Dmitry Orlov for an alternative view of the US-Russia rivalry. This will enrage everybody, but hey, back in the 60s we were always cracking jokes about thermonuclear war. And at that time, it was usually the US who was the scariest. Fail Safe, Strangelove
Orlov, John Michael Greer, and Kunstler are the leaders of the "Collapsitarians (sic?) I just visit them when I need a break from Empire, about to go down and take the world with us.
Actually, the first OP link kinda agrees with the Orlov, if describing the crises slightly differently, and not partaking of Orlov's vicious sarcasm and irony.
Washington has been unable to get past a way of looking at Russia and the world that proved disabling. There is a large rhetoric to strategy gap. The United States is in the midst of an ostrich strategy. It didn't get the Russia it wants, and ever since 2012 has stuck its head in the sand hoping that Putin's Russia will fail and be replaced by that old cooperative Russia . Russia hawks are even more delusional, thinking that if the president yelled at Moscow and beat his chest red that Putin and his followers would scatter in fear.There are no easy options here. The only thing harder than negotiating with Moscow is ignoring it. The Trump administration would do well to understand the biases which led the policy community to get outplayed by Russia in recent years and start formulating its own Russia strategy with those failures in mind. It's back to the drawing board.
I quoted the final paragraphs because it is typical of the Russophobic pieces. I kept looking for solutions, recommendations, policy ideas, and found nothing. I am starting to think that's part of the plan, although damned if I have a clue as to what the plan or goals are.
Russia hacked the election! Diabolical, insidious Putin wants to conquer the whole fucking world with advanced insidiousness!
Geez, that's terrifying! What do we do?
Umm, Russia invaded Ukraine!
"On paper, Russia is a much weaker power than the United States, but the physical matchup varies significantly by context and geographical location. U.S. power dwindles in proximity to Russian borders."
Maybe the US should not try to express military power in proximity to Russian borders.
Its interesting that they pin the Arab Spring as being under the instigation of the US, when, in my recollection, the US Government appeared to be caught entirely by surprise, and really had no idea how to respond to it.
3: I would agree, except Russia is in the habit of invading people who don't want to be invaded.
5: That's my understanding too. In a course I took on the Cold War, the lecturer showed an American map from IIRC the 1970s, showing all the Soviet aggression in angry red blotches; then a Soviet map from the same period, showing all the American aggression, with the exact same blotches. They really were profoundly paranoid, and evidently have the same mindset today. That's what struck me the most in the OP links: weakness and fear, to the bone.
Concretely, with the Color Revolutions, it's easier to see how Russia could view those as Western aggression, when for instance George Soros helped finance activists overthrowing a Russian client in Ukraine. But still, that doesn't imply any coherent policy behind the private actors. Russia seems unable to explain things other than by conspiracy.
5 It was a favorite trope of Obama's domestic opponents: "we" brought those folks out in the streets, instead of standing with the nice dictators who were our true friends. When I hear this live, I ask about our position on the 2011 Life March in Yemen, but they've already stopped paying attention once it seems like the conversation is going to be about facts.
7 Obviously I don't know, but I would definitely not be surprised if Russian intelligence has a whole lot of evidence of Western complicity in the color stuff.
IMHMHB meeting the hero of the Ukraine color thingeroo at Sen. Kennedy's house in 2003 (I think it was).
9.1: No doubt all manner of acquiescence, but that's far from a policy of aggression. I'm reading a book on the Cold War USSR now. I'm still in the Stalin era, and his thinking and strategy is remarkably similar to what's described here: fear, paranoia, endless mobilization, subversion and expansion to create a security buffer.
Stalin took warnings that the Nazis were about to invade him as a British-backed conspiracy. His paranoia was enormously counterproductive. Enough to give paranoia a bad name.
Of course, it all goes to support my theory that Russians are assholes.
11: And remained convinced that the Anglo-American offensives were deliberately delayed to let the Germans kill more Soviets. Reading this book, the similarities are chilling.
I used to study U.S. foreign policy.
That's not why I think Russians are assholes. I think Russians are assholes because they always scowl at me.
Believe me when I say to you
the Russians are assholes to Moby too
Exactly. Especially this one guy a block away.
What worries me is that this particular set of Russian assholes seems to have hit on the one way they might actually win.
19: Win what?
If "HEGEMONY" does that mean occupied San Francisco, with reeducation camps?
If Latvia, economic hegemony, meaning what, oligarchic billionaires disassembling the welfare state, exploiting the masses, what. Thank God I am an American, with none of that here.
"...the one way they might actually win."
