“Oh no! A foreign super power has messed with your country’s politics. No one else in the world knows what that’s like…”
Superpower?
Russia still has a large number of nukes and manages to exert a great deal of political power in the world.
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Quite so. It’s like Portugal had a 150mn population, an army half the size of Israel and 7000 nuclear warheads. Our Russian friends are in an exclusive club of maybe 5 countries that could end all life on earth (maybe just the northern hemisphere). However unlike the US, the Russians don’t have the military to change regimes and build new nations and they don’t have the money to bribe other countries to do what they want. I still think there is only one super-power.
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Authoritarians LOVE Putin, his forever rule is what they wish they had.
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So Nobby, you all cheers now that your candidate of choice won?
Tell that to Ukraine. Or Syria.
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So Nobby, you all cheers now that your candidate of choice won?
No, my candidate of choice was Jill Stein. She didn’t win.
Mind you I do get to tell people I was right. Hillary Clinton is so unpopular she could make Donald Trump president. But it’s not much consolation.
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Tell that to Ukraine. Or Syria.
So I know this is gonna seem pedantic, but Assad was president of Syria, and still is president of what’s left of it. And Ukraine ’ s previously democratically elected president was overthrown in a coup and the new government did not hold elections in the part it didn’t control. Not saying they could have but clearly, if the Russians didn’t want that regime change right next door, it’s kind of telling that they were unable to prevent it. But you can’t argue they engineered it.
So neither is much of an example of the Russians being able to execute a regime change.
As for the build new nations…
Ooh, a title! That grants legitimacy.
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to think that the Russians aren’t still capable to intervene and manipulate in their own back yards is missing the forest for the trees. The Russians NEVER had the same global reach, even at the height of their empire as the Soviet Union. their influence was exerted in very different, less overt ways than ours were. I’d suggest that Putin has been doing the same thing.
I’d also suggest that we are far less able to control and manipulate world events than we think. The problems we have today came from our policies and the unintended consequences and our inability to control our “allies” and clients.
They’re less interested, I think, in direct nation-building, but then again, they didn’t do so as much during the Soviet era, either, at least, not outside of their direct sphere of influence. One of the major reasons that Tito ended up coming into conflict with Stalin after the end of WW2, was because Stalin wanted to treat Yugoslavia like a colony, and Tito wasn’t down with that. And since the red army wasn’t in Yugoslavia, they couldn’t exert the same control over that country as they did with the Eastern Bloc. However, in recent years, the Russians have most certainly patronized Serbian nationalists under the rubric of “Slavic unity”.
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All true, but not exactly the stuff of superpowers. They are not really capable of the power projection of the US or even China. And frankly Germany seems more able to manipulate matters in its back yard - example Greece.
Russia has been a declining power for some time. I guess my only point was that before I lived in Russia I had been taught to fear the Bear by the stuff I had read in the UK and US. After I lived there for two years I no longer feared them. Too incompetent for force projection and generally they have enough trouble managing their own decrepit empire to give a shit about the rest of the world. There are countries which try and manage the world to gain illegitimate advantages over other countries but the Russians arnt prominent in that role.
They have lost the Ukraine even if there is a sizable minority of people in the Ukraine who are still well disposed to Russia. Poor Ukrainians will take a while to figure out how little Western Europe cares about them.
Most of the reason our press is so anti Russian is because without them we wouldnt have a reason to have an arms industry which we waste god knows how much money on. F35 anyone?
They never were here, but that worked the other way, too.
They certainly projected power into China for a while, though prior to the break (which we certainly exploited for our own gain).
Again, I’d suggest that power is not spigot, it’s a dynamic, wavering thing, that is wielded in multiple ways. But the fact that they are a nuclear power who can destroy the world by themselves with their arsenal means that they can still be considered a super power. I think that is becoming more true than it was immediately after the fall of communism. [quote=“Nobby_Stiles, post:51, topic:89104”]
Most of the reason our press is so anti Russian is because without them we wouldnt have a reason to have an arms industry which we waste god knows how much money on. F35 anyone?
[/quote]
I have a theory that it’s really about the Obama administration (and Clinton during the election) attempting to get the narrative away from the “war on terror” and redirecting it to another boogey man.
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Yeah I can only agree. I shouldn’t comment on your last point cos I’m already covered in tin foil but I tend to agree.
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Try double layers. It helps! 
Feel free to comment on whatever you agree or disagree with. You don’t have to agree with me, of course. But I am right, of course!
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South Ossetia, Abkhasia,Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk? Russia seems perfectly capable of regime change when the government thinks it worthwhile.
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Strange - all the places you mention have substantial if not majority ethnic Russian populations. Shows a distinct lack of ambition. Why couldnt they try the big stuff like Libya or Iraq? Thats when people notice your regime changing capabilities.They seem to sticking to places right on their border.
For that matter, its not entirely clear that the regime in Donetsk and Lugansk “changed”. The Kiev regime changed in a coup so one might argue that the Kiev regime changed while the Dontesk and Lugansk regime didnt.
The Russian government has made noises about intervening on behalf of ethnic Russians, only the Ukrainian regions mentioned have significant ethnic Russian populations - and Crimea was Russia until the 1950s*. In South Ossetia, for example, Russians make up only about 1% of the population. You’re right that they are all close to Russia, which I take to indicate that they have different goals than those of America.
*Corrected
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The Russian government has made noises about intervening on behalf of ethnic Russians, only the Ukrainian regions mentioned have significant ethnic Russian populations - and Crimea was Russia until the 1950s*. In South Ossetia, for example, Russians make up only about 1% of the population. You’re right that they are all close to Russia, which I take to indicate that they have different goals than those of America.
So I’m not really sure what ukraine is. I know that the eastern part of ukraine was part of russia before the formal creation of a Ukrainian Soviet State. A lot of the inhabitants of those eastern areas would have been what was called Cossack mixed with “Russians”. But those Oblasts which are pretty much the whole Eastern third of the country. The western third was made of bits of the Austro-Hungarian empire like say Galicia. It’s the middle third of the country one might describe as Ukrainian whatever that means.
I mention only because it doesn’t make much sense to talk of ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. For what little that’s worth.
I guess “national security” might explain some of the interference in the affairs of states bordering the Russian Federation. But I guess that makes a lot more sense (even if not true) than whatever excuse was concocted to intervene in Iraq.
There are ethnic Russians in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. too.
In the 1930s, there were ethnic Germans all over Central Europe. Don’t know if that’s relevant.
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That was the point I was making - countries like Lithuania and Latvia fear Russian antagonism performed ‘on behalf of’ their ethnic Russian population. But in the examples I gave, only Ukraine has a large ethnic Russian population - in fact I think overall there are more Russians in Ukraine than Ukrainians.
And yes, while it’s steering quite close to Godwin’s, the instrumentalising of ethnic Russian communities in Eastern European countries probably does in some way reflect the situation of ethnic Germans in the earlier part of the 20th Century. There still are quite a few in Russia and small numbers in Romania (from way back) and I think Kazakhstan too (the original population encouraged to settle there by Catherine the Great, but the population seems to spike after WW2 so I’m thinking gulags).
@Nobby_Stiles Look at any state over a long enough time period and you’ll see enough border changes and exchanges of power to make the nation seem an inadequate reflection of the people that live there. While this was the purpose of the modern nation state (an entity spanning a single ethnicity and/or language) it has almost never actually worked out that way.
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