Putin's Russia requires the United States of America as its enemy.

[pscot]

To understand the shift underway in the world, and to stop being outmaneuvered, we first need to see the Russian state for what it really is. Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed. This freed the Russian security state from its last constraints. In 1991, there were around 800,000 official KGB agents in Russia. They spent a decade reorganizing themselves into the newly-minted FSB, expanding and absorbing other instruments of power, including criminal networks, other security services, economic interests, and parts of the political elite. They rejected the liberal, democratic Russia that President Boris Yeltsin was trying to build.

Following the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that the FSB almost certainly planned, former FSB director Vladimir Putin was installed as President. We should not ignore the significance of these events. An internal operation planned by the security services killed hundreds of Russian citizens. It was used as the pretext to re-launch a bloody, devastating internal war led by emergent strongman Putin. Tens of thousands of Chechen civilians and fighters and Russian conscripts died. The narrative was controlled to make the enemy clear and Putin victorious. This information environment forced a specific political objective: Yeltsin resigned and handed power to Putin on New Year’s Eve 1999.

From beginning to end, the operation took three months. This is how the Russian security state shook off the controls of political councils or representative democracy. This is how it thinks and how it acts — then, and now. Blood or war might be required, but controlling information and the national response to that information is what matters. Many Russians, scarred by the unrelenting economic, social, and security hardship of the 1990s, welcomed the rise of the security state, and still widely support it, even as it has hollowed out the Russian economy and civic institutions. Today, as a result, Russia is little more than a ghastly hybrid of an overblown police state and a criminal network with an economy the size of Italy — and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

Even Russian policy hands, raised on the Western understanding of traditional power dynamics, find the implications of this hard to understand. This Russia does not aspire to be like us, or to make itself stronger than we are. Rather, its leaders want the West—and specifically NATO and America — to become weaker and more fractured until we are as broken as they perceive themselves to be. No reset can be successful, regardless the personality driving it, because Putin’s Russia requires the United States of America as its enemy.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/putins-real-long-game-214589

[pangaia]

1. This is at least the third time this has been posted.. YEA!!

The more times the better..I even think I was first, for a change.. .... from a FB post of a Russian friend of mine living in Den Haag.

[BlueCaliDem]

3. But first time I've seen it, so reposting this is a GOOD thing. :-) eom

[DetlefK]

2. I strongly disagree. Russia doesn't want to "drag the world down to its level." Quite the opposite.

Just like the US, Russia has a myth of "Russian Exceptionalism".

1. Russia regards itself as the successor of the Byzantine Empire, which in turn was one of the two successors of the Roman Empire. (The West-Roman Empire was taken over by the nobles of german tribes in a putsch and became the founding-stone for the German Empire.)
Russia regards itself as the final bastion of honor and morals in a corrupt, decadent world.

That's why they adore their orthodox church despite decades of communist rule branding religion as something evil. That's why they hate the liberal attitude of "the West". That's why Russia goes out of its way to make the lives of drug-addicts and AIDS-patients as horrible as possible.

2. Though nominally an international alliance, Russia effectively installed itself as the ruler of the Soviet Union and turned it into a russian empire. Russia got respect because of the power of the Soviet Union. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia lost all that. Except that Russia refuses to admit that and still thinks that it deserves the same political and diplomatic impact as if it were one of the major powers on the planet.

That's why "the West" sees agression when Russia wields influence, while Russia sees it as defence. To Russia, Ukraine and Georgia never counted as independent countries. That's why Russia considers it defensive measures when it invades those countries.

[pscot]

4. People in the Baltic states and Ukraine and Poland

see it differently. I think from Putin's point of view, the best defense is a good offense. The Greeks didn't wait for the Persians to show up at Piraeus. Mao Zedong opined that "the only real defense is active defense", meaning defense for the purpose of counter-attacking and taking the offensive. Often success rests on destroying the enemy's ability to attack. This principle is paralleled in the writings of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu." (wiki) Until about 6 months ago I was where you are right now. I worried Hillary might be too hard on the Russians. But we've done a complete 180. We've gone from opposition to fauning admiration and enabling. I have always thought we baited the Russians by offering NATO membership to the states of Russia's 'near abroad'. Some other security arrangement might have seemed less threatening to the Russians. That's behind us now. Putin's a murderous dictator. Russian democratic impulses have been strangled. He'd like to perform the same service for the West. It will be interesting to watch the next European election cycle.

on edit: I agree that the part about dragging the West down to it's level requires a leap of imagination.

[Igel]

5. There's a funny game that's played.

The US plays it, too, to a certain extent.

There's the public line. Russia is great, it's powerful. It's honorable and glorious. 3rd Rome. Eurasia, rah-rah.

Behind the scenes, the PTB know that it relies on mineral and resource extraction, that technologically it still has severe problems. Most Russians aren't Orthodox in practice, just in name. They know that much of the banter is specious. But because of their version of honor, unsaid crimes don't exist: Ne pojman, ne vor. If you're not caught, you're not a thief. Orthodoxy's resurrection is recent; really, in 1980 most Russians wouldn't have said they were Orthodox, and that's not just because it would have been bad for their careers.

So it's possible on the one hand for Russia to say that they're defending honor and morality and want to uplift the world. At the same time, it's also possible for their primary way of getting Russia to the top of the heap is the time-honored peasant practice of dragging others down.

Their secular history is rife with this sort of behavior, and their history justifies this behavior, as well. They were morally superior in losing millions in the fight against fascism, even as Stalin killed millions in the GULags. They were superior in oppressing much of their near-abroad, even as they paraded as glorious liberators and demanded acts of public fealty and loyalty. Their blood sanctified was virtually a ransom for those peoples, so they owned those nations. They found it very piss-offing when their captive nations turned on them and pointed out that Russian liberation was oppression and their blessing a curse. Even in the depths of the Soviet zastojka they insisted they were morally (etc., etc.) superior.

The West often sees Russia's wielding of influence at gun-point as aggression because it's aggression. It's an attempt to ensure that those near-abroad nations not be a threat, which means either poor and in chaos or out-and-out subjugated. It's rather worse than the Monroe Doctrine, something that's repugnant to most moderate Americans these days. Except that with the Monroe Doctrine it was clearly maintaining US interests, while Russia insists in gilting their imperialism as helping them there lesser folk. (Serious, I don't know how often I've heard the ambiguous "velikaja rossija" used in the last couple of years, with the implication that there's a "malaja rossija" or "Little Russia" or that the surrounding territories are trivial.

[Hortensis]

6. Yes, but it's possible for both to be true at once, and

in fact human motives are almost never pure and simple.

* Strong belief in Russian exceptionalism and determination to be a great nation.

* Desire to break the U.S. inspired by the realization that superpowers can be destroyed, inspired by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

They work together very nicely. No conflict here.