Exactly what I am talking about, am I supposed to tremble, quiver and say "Oh dear God no, we can't let "them" win."
11, 13: This is a little bit inside baseball, but my great-grandfather transmitted an early warning, he shows up on page 1005:
https://archive.org/stream/interlockingsubv1415unit#page/1004/mode/2up/search/ege
That's fascinating, lw! Thanks for sharing it.
That is. There were lots of inside warnings, but it must be strange to have known somebody who got to play Casandra in this particular tragedy.
The testimony is actually pretty interesting, Akhmedov later wrote a book. Turkmen defector unhappy with Stalin's treatment of Muslims, initially interviewed by Philby who Akhmedov could have betrayed, but who was described by Philby as nobody and so buried. He later testified at the height of the McCarthy years to the US congress in 1953.
That same year or maybe in 1952, my great-grandfather had the first of many conflicts with the CZ communists about the house he had built in 1924-26 with profits from oil trading in Istanbul with incompetent bolshevik buyers. The tennis court got torn down then and a second structure built, and he lost part of the main house, but managed to keep most of it for his extended family. My parents lived in one room there when I was born.
Thanks to the link to the long document, looks worthwhile!
Skvor passed some information to British intelligence via Belgrade the previous month, he was pretty concerned about records kept there when the Germans invaded, but they bombed the building that the Brits were using so those records were destroyed.
I have a nice art-deco decanter and glasses set of his from that house.
Stalin, right. And fucking bloody rag anecdotes.
As someone who grew up watching MILLIONS die because "we can't let them win" in Vietnam, guess who I think is the scary ones.
I think that the only people who ever killed anybody for saying Hitler was evil are Hitler and Stalin.
29: so the Communists are the scary ones? They're the ones who killed millions, after all. The US didn't.
Vietnam was entirely the commies fault?
Madness
And this madness calls itself some kind of left
FWIW, Marxists believe the United States, directly or through aid*, is responsible for ~100 million deaths since WW II.
Saudi Arabia in Yemen is a current example.
lw, thanks for that. Really interesting.
On the one hand, Hitler and Stalin were spending the 30s killing people. On the other hand, the English were calling people "pukka sahib".
Captain Hastings gets on my nerves sometimes, is what I'm saying.
Further 11: Very aggressive paranoia, including stuff I'd never heard of. After the war he demanded massive territorial cessions from Turkey and at the same time concessions amounting essentially to protectorate status from Iran*, resulting in both appealing to the US, rejecting Soviet demands and becoming US allies.
*History rhyming: Iran was pressured through Soviet wartime occupation troops, and by the organization and arming of ethnic separatists all over the country.
I don't get the joke in the title that apparently everyone else gets. Is it a play on Kennan's "Long Telegram"?
I don't get it either, but that's probably right.
This
https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/201608_whr_4_16_if_war_comes_tomorrow.pdf
is even longer, but is a fascinating insight into how much Russia is still, as the USSR was, not just a state with an army, but a military state. Not just in terms of defence spending (which is immense) but in terms of the mobilisation of the entire country, as tested in annual exercises.
Thanks for that ajay, though I don't know when I'll read it. I liked how the OP links explain some things. Like when the Russians used cruise missiles in Syria, fired from the Caspian Sea. This struck me as totally gratuitous, even slightly pathetic mini-me superpower posturing ("Look at me! I have rocket-boats too!"); but it makes total sense as part of a general deterrent posture. They demonstrated an ability to use cruise missiles, and the ability to launch from the Caspian is very relevant to most ex-Soviet countries.
"Look at me! I have rocket-boats too!"
You wouldn't be so scathing if they'd launched them from a Lun class ekranoplan.
The possibility of an ekranoplan race is the only light I see in this tunnel.
Speaking of tunnels:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/25/elon-musk-la-traffic-tunnel
I'm looking for someone with knowledge of Russian military assets and doctrine to venture a prediction about this:
Assume for a moment that Trump/Tillerson lift sanctions against Russia. They'll likely want some kind of fig leaf of a deal so they can depict it as "Trump, Genius Dealmaker" rather "unilateral concessions to new BFF Putin". So I expect Putin will put something trifling on the table, ideally some white elephant of little military value that costs a lot of money to maintain. Basically, the equivalent of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey that JFK bargained away to end the Cuban Missile Crisis. So what's it going to be? What's the Potemkin concession that Fox News will be selling as the greatest deal since the Louisiana Purchase in a few weeks?
45: One speculation I heard was nuclear warhead reduction.
I'm not saying this is the answer for certain, but Putin has been really talking up Russian prostitutes.