I stumbled across a post by Nathan Barrick on the excellent resource Registan that continues with the subject I touched on yesterday:
To begin with, Russia is not strategically focused on conquest and expansion. Instead, Russia is on the strategic defensive and is focused on survival.
Russia perceives a demographic crisis. Some very good analysis attempts to diminish the ‘crisis’ characterization, but this analysis does not appear to differentiate between ethnic Russian and national Russian. The ethnic Russian population is dying more than growing. While there is contention about this demographic statistic, it has become an element of conventional concern in Russia and affects other deeply held perceptions. Most importantly, this possible crisis feeds the ethnic Russian fear about the future of Russia’s Muslim population.
In contrast to the decline in Russia’s ethnic Russians and overall national populations, Russia’s Muslim population is growing and becoming a greater percentage of Russia’s population. In 2000, in a discussion with Russian national security students in a St. Petersburg university, they identified a threat to Russia from the “south†as greater than the threat from NATO oft-expressed in Russian rhetoric. This reflected the separatist concern about Chechnya and Dagestan, but also concerns about the threat of Islamic extremism globally and towards Russia specifically. Prior to 9/11, new Russian President Putin called for a global coalition against terrorism in an address to India’s Parliament in October 2000. The victimization of Central Asia’s migrant workers in Russia today is related to ethnic Russian concerns about visceral demographic and socio-cultural threat perceptions. Not only is ethnic Russia dying, it is being overrun by Muslims.
Here’s a vital observation:
Is it really so hard for American leaders to recognize Russia possesses a huge nuclear arsenal and merits such consideration? Even American city slickers are going to be wary of approaching a mobile home trailer in the deep woods of hillbilly/redneck territory when a sign says “No Trespassing†for fear of the shotgun-toting resident. Why should Americans accord more respect to possible characters out of a “Deliverance†movie than to Russia?
Read the whole thing.
It is a pretty good essay, but at some point after emphasizing the demographic concerns and the threat posed by Chinese military and economic growth, predicts that Russia’s desire for a strategic partnership will lead it to invade a NATO country and get the respect it deserves. I’m not quite sure at what point the essay moves from trying to objectively explain the Russian situation, to positing the view that the Russians are desperate and insane.
It doesn’t help that the author states that improved relations took a turn for the worse “when Vladimir Putin began a third term as Russia’s President in March 2012, offending U.S. sensibilities about Presidents only serving two terms.” Really, the U.S. has a reputation for insisting on two-terms?
“Russia wants ethnic Russians living in Ukraine to decisively influence Ukrainian politics towards a pro-Russia stance.” Instead, we have a million ethnic Russians fleeing Ukraine to Russia, which is a more credible goal in light of the purported demographic crisis, which Putin claims will be stayed by migration. Invading a country and seizing the only Russian majority region does not enhance the power of ethnic Russians within that country. I cannot imagine anybody would have thought that.
The part about being willing to lose to NATO was the end of the nonsense. The people that Putin and the Russians would cultivate as client states are not liberal western democracies. They are authoritarian countries, and they do not consider losing to be a winning strategy.
I doubt that Putin has some grand plan for world or even regional domination. He is mostly cunning. He may play chess, but his goal is to capture as many of the opponent’s pieces as possible. (President Obama is not playing checkers. He is playing chess, but he wants to have a dialog about every move his opponent makes.)
Ukraine provides the template for overthrowing a government without invading. You create a social media campaign, and use that as the impetus for a bloodless coup. You install the new government, and the new government switches allegiance to you.
The only reason Russia was thrown out of the Ukraine is because western aligned operatives created a campaign to oust the government. The Russians are quick learners. They learned their lesson in Libya, and this is why they are in Syria.
Well, I think of more immediate moment, vis-a-vis the Russian desire for “respect”, is the unfolding doping scandal that is engulfing the Russian sporting federation. Most people don’t know or care about the Russian demographic crisis and its effect on the Russian psyche and how that figures into Moscow’s realpolitik. They do understand sports, though. And when the world antidoping agency recommends that the entire Russian team to be banned from the Rio Olympics, that gets their attention. The Russians come off as pathetic losers who can only compete by wholesale cheating. If they are banned, I don’t know how they would react to that loss of national face. Not well, I’d imagine.
Not only is the guy barely coherent, he also fails to source or substantiate any of his outlandish claims.
I don’t agree with all of his conclusions but I think his background information is solid. I think I get where he is coming from with his cockeyed idea of the Russians invading, say, Estonia or Latvia. If they didn’t invent it, the Russians are masters of “rope-a-dope”.
I still think the idea is far-fetched.
WRT to the doping scandal, I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I don’t follow sports. For all I know everybody does it and the Russians got caught. As I say, I don’t know what to make of it.
Who cares about what happens in Syria when we’re loosing the battle for freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press in places like Columbus, MO and New Haven, CT?
Damascus is so 1915’s problem.
WRT to the doping scandal, I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I don’t follow sports. For all I know everybody does it and the Russians got caught. As I say, I don’t know what to make of it.
Not everybody does it, but a large number of top athletes do. The Russians appear to be running a systematic nationwide program, though, which is more on par with their communist past than what occurs in the West. I don’t think there has been a systematic nationwide cheating system for a Western nation since the Canadian track team got caught in 1988. It’s usually left up to individual athletes and coaches.
What seems different is that the Russians were undermining the doping tests directly, as opposed to doping the athletes and hoping to avoid detection by use of timing, masking agents or designer drugs. If you just destroy the samples at the lab, or intimidate/bribe/blackmail the lab workers, you can leave the cheating up to individual athletes and their coaches. I think that is why WADA is so worked up about this: in that kind of environment, they can’t have any idea whatsoever about who is or isn’t cheating.
Note that this would still mean that Russian athletes would have to adjust their doping schedules appropriately to not get caught when performing out-of-country. But then, screwing up the timing is the reason the Canadians got caught.
Basically, the alleged Russian system would reset the testing regime back to the mid-1980s model, which was very ineffective at catching people. Basically, the athletes had to screw up their timing, like Ben Johnson did.