composition of the anti- American coalition is different, it is however much broader and more diversified and thus much more dangerous. They won’t dare to attack the US directly, of course, but they will keep biting it in hundreds of spots (they are doing that already) exchausting her mentally, emotionally, morally and force her into isolationism. In such a self imposed islation, America will in turn become even weaker and obviously more succeptible to another large scale terrorist act. We have to remember that a deranged individual poised to stab anyone in the back will always have an edge over a strong opponent. Unfortunately, we are going to witness lots of back-stabbing in the near future…
That’s truth Albion. But as Lenin used to say, organised minority can defeat disorganised majority. Looks like it is happening…
Sure, which is why they need to be contained and sometimes even confronted. Arms sales to everyone at risk on Russia’s borders would be both sensible and profitable.
That is not Russia’s strength, it is it’s weakness… Russia is dependent on energy sales to stay afloat and to do that it must actually sell energy. So threatening to cut off energy is like threatening to cut your own throat and bleed on your enemies. Without energy Russia is a banana republic without bananas.
So? If they threaten to blow up the world, call their bluff. How exactly does that really give them power in reality?
But the UK has people in lines around the block trying to get in, hence significant population growth… who in their right mind wants to move to Russia permanently? Not a whole lot of people really.
P d H:
As it is with the reification of “Government,” there is this conviction to reify the motives and
actions of those who currently control (or dominate) the governmental and military functions of the Russian peoples into something denominated as “RUSSIA.”
Doing so, at the expense of ignoring that those motives and actions flow from the objectives of individuals (not from some commonly presumed “will” of the public) now dominant or in control can lead to significant miscalculations.
There needs be examination and analysis of those objectives if the methods being used to achieve them them, such as the adventure into Georgia and the other areas of the Caucases, are to be thwarted if they are in fact detrimental to international order.
PdH>> Sure, which is why they need to be contained and sometimes even confronted. Arms sales to everyone at risk on Russia’s borders would be both sensible and profitable.
This is pure idiocy. You need to maintain good relations with your immediate neighbours, especially when said neighbour is a lot more powerful entity (as Saakashvili learned the hard way). It’s easy for you, while sitting in far away UK, to propose selling arms to people on Russia’s borders when you are not the one who is going to be bombed and killed. Armchair war much?
Secondly – why should they be contained? Apart from hysterical claims by US state department and most of Western media I don’t see any necessity in escalating level of confrontation against Russia.
I don’t recall, apart from Georgia debacle (which by all acounts was started by Georgian side), any significant military moves by Russia outside its territory since the break up of the USSR. Meanwhile, during the same period, US and NATO engaged in 4 full scale aggressive wars – Iraq I/II, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan. Current US vs Iraq war started without any provocation or justification – and you want to tell me that it’s Russia that needs to be contained? Get a grip on reality.
>> So? If they threaten to blow up the world, call their bluff. How exactly does that really give them power in reality?
I don’t recall Russia (or USSR for that matter) ever threatening to blow up the world. To wit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use
But nice strawman.
Clockworkorgange, go and do some fact-checking. Remember how Russia threatened to switch off gas to Ukraine? Remember its clear flouting of arms sales to Iran? Remember how that country throws out pesky investors who dare suggest its businesses are run by crooks (several have been). Remember the outrageous confiscation of western assets in clear breach of contracts?
The list is getting longer. Oh, let’s not forget the state-backed murders of journalists, the bumping off of the guy in London etc.
Oh and Clockwork, spare us the horseshit about “defending Russia’s interests”. Since when has robbery of investors, invasion of democratic states, been “defending Russia’s interests?”. There is no remote parallel, for instance, between the overthrow of say, Saddam’s crime-family and the folk in charge of Georgia. About the most that can be said of the latter is that they have been a bit reckless.
JP, The only horseshit around here is yours.
It’s quite laughable for a supposed libertarian defender of sacred property rights and free markets to suggest that cutting off gas to Ukraine for refusing to pay market prices is somehow demonstrating that Russia is out there to hurt everyone and enslave it’s little neighbours. I guess market forces and contractual obligations are only for those people who libertarians like (which is as I always suspected).
