Masthead graphic based on a painting by Gudrun Thriemer.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

William S Lind, "On War #283: The Russian imperative," Defense and the National Interest, November 17, 2008.

  Russia could be a valuable friend indeed, diplomatically, militarily and economically.

The arriving Obama administration will be handed not merely a can of worms but a bucket of asps. Somewhere, I suspect the ghost of Herbert Hoover is smiling. The inherited foreign policy problems are no less daunting than the economic mess. But on the latter front, there is at least one piece of good news. It may be possible to set the U.S. - Russian relationship on a new course.

America’s failure to reintegrate post-Communist Russia into the concert of powers was a strategic blunder of the first order. The threat from the global south, manifested most powerfully by invasion by immigration but also evident in many other ways, can only be met by a united global north. Russia holds the West’s vast eastern flank, which stretches all the way from the Black Sea to Vladivostok. Were that flank to collapse, as Russia came close to doing in the early 1990s, the West’s geo-strategic position would become well-nigh hopeless.

  With all the old Clintonistas moving straight into the new Obama administration, there is not much hope for change.

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