I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:
The future may hold a lot of vehement arguing over some very insignificant bits of territory.
I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:
The future may hold a lot of vehement arguing over some very insignificant bits of territory.
Oddly, I had heard of Transnistria, but I couldn’t remember where it is. I probably read about it recently when I decided to look into Moldova’s and Belarus’s ethnic composition a few weeks back. (Looking for the next likely expansion opportunity for Vlad the Liberator.)
As I looked into it more I decided the Vlad was right, and the breakup of the Soviet Union into constituent parts was a bad thing. Where do you stop? A lot of the other SSRs were very ethnically diverse, and the old RFSSR might by itself be more diverse than the old Habsburg and Ottoman empires combined. And breaking up those two old empires hasn’t exactly worked in favor of more peace and prosperity over time.
I should say, more diverse in terms of number of ethnicities. They’re much more Russian than the USA is white these days.
As I’ve said in other comments threads the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was much worse, geopolitically speaking, than the collapse of the USSR. You can open any newspaper practically on a daily basis and read a story that can be traced to that collapse.
My view of the collapse of the USSR which I articulated at the time (long before blogs, sadly) is that it needed to be done but it should have been done more slowly. Neither Russia nor the other Soviet states had the institutions on which to build liberal democracy. Institutions first, then breakup. The alternative was that states would be built on the institutions they had, mostly the military, the KGB, organized crime, and, to a lesser extent, the Orthodox church. Si monumentum requiris circumspice.
In the twenty-first century, it is totally different. We have Facebook and Twitter. It is not about power and money. It is about people coming together and working for the common good.