[parcifal]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door zonbron

Wat een voorbeeld van cognitieve dissonantie!

Rusland is helemaal niets 'begonnen'.

Lees eens het opiniestuk van Martin Wolf in de FT.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/efd70...#axzz3E7kjXrLn

Zeer de nagel op de kop.

Russia is our most dangerous neighbour

Russia is both a tragedy and a menace. In the Financial Times this week Sergey Karaganov offered an arresting insight into the blend of self-pity and braggadocio currently at work in Moscow. It is as depressing as it is disturbing. Western policy makers seem to believe the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (known as Isis) is the greater danger. But Russia is the nuclear-armed rump of a former superpower and, ruled by an amoral autocrat, it frightens me even more. For Europe and, I believe, the US, there is no greater foreign policy question than how to deal with today’s Russia.

Yet President Vladimir Putin, the latest in a long line of Russian autocrats, has stated, instead: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.” It was, in fact, an opportunity, one that many in central and eastern Europe seized with both hands. The transition to a new way of life proved unavoidably difficult. The world they now inhabit is highly imperfect. But they have mostly joined the world of civilised modernity. What does this mean? It means intellectual and economic freedom. It means the right to engage freely in public life. It means governments subject to the rule of law and accountable to their people.

The west has too often failed to live up to these ideals. But they remain beacons. In the early 1990s they were beacons to many Russians. As a great admirer of Russian culture and Russian courage, I hoped, fondly perhaps, that the country would find a way through the debris of its collapsed ideology, state and empire. I knew it would be difficult. I wanted Russia to choose western values, however, not just for our sake but also for its own. The alternative of continuing the cycle of despotism was too depressing.
With the selection of Mr Putin, a former KGB colonel, as his successor, Boris Yeltsin delivered that outcome.

The president may, for now, be a popular despot. But a despot he is. He is also heir to the project of Yuri Andropov, former KGB head and Soviet leader, for a modernised autocracy. As a loyal servant of the state, he believes results alone matter. Lies are just another tool of statecraft. Only the wilfully blind could fail to see that evident truth in recent months.

It [Russia] sees itself as surrounded by enemies. Foreign relations are zero sum; success for others is a failure for Russia. In this view, a prosperous and democratic Ukraine, if achieved (a remote possibility, I agree), is a nightmare. For Moscow’s elites preventing that is, as Mr Karaganov puts it, “a struggle to stop others expanding their sphere of control into territories they believe are vital to Russia’s survival”. And who is it that, allegedly, threatens Russia’s survival? It is a west that is “weaker than many imagine”. Such a feeble west plays the part of bogeyman.

Viewed from Moscow, western policy is the politics of Versailles. In fact, the western position is based on two simple principles: first, a country is entitled to make its own choices; second, borders may not be changed by force. Russia rejects both of them. It is because its former satellites and dependencies were rightly confident that Russia would not accept these principles that they have been so keen to join Nato. The military alliance did not have to force them to join. They begged to do so. Maybe they understand how broad is Russia’s understanding of its “vital interest” and how ruthless it is in protecting them.