By now virtually all Western policy makers and analysts agree that Vladimir Putin is pursuing a neo-Czarist policy. Like the Czars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, for that matter, like the United States, Putin is slowly expanding his country’s borders, exploiting his neighbor’s weaknesses and responding to call for support from his ethnic confreres in those countries. For Russia in the nineteenth century it was central Asia and the Caucasus; for the United States during the same period it was California, the Southwest, and Texas. Putin can argue that if Washington could invade and overthrow governments at will—Iraq being the most recent example, but Panama and Grenada not all that long ago—he can do the same. And he might add that if the West can support the separatist Kosovars, ignoring the territorial integrity of Serbia, he can do the same in Ukraine.
There is no point in trying to split hairs to demonstrate that somehow what the United States, or the West in general, does is “different;” that Washington and its allies no longer absorb the countries they attack. Putin is not a lawyer, nor is he interested in legal casuistry. The only thing he will understand, as did his Czarist predecessors, is strength at a minimum, force at the maximum. If he sees that the cost of appropriating his neighbors’ territories runs the risk of being too high, he will stop, and do so abruptly.
Source: nationalinterest.org
from Around The World http://ift.tt/1dpBvDU
via IFTTT
0 التعليقات:
إرسال تعليق