>> There is no remote parallel, for instance, between the overthrow of say, Saddam’s crime-family and the folk in charge of Georgia.
That’s correct. I guess even broken clock like yourself is right twice a day. There is no parallel between starting a massive war of aggression on false premises against a country (Iraq) which has never attacked the US/UK and killing many thousands of it’s people, and quickly and decisively repelling Georgian bombardment and invasion of Ossetia which killed several hundred people. Or are you going to claim that Georgia did not attack S. Ossetia on Aug 8 too?
In case you haven’t noticed folks in charge of Georgia have not been overthrown (although they should be, hopefully by their own people). What was that noise about fact-checking?
The desire to have good relations with your neighbors is a two way street. Russia doesn’t seem to give a damn about such relations. The leadership of Russia does not want friendly relations, it wants subservience enforced by fear.
The only thing they will get out of that approach is the coalescence of neighboring states to counter balance it. After what has happened in Georgia it is an absolute no-brainer that everyone with a border to Russia is going to up-arm themselves and form mutual defense pacts with their border neighbors.
So through stupidity, Russia is creating its own paranoid delusion. It is making all of its neighbors so worried about who will be threatened next that they have to arm against it.
There was always going to be suspicion amongst them: Russia does not have a very good history of doing anything except running its tanks through other peoples capital cities. Most of us thought that had been left behind with the bad old USSR. (Not that the Tsarists were all that nice to have in your neighborhood either).
So kowtow and all will be ok, eh? Yeah sure.
I’ve seen wars up close, have you?
Because they are interfering in other countries? Assassinating people in London for example.
Of course you don’t, you are an apologist for Russia’s fascistic regime. But if you actually read my article instead of reacting to certain trigger words, you would see I am saying there is indeed no need to ‘return’ to the Cold War because Russia is a pathetic shadow of the Soviet Union and it can be dealt with via arms sales to those Russia wishes to intimidate (i.e. raise the cost on intimidation) and political isolation.
By ‘all’ accounts? You mean Russian accounts. Georgia was operating inside Georgia against a Russian backed insurgency, so what ‘started’ this was the insurgency that only Russian support has made possible.
Indeed, which is why no massive Cold War style response is needed.
…Which I support
…which I strongly supported. Helping to thwart Serbian fascism was Bill Clinton’s finest hour. I watched some of the bombing strikes in Bosnia first hand and never have I been happier to see, hear and smell my tax dollars at work.
…which I also support.
Matter of opinion.
I have a fine grip on reality, I just do not happen to share (a) your notion that there is any moral equivalence in the wars you mention and Georgia trying to prevent Russian attempts to disassemble Georgia (b) I do not support the thuggish kleptocratic Russia regime.
I am no pacifist and not against wars, per se, just against wars that benefit the more vile regimes of the world.
Once Russia is no longer run by former KGB people, it may became just another European power and perhaps even a natural ally against the far more intractable threat of Islamic fundamentalism.
Until that days comes however, contain them and let them rot in a haze of vodka.
Perry, it’s good to have you back. Haven’t seen anything from you in a while.
Dear Mr. de Havilland,
Sorry about misspelling your name.
I reread your article and you are indeed contending that this need not be the start of a new cold war. I absolutely agree with you.
That is not my concern. As I stated my concern is that miscalculation by Russia could have disastrous consequences for the whole world. Most wars are the result of miscalculation.
As to some of the other comments:
NATO – hah! NATO is now and has been for some time the US military. If hostilities were non-nuclear it could easily handle Russia, China or both at the same time. NATO now serves as a tripwire and a pretense to international cooperation.
Mr. Orange, you point to a wiki article about treaty arrangements to argue that Russia has never threatened the use of nuclear weapons. I was involved with a US intelligence agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I saw communications that will probably not see the light of day for at least another 50 years. I will not characterize nor allude to specific content. I will simply say that you are wrong.
Many of the other comments analyze the situation assuming there are rational actors on all sides. If that were the case then there wouldn’t be any wars. I would suggest that history is somewhat at variance with that view.
Regards,
Roy
Surely a policy of political containment is really all that is needed while nature, rust and liver sclerosis on a Biblical scale do the rest.
