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Slava Ukraini!
By George Friedman
The United States has been fighting a war in the Islamic world since 2001. Its main theaters of operation are in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its politico-military focus spreads throughout the Islamic world, from Mindanao to Morocco. The situation on Aug. 7, 2008, was as follows:
(read the rest here)
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I think this is alarmist. Russia is a declining state whose economic power is solely based upon oil. They are suffering demographic collapse and their current oilfields are being overproduced and are on the verge of total collapse. They are dependent upon Europe for the technology to upgrade their antiquated Soviet-era warfighting equipment (e.g. the new infrared sights for their tanks are reliant upon French components, and they are buying diesel engines for their new APC's from Germany), and otherwise are a far cry from the Soviet bloc, which itself could not compete with the West. When they could not compete with the West when they controlled all of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Republics, why would they be able to compete with the West with half the population and economic output that they had back in their Soviet prime? It doesn't make sense, and I don't think even the Russians care to try to be that kind of threatening superpower again. They're content to be a major regional power, and that's all they want to be -- safe within their region. Russian paranoia and all that, y'know?
ReplyDeleteSo what is this Stratfor guy doing? He has to know all this. Is he pining for the old days of the Cold War, wishing for his former glory as a Kremlinologist to lose its obsolete status? Hmm...
- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin
I don't know if he is. But he is right about the point that the Russians, if they so choose, could play the spoiler against US interests in a lot of areas for not a very large investment.
ReplyDeleteWhile Bill Clinton (and George HW Bush) get some of the blame for this, the lion's share of the blame goes to George W. He fully embraced the "we are the sole power in the world, we can do what we want, to hell with international law and fuck all y'all."
Now that is blowing back in our faces as W. gears up to go back to Texas to hide out from various international indictments.
Russia today is Saudi Arabia with nukes. Except that instead of their population of educated people dwindling because of official corruption and Wahabism in the schools, their actual population is dwindling.
ReplyDeleteYou'll notice that Saudi Arabia tied down the entire U.S. military by dispatching a dozen folks with box cutters, so yeah, Russia could play the spoiler against U.S. interests the same way that the Saudis (or their Wahabi faction I should say) did, but then so could pretty much any other nation on the planet. The U.S. is in a pretty vulnerable position right now, its military encumbered, its economy collapsing (albeit the collapse has been papered over for the past twenty-five years by a series of corrupt regimes in Washington D.C.), its vaunted technological lead dwindling. It simply doesn't take much right now to play the spoiler against U.S. interests, all you have to do is find one critical part of the U.S. economy -- like, say, the Taiwanese motherboard industry -- dispatch a few truck bombers, and voila!
On the other hand, Russia has no reason to do anything like that as long as the U.S. does not operate against Russian interests. Which, broadly speaking, means don't fuck with states on Russia's borders and Russia won't fuck with you. This Stratfor analysis is just plain ridiculous, Russia has no capability to project any sort of military power, does not have the economic wherewithal to prop up client states to serve as a thorn in the U.S. side like back in the day when they sent millions of dollars worth of military equipment, oil, and other goods to North Vietnam, and otherwise is not the Soviet Union and cannot be because they simply don't have the population or economic base to do so. It's as if the United States were reduced to the state of Texas, and a Russian analyst was writing serious tomes about the Texas threat to Russia. It is to laugh...
- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin