Category: The Big Picture

Failure of western democracy, tensions between the US and China, the Arab Spring and other major global events.

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For Chinese Power Game, a Changing Equation

From Sebastian Veg, Research Professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Science in Paris:

By shaking up the unwritten rules that have prevailed since Deng Xiaoping consolidated power, Xi is taking a political risk. In exchange for the immunity that PBSC members were granted, they were expected to retire at the end of their term, and to remain loyal to collective decisions. If immunity is denied, both of these tenets may begin to be questioned. Why should powerful leaders retire if they can then be targeted? Why should they accept decision by consensus if they can later be made to pay the consequences as is alleged in Zhou’s case with the vote on Bo? They may be better off spending their terms gathering compromising material on other colleagues. Xi no doubt understands the risk, and believes it must be taken because the Party’s legitimacy is in danger. However, by disturbing the carefully crafted institutional balance, he runs the risk of overplaying his hand.

Read more at For Chinese Power Game, a Changing Equation.

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Has Vladimir Putin taken a dangerous ideological turn?

Vladimir Putin has long shown himself to be ruthless and cynical. But also pragmatic and rational.

In his third term in the Kremlin, however, and particularly in the Ukraine crisis, Putin appears to have taken a decisive ideological turn.

As pressure mounts from Western sanctions and Russia becomes more isolated, speculation has intensified about whether Putin will seek an exit strategy from the Ukraine crisis, or whether he will escalate yet again.

The answer largely depends on which Putin — the pragmatist or the ideologue — the West is dealing with.

On the latest “Power Vertical Podcast” Brian Whitmore discusses the issue with co-host Mark Galeotti, a professor at NYU, an expert on Russia’s security services, and author of the blog “In Moscow’s Shadows”; and Kremlin-watcher Ben Judah, author of the book “Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin.”

Also on the podcast, Mark, Ben, and Brian discuss how attitudes in Europe about Russia are changing — and changing dramatically.

From Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty.

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Let the Past Collapse on Time! by Vladimir Sorokin | The New York Review of Books

From Vladimir Sorokin:

Yeltsin, who was tired after climbing to the top of the pyramid, left the structure completely undisturbed, but brought an heir along with him: Putin, who immediately informed the population that he viewed the collapse of the USSR as a geopolitical catastrophe. He also quoted the conservative Alexander III, who believed that Russia had only two allies: the army and the navy. The machine of the Russian state moved backward, into the past, becoming more and more Soviet every year.

In my view, this fifteen-year journey back to the USSR under the leadership of a former KGB lieutenant colonel has shown the world the vicious nature and archaic underpinnings of the Russian state’s “vertical power” structure, more than any “great and terrible” Putin….A country such as this cannot have a predictable, stable future….

Unpredictability has always been Russia’s calling card, but since the Ukrainian events, it has grown to unprecedented levels: no one knows what will happen to our country in a month, in a week, or the day after tomorrow. I think that even Putin doesn’t know; he is now hostage to his own strategy of playing “bad guy” to the West…..If you compare the post-Soviet bear to the Soviet one, the only thing they have in common is the imperial roar. However, the post-Soviet bear is teeming with corrupt parasites that infected it during the 1990s, and have multiplied exponentially in the last decade. They are consuming the bear from within. Some might mistake their fevered movement under the bear’s hide for the working of powerful muscles. But in truth, it’s an illusion.

Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell.

Read more at Let the Past Collapse on Time! by Vladimir Sorokin | The New York Review of Books.

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It started with a Super Bowl ring, now Putin is taking whole countries

Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, says Vladimir Putin stole his prize Super Bowl ring in 2005:

“I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring.’ I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

Kraft revealed that he hadn’t intended to part with his prize from the Patriots’ win over the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX. He claims that a call from the White House kept him from attempting to recover it. The official overcame Kraft’s objections, repeatedly saying:

It would really be in the best interest of US-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.

This may have been a mistake by the Bush administration, considering that Vladimir Putin has graduated to seizing parts of Georgia, the Crimea and now has his eyes on Eastern Ukraine. As Winston Churchill would have said:

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

Read more at Kraft: Putin stole Bowl ring | NY Post.

