My take on the Putin Doctrine: Chancellor Merkel and President Obama have misread the Russians if they think Russia sees or wants to see the 21st Century the way the West does...(Russia, like India and China and the Muslim world, are not in the 21st century alone but live several centuries at once... So do America and Europe though the latter do not admit it...)...The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan months before that) and the collapse of the USSR shortly thereafter, mostly voluntarily under Gorbachev, were not properly anticipated for by US intelligence, a classic failure. US policy continued in Cold War mode for years after that, seeming to want, under James Baker, to smash Russia once and for all; that, combined with the chaos and pain in Russia resulting from what I called the Blackboard Economics emanating from certain US jet-setting academics pretending to know something on the ground, created a permanent strategic perception in Russia -- developed in depth by Mr Putin -- that the West was never really going to accept a non-communist modern democratic Russia which retained an ounce of real political or military power even in its own neighbourhood. It was unrealistic of the USA to expect that; the rather obvious naivety and misunderstanding of what Messrs Obama, Biden, Kerry, McCain, Gingrich et al are saying and doing now remains a result of that. Toss Russia out of the G8? Cest rien. Sanctions on this that or the other? Cest rien. Reduce Russias access to the West? Cest rien... This is a nation that produced Kutusov -- who let Napoleon take Moscow... and waited him out... I will make them eat their horses Kutusov vowed, and that is what his adversary had to do. It is the nation which withstood Hitlers Siege of Leningrad... (I remember the staff of the Hotel Astoria in 1970 telling me Hitlers generals had decided to stay there when they came and had allotted rooms to themselves according to one document but they never made it... a nice fictional war story perhaps...)... Nothing that I can see the Americans, British, Germans or anyone else can do against Russia is going to work on either Crimea or any other part of Ukraine; nothing short of war -- and that too will not work. The area is Russias backyard or perhaps front porch, as I have said; better not mess with them there. They are a historical people who live all their history all the time, forgetting nothing. They are not going to respond to Western incentives or disincentives, carrots or sticks.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 11:53:40 +0000
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