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FINANCIAL TIMES: Most dangerous enemy - Russia
9/18/2014 10:52:49 AM
The Financial Times published an article entitled "Russia is our most dangerous neighbour". The newspaper writes:
- The blend of self-pity and braggadocio currently at work in Moscow. It is as depressing as it is disturbing.
Western policy makers seem to believe the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (known as ISIS) is the greater danger. But Russia is the nuclear-armed rump of a former superpower and, ruled by an amoral autocrat, it frightens me even more.
For Europe and the US there is no greater foreign policy question than how to deal with today's Russia.
In the early 1990s there was a hope that Russia would find a way through the debris of its collapsed ideology, state and empire, that it will choose western values and stop the continuing the cycle of despotism. With the selection of Putin, a former KGB colonel (he was fired from the KGB with the rank of Major on suspicion of working for Western intelligence agencies - KC), as his successor, Boris Yeltsin delivered that outcome.
Putin is heir to the project of Yuri Andropov, former KGB head and Soviet leader, for a modernised autocracy. As a loyal servant of the state, he believes results alone matter. Lies are just another tool of statecraft. Only the wilfully blind could fail to see that evident truth in recent months.
Putin, for now, be a popular despot. But a despot he is.
The west is partly responsible for this. It failed to offer the support Russia needed quickly enough in the early 1990s. Instead it focused, ludicrously, on who would pay the Soviet debt.
Modern Russia sees itself as surrounded by enemies (the age-old inferiority complex and innate jealousy, the driving force of the Russian people - KC). Foreign relations are zero sum; success for others is a failure for Russia. In this view, a prosperous and democratic Ukraine is a nightmare.
Viewed from Moscow, western policy is the politics of Versailles. In fact, the western position is based on two simple principles: first, a country is entitled to make its own choices; second, borders may not be changed by force.
Russia rejects both of them. It is because its former satellites and dependencies were rightly confident that Russia would not accept these principles that they have been so keen to join NATO.
"I bully; therefore I am". That appears to be the motto behind some of Putin's outbursts.
The west is not a threat to Russia. On the contrary, the west knows very well it has a vital interest in good relations with the country. But it is not so easy to ignore an invasion and, yes, that is what it is, however much one might dislike the word.
At the same time, an adversarial relationship with a power as important and potentially helpful as Russia is grim.
However, to have an adversarial relationship with a country like Russia, it is not a pleasant prospect.
Is there a solution to this quandary? All possibilities – further sanctions, massive economic and possibly military assistance to Ukraine or doing nothing at all – carry risks.
But the west has to start from an honest reckoning of the Russia it now has to live with. Today's Russia feels it is the victim of a historic injustice and rejects core western values. It also feels strong enough to act.
Today's Russian leader also sees these potent emotions as a way to secure power. He is not the first such ruler. His Russia is a perilous neighbour. The west must shed its last post-cold war illusions, concludes the FT.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
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