Tim Trewyn
Силиконовый занавес
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Comments by "Tim Trewyn" (@timtrewyn453) on "Fiona Hill - Rather than a Real Threat NATO was an Irritating Barrier to Putin's Imperial Ambitions." video.
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As an American citizen, age 65, I am aware of American imperialism. Human, emphasis on human, history is filled with imperialism. It does not surprise me that America and Russia are imperial powers, as a study of both histories makes plain. Abraham Lincoln, preserving the Union; Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. What is hypocritical is the proclamation of innocence by any empire. No one is innocent if they accrue any benefit from the largesse of the empire they live under. The average American citizen, as a voter and a critic, has slightly more power than the average Russian citizen to question authority and replace poor leadership. I think that's evident by the social and electoral history of the United States. But the average citizen has little influence when economic powers that be need a change in some small government. And it's one thing to make a list like the above, and quite another to look into the circumstances of each event. I am not going to advocate that Ukraine capitulate to the Russian empire because I should be ashamed of America's imperial history. The average Russian should be as much or more ashamed for this war, although I blame them less for it, as they have next to no power to alter their government. What boggles my mind is the perpetual Russian claims of innocence and infallibility. It boggles my mind because such self-deception led to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the current Russian regime is composed of a very similar mentality. To a considerable extent, the incompetence this mentality produces is on display in the military performance of the Russian empire against a smaller power it shares a land border with and supposedly enjoys superiority over in every military metric. While on the surface, Putin enjoys unmatched support in any election, deep down there appears to be a rather wide disconnect between the Russian people and the Russian government. The FSB and the world's finest corps of riot police keeps that disconnect from getting out of hand. The average US citizen reconnects with the government at least every two years by voting. So no, the list does not change my mind. Slava Ukraine.
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Russia has to consider China's interest in the Arctic of the future as well as China's economic and expanding military power. China's capacity to develop and manage resources is likely to increase its influence in eastern Russia. China is likely to carry out this expansion of influence very incrementally, yet purposefully because of its own needs and interests. A highly sanctioned Russia will have little choice but to accept some of this expansion of Chinese power in exchange for Chinese purchases of Russian resources. Look at the advantages that China seeks for itself in terms of technology transfer as an example. I propose this is a factor in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because Ukraine for a very long time will be too far a reach for China compared to Moscow. Russia may assess that overall, seizing land for power makes more sense near western Russia than eastern. Nuclear arsenal metrics aside, Russian hubris in its actions is clear, but Russian leadership perspective is based on successive victories in the expansion of its power, not international cooperation in a context of climate change. Russia has a vain concept of its capacity, and it also seems to a vain concept of China's capacity or willingness to buttress Russian capacity. Reality is facing Russia with a dilemma. It is not acquiring the power Putin thought it would acquire by invading Ukraine to offset the rise of Chinese power. The West is doing what it can to present Putin with a very grim, long-term future. But Putin, like Trump, has trouble processing loss. He seems to always be chasing some silver lining he sees. I don't know that public discussion on how this sorts out for China might get Putin's attention in time to consider how his losses in Ukraine could accelerate Russia's loss of power to China, but it might be worth a try.
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@captain34ca The imperial impulse is human and not confined to any particular nation. Does not an objective study of human history reveal this? The subject is Russia and its neighbors. I must agree with Toby. Russia cannot be surprised that its neighbors are increasingly defensive. Or is it a defect of Russian leadership thinking, that it thinks itself infallible, and that if anything goes wrong, someone else, certainly not itself, but "America the other" is to blame? That would be a characteristic of what Christopher Hitchens called "a psychopathic dictatorship", that is, what he called the present Russian regime. The psychopathic mind has difficulty processing loss, e.g., Donald Trump. Someone no less than Mikhail Gorbachev said of Putin, "He is always right." And the weakness of the regime seems its sense of having some obligation to publicly agree with that. It was a rather clever thing for Gorbachev to say, and he did not seem to suffer any serious consequences for saying it. And so what I am trying to get across here is that if the Russian regime continues on its present path, its belief in its infallibility and that all its misfortune is someone else's fault, then it will eventually fail and lose, as the Soviet Union did. It will lose because, as a victory centered psychopathic dictatorship, it crushes, indeed kills or chases away, the very people it needs to succeed, by doing what Toby has described. It will fail and lose because it will not, psychologically cannot, self-correct as it needs to. It was not enough to let some facade of Russian Orthodoxy, and other suppressed institutions like journalism, to resurface to renew the Russian culture, those institutions need to be left as truly free as possible for the West to see and economically re-engage with a new and better Russia.
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