Heh heh. That’s a very clever line.
So it’s poor, vodka-fuelled, inefficient, and in a long-term terminal decline, but it’s also aggressive, expansionist, and heavily armed with nuclear missiles, and the best long-term plan to deal with it is a combination of encouraging emigration, political containment, enclosure through alliance-building, and a series of long-term challenges that they cannot meet.
Doesn’t that sound exactly like the Cold War?
It is really quite different. We get to miss out the not unimportant bit of about the vastly expensive heavy military/industrial establishment … all we need is a Coolish Grump rather than a Cold War
A drunk with a gun rather than a knife is the image I’ve had in my mind. But that could just be my American predilections at work.
Russia is still dangerous. But their ‘government’ is walking dead. The only question is how much damage the oligarchs will do on the way to their graves. And who they will do it to (the Russian people being at the front of that queue). I could easily be a Russophile, there is so much good still to be found in that graveyard of individual thought, much but not all of it died in the pogroms.
I came across something on the third page of this article (old but of some interest) that captures Russia’s entire cultural suicide pact in a single joke.
As for the thugs that Russians seem to like to have stomping on them? Back when Brezhnev still had a pulse I worked with a Pole (who’s brother and mother were still behind the curtain) as a software developer. He summed up all of the Soviet’s extended empire with a simple description. They are all crooks. From the lowliest party member up to the chairman, they all steal from everybody including each other and the most clever schemers or most brutal crooks make it to the top (or gain control of it). Without exception he said, they were all cynical thieves and bullies without an ideological principle to be found. Nothing has changed since then.
Alsadius,
The difference is, back then we actually were able to engage with a more or less rationally deterable kleptomaniacal regime. But they done fell the rest of the way off the wagon and are beyond any pretense of attachment to reality. Putin is the sober looking mask of a bunch of power intoxicated gratification junkies. Our situation vis a vis them reminds of an old friend’s favorite put-down line, “I refuse to have a battle of wits with and unarmed man.” Or my advice to people who try out clever devices to keep ducks from shitting on their boats in the mooring field, “you can’t outsmart a duck, ducks don’t think.” They only thing that keeps ducks off of unoccupied boats on the moorings is a physical barrier they can not defeat. I am afraid that the oligarchs have taken Russia to that level of treatment as well.
Yes, as long as thugs control Russia they are still a serious danger. But no, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by attempting to deal rationally with them and much to be lost by failing to deal with them by other means.
Spare me the lectures about the free market. In case you had not noticed, Clockwork, the Russian state is controlling the country’s gas and oil market. The idea that it represents some sort of model of Friedmanite laissez faire is a joke and would be regarded as such by any non-Russian national trying to invest in that sector today.
Twit. Iraq has invaded two of its neighbours, used chem weapons against the Kurds, fired rockets at Israel, supported terror groups, sheltered said terrorists who had been involved in attacks on the West, defied UN weapons inspections, violated ceasefire terms. The list is so long that no-one who takes international law seriously can deny that the case for overthrowing Iraq was overwhelming. As for Georgia’s actions, they are not in the same league at all.
In 1974 Turkey, a NATO member, invaded northern Cyprus for humanitarian reasons, without being invited by the Cypriot government, and it’s still there. It doesn’t seem to bother NATO. Now if I was Russia, I would say “what’s sauce for the goose . . .” – well, for 34 years anyway.
The Georgia episode is important for one very simple reason. If you are a the government of a small country and you are making decisions about long term strategic alliances, one of which is closer ties with the West, what do you do? Pace Dale Amon, I think that now if you have any sense you tell the West to buzz off and cosy up as close as possible to whatever thug regime – be it Iran, China, Russia or whoever – you have the best cultural, economic, strategic or other links with. The soon to be Obama led West isn’t going to punish you for this, they’ll probably just keep throwing aid at you. Conversely, if you make the Georgian gamble and the thug regime on your doorstep comes knocking, you know where the West will be. Anywhere but helping you.