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MH17 is the third plane this week shot down over Ukraine under mysterious circumstances – Vox

From Max Fisher:

…at first, people were wondering if rebels even had the capability to shoot down a high-flying commercial airliner like MH17. But there was another incident just on Monday, July 14, that did not get very much attention at the time. That day, over eastern Ukraine, an Antonov AN-26 Ukrainian military transport plane was hit by a missile while flying over eastern Ukraine — at 21,000 feet altitude. That’s far beyond the range of a shoulder-fired system like the MANPADS.

Read more at MH17 is the third plane this week shot down over Ukraine under mysterious circumstances – Vox.

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Netherlands Held Liable for 300 Deaths in Srebrenica Massacre – NYTimes.com

From DAN BILEFSKY and MARLISE SIMONS at the New York Times:

The Dutch Supreme Court, which was upholding a 2011 decision by an appellate court, said that even though United Nations commanders were in charge of the peace mission at Srebrenica, in the days after the Bosnian Serb takeover, Dutch authorities had “effective control” over the troops and therefore shared liability.

Srecko Latal, a political analyst who until recently worked with the nonprofit International Crisis Group in Sarajevo, Bosnia, said by phone that the verdict was important for showing that peacekeepers had both a moral and a legal responsibility to protect civilians….

The Srebrenica tragedy highlights two important issues:

  1. Why are lightly armed UN peace-keeping forces being sent into conflict areas where they are incapable of offering effective protection from heavily-armed protagonists? You don’t have a strong negotiating position when your opponent has tanks and artillery.
  2. Who is responsible if troops under UN command obey orders?

Read more at Netherlands Held Liable for 300 Deaths in Srebrenica Massacre – NYTimes.com.

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238 Years After The First Revolution, Is It Time For A Second?

From Jerry Bowyer:

To determine whether the framers [of the Declaration of Independence] and their principles would cause us once again to break from a central political authority one must first get into the head space of the founders. Their way of thinking, though alien to modern political philosophy and so much the worse for modern political philosophy, is clear and cogent:

There are certain ideas which are self-evidently true. One of those ideas is that we are created without legal primacy or inferiority with regard to one another. Another idea, which is just obviously true to people whose rational faculties are operating properly, is that the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of a prosperous life which is what the word ‘happiness’ meant in 1776 are not alienable, that is they cannot have a lien placed on them by any other persons, not even representatives of the state.

Not only is government denied the authority to put a lien on and repossess those rights, but it is further required to protect those rights. And in fact, the protecting of those rights is the only reason that government should exist in the first place! And not only is it necessary for government to protect these rights, but its use of power to do so is still only just if it also involves the consent of the people whose freedom and property are being protected. Further and this is shocking, even to modern ears, when governments move from protecting those rights to injuring those rights, the people are allowed to erase the authority of the government.

….No amount of banning or inciting can change the facts. 238 years ago the principles of the Declaration found that the central government had lost the right to rule and called on the people to withdraw allegiance to it. Is that the case now?

Read more at The July 4th Question: 238 Years After The First Revolution, Is It Time For A Second?.

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America’s Ukraine-Policy Disaster | The National Interest

From James W. Carden:

….A second unintended consequence of our involvement with Ukraine is the emergence of Russian hypernationalism. Little attention seems to be given to the effects that our facilitating an anti-Russian regime in Kiev has had on the political landscape in Russia; Russians now, more so than at any other point in the last quarter century, are under the spell of one man. According to the widely respected Levada Center, Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings stand at 80 percent. While respected analysts like the Carnegie Endowment’s Lilia Shevtsova seem to believe that this level of support is unsustainable, the numbers may point to a new and troubling phenomenon: that a rather prosaic Russian nationalism is in the process of transmogrifying into Russian hypernationalism. If this is so, a war in East-Central Europe becomes all the more likely, because as the University of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer has noted, “hypernationalism …is the belief that other nations are not just inferior, but dangerous as well, and must be dealt with harshly, if not brutally…[it] creates powerful incentives to use violence to eliminate the threat.”

Read more at America's Ukraine-Policy Disaster | The National Interest.

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