This matters not only for selfish reasons, but because, in the long run, thuggish, barbarian regimes get along better with each other, as do basically law-abiding and civilized ones. The dominant partner will, almost unconsciously, shape its satellites in its own image. Alliances can’t be cordoned off in a box marked foreign policy; they have serious consequences for the socio-political future of the country in question.
Now, I admit that standards of rectitude in public administration in the West fall rather short of the Gladstonian minimum, but there still is a difference between countries that use legislative force to bankrupt industries in order to nationalise them on the cheap before passing them off to government cronies (Link) and ones that don’t.
So, I don’t much care about the rights and wrongs of South Ossetia. Either the West properly incentivises friendship or it doesn’t. (A comparison in microcosm is pre-surge Iraq. For any sane individual, actor siding with the insurgency was the rational choice becuase you were much less likely to be shot by the U.S. military for opposing it than by Al Queda. Once this decision has been made its easiest to embrace a lunatic idelogy that in the (not so) long-run dooms any country that embraces it. In an mad situation, it is rational to make insane decisions. We must make the situation sane again).
Contributing greatly to the Russian popular animosity towards the West was the Clinton administration’s bombing of Serbian civilians to stop a genocide that existed only in propaganda, at least as far as was known at the time — testified to by credulous people who saw mass graves but who had no forensic skills. Having failed to help Russia create the necessary legal infrastructure, the Clintonistas demonstrated their near-total incompetence in foreign policy in a wag-the-dog war.
The fact that NATO would be used as an offensive rather than a defensive instrument would concern anyone within its reach, even if they weren’t the scum now ruling Russia.
Temporizing on the part of Europe and the US has led to further Russian subterfuge and has allowed a military hardening of Russian-occupied Georgia. It might have sufficed to remove Russia’s pretext for intervention, but the opportunity seems all but gone, now.
The main danger of Russia’s neo-Soviet leadership is its enhancement of China’s growing military force. The manufacturing base in China, no doubt subsidized by US taxpayers, coupled with the technological leap brought to the Chicoms’ aid, increases the likelihood that something unexpected and durable will meet the US military when China launches the war for which it has been preparing.
I find myself in the strange position of agreeing with Gabriel.
However tdh…
So after all the well documented and well know action by the Serbian state and its proxies in th rest of former Yugoslavia, only an investigation by medical experts on the ground (which was obviously never a prospect) would have been sufficient justification to assume the claims Kosovars were being slaughtered were true? Sorry but I deeply suspect your motives in that case.
I prefer the testimony of the ITN journalists, the International Criminal Court’s vast collection of testimonies about the extent of Serbian war crimes. Funnily enough, I have just been reading What’s Left, by Nick Cohen, who deals exhaustively with the lies and obfuscations of those who have tried to cover up Serbian aggression, or shift blame to the victims, as is now happening with Georgians.
As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, these apologists are not anti-war, but campaigning for the other side.
In 1997, Washington rightly considered the KLA to be a terrorist group. Two years later, Washinton bombed Serbia on behalf of the KLA and allowed the group to take over Kosovo and allowed these thugs to drive out the Serbian and gypsy populations.
This is one of the major problems of humanitarian interventionism. What happens if it turns out that the oppressed are scumbags as well?
M,
The evil that has been done by the collectivists can never be put to rest without the defeat of collectivism. I don’t necessarily agree with the recommendations expressed in this paper, but reading it will give you a small glimpse of the diabolical campaign to create hatred and violence by and to just one of the peoples of the Soviet Empire. It is a dry read by a non-native English speaker but its clinical, dispassionate treatment of the topic makes the anger I felt while reading it all the sharper.
There will never be any possible justice achieved for these people. It is simply not possible. Ever. Forgiving and forgetting is not an option either. People were removed from their houses and lands and placed in other peoples’ houses and lands and those people were in turn placed in yet other peoples’ houses and lands. This was done by the collectivists with the calculated intention of causing blood feud animosity and using it to expand borders and solidify totalitarian control.
To demand that everybody abandon their grievances (as your comment seems to consider) before we will come to their aid is to declare that we will not come to anybody’s aid ever. The best option for our own security as well as their’s is to side with the faction or government that most closely reflects our values and principles and then make our help the means for further improvements. In the past our government has often chosen allies based on tactical considerations. We need to now choose our allies for their principles. We are strong enough that we have that option.
We need to turn this supply of hatred between groups that were/are both the victims and the tools of collectivism into a weapon against collectivism itself.
Unfortunately you seem to have made an error of judgment similar as the commentators you accuse have. It is necessary to distinguish the Modern Russia from the Drunken Yelsten Russia. GDP is a particularly poor Method of charting a nation’s economic strength: By virtue of the fact that it counts non wealth producing jobs Such as “Wal-Mart” Retail Jobs where the primary good sold are imported leading to a flow of capital out of the country. Many Western Nations have massive sections of their economy composed of Retail and Services (two Thirds for the United States) Naturally these peddling jobs are conditional on the fact that cheap imports remain available to us, an untenable situation for a debtor country. Purchasing power Parity, the value of nation’s assets, Gives a more realistic image Using such systems one can see that the balance has moved away from the west: Nations Such as Brazil and India now have GPP approaching That of Germany with other newly industrialized nations such as Venezuela and Kazakhstan above Italy. Demographically Speaking post 2000 Russia is in population growth at the same level as France, and has a population of 150 mil, half of the US, Yet unlike Europe and the United States there are surplus resources and increasing food productio0n to accommodate future growth. When one adds the SCO composed of China, India, Russia and the Central Asian soviet states to the mix you receive in purchasing power parity, Mining metal production and Industry the largest block on the planet! Due to these statistics I am tempted to dismiss the drunk analogy as Anachronistic, Or simply wishful thinking.
For a nation where property rights are at the whim of the state, to expect systemic development over the long term in Russia, and frankly China, is to fail to understand that creating a culture capable of long term growth has bugger all to do with resources.
Also people are trying and succeeding to get into France. Who the hell wants to live in Russia?
Keeping in mind that Kosovo is neither Croatia nor Bosnia-Herzegovina, I see two major crimes in Kosovo: (1) ethnic cleansing of 800,000 (apparently, from its timing, in view of the prospect of dismemberment by NATO); and (2) the mass murder of 900 (and I can’t discern how many of these were not innocent, being actual supporters of KLA terrorists). Is this evil? Yes. Is it genocide? No, unless you want to put the Waco massacre, one more order of magnitude down, into question as genocide. And how many Serbian civilians were killed in the bombing over Kosovo? Was that, too, genocide?
Here’s an interesting quote from Human Rights Watch (for example):
… the prosecutor submitted that … the Kosovo crimes … could be seen as a less substantial or grave case
The fact that a large number of people were killed does not establish (a) under what circumstances they died or (2) who killed them. This takes investigation, not emotion, to establish. Even where the source of the bullets is known, it is not obvious whether they were crossfire or aimed. In at least one village where mass murders took place, there was a reliable witness.
BTW, there is an inaccurate quote later on that “[y]ou cannot wage a war without financial support.” Tell that to Alexander for his Persian wars; there was some initial funding, but the bulk of it came as booty. This has relevance for modern warfare, too, especially in the form of manufacturing capacity.
Regardless of how you view the question of whether NATO should have intervened in this situation based on the actual events on the ground, you cannot rightly deny that (a) bombing Serbian civilians was evil and (2) the effect of the bombing on Russians was traumatic and decisive. Intervention in Kosovo was a foreign-policy blunder of the first order.
Correction: “highest order” (or worst sort, first rank, but not first magnitude, for something that was “Not At” Albright)
Are you serious? Explain to me how “political containment” stops tanks from rolling across borders. This is exactly the response that Putin expects, and which will allow him to roll over countries like a hyena thinning out stragglers from the herd. Nice to see the spirit of Chamberlain is alive and well.
This is not the start of a new cold war – that time is already here, a few years past, largely unremarked by an ignornant media. Now is simply when we figure out if the cold war goes hot.
Sorry Tim but you are simply joking if you think sclerotic Russia is a serious threat to anyone with a bit more muscle than Georgia. Putin is not Hitler, he is Mussolini and Mussolini may have taken down Ethiopia but even Greece was to much for him. Your mistake is you actually buy the absurd posturing. Just look at the numbers, not the sounds issuing forth.