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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KyrosL who wrote (32088)	4/2/2008 2:41:07 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217596

<<successful resolution of the missile defense dispute with Russia, perhaps by having the defense sites run cooperatively with Russia, it will mean that Russia will eventually join NATO. With communism gone, there no strategic rationale for enmity between Russia and the West>> it could well be that communism has nought to do with the eons old game of strategy and balance, per stratfor, and that empires must do what empires do, until empire do no more. in my view, there is no such thing as a benign empire. such a benign empire only exist in the world of prime evil and or very ignorant media spin. stratfor and many talk about 'hard to defend long russian border' and 'big empty siberia', but all fail to nominate any combination of powers who are _____________ (put in desired adjective - i.e. which part of 10,000 strategic nuclear weapons do folks not graps and understand?) enough to (i) want to, and / or (ii) want to take the lead on breaching the 'long and defenseless border that marks of the empty space. funnily enough, stratfor thinks resource wealthy russia, relative to debt-dependent and more or less tapped out usa, lacks strategic depth. quote Geopolitical Diary: Russian Revival Challenges U.S. Interests April 1, 2008 Rumors of a soon-to-be-signed bilateral â€œroadmapâ€ for cooperation and strategic relations between Washington and Moscow emerged Tuesday. While U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin have had on the face of it cordial personal relations during their tenures, there is little room for common ground on issues like Ukrainian membership in NATO or U.S. ballistic missile defense installations in former Warsaw Pact nations. However, whatever the White House might sign with the Kremlin, the U.S. is not one to trust a potential rising continental power in Eurasia. The United States has long operated under five geopolitical imperatives. First, it needed to consolidate control over North America and secure strategic depth for the continental United States. Then it needed to control sea approaches to the North American continent and dominate the oceans. Finally, it sought to keep Eurasia divided. Washington has enjoyed the rare freedom of struggling with its final imperative from a position of strong geographic advantage and consolidated geopolitical imperatives for more than fifty years. Even before that consolidation, U.S. grand strategy had a divided Eurasia as a core objective. A unified power that can harness the people and resources of the Eurasian land mass has the capacity to overwhelm U.S. control of the oceans, the sea approaches and ultimately the continent itself. But since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, even the spectre of such a threat has evaporated. The former Soviet Union sank into a deep and precipitous economic and military decline. Although European unity was on the rise in the 1990s, the repeated failure of Brussels and the major regional powers to act effectively in the Balkans â€“ their own backyard â€“ gave credence to the fact that the underlying balanced and divided structure of the European Union necessarily prevented the emergence of a coherent leadership and thus blocked any potential rise as a continental power. The confusion of the September 11th attacks momentarily gave rise to the phantom threat of a unified Caliphate in the Middle East. But despite the sincerest hopes of al Qaeda, the geopolitical structure of that region was and is far too fragmented for even the possibility to warrant much discussion. Nevertheless, the spectre of a dominant continental Eurasian power is firmly planted in the U.S. psyche. After nearly two decades of unprecedented unilateral hegemony, Washington for the first time has a power on its hands with at least the capability to rise to that status: Russia. We have spent the last few weeks highlighting the potential for Cold War II. This has never been to suggest that 50,000 Soviet tanks are about to spring up along Eastern European borders or that the Berlin Wall will pop back out of the ground. But Russia may be emerging in a position to exercise significant power over the continent â€“ in some ways with old Soviet tricks and in some ways with new tricks. But the bottom line is that Moscow does have all the makings for a dominant continental Eurasian power: Economically, Russia enjoys significant industrial capacity, although it is only now being brought back online in a meaningful way. The Kremlin has also felt the geopolitical heft of its resources in a world of rising global commodity and energy prices. It has the resources to sustain its own growth and the export capacity to exercise influence through foreign dependencies. Financially, it has prudently ridden those rising prices and amassed vast currency reserves in the process. Put simply, it has the money to do things. Politically, few countries in the world can claim the single, coherent, unified political leadership that the Kremlin enjoys. Militarily, Russia maintains a standing military in excess of 1 million (though significant questions remain about Russiaâ€™s ability to improve qualitatively), deploys a nuclear arsenal second only to the United States and enjoys the accumulated knowledge of late Soviet technology, despite the fact that revitalization is still underway and significant challenges remain. Geographically, although Russia suffers from long, difficult to defend borders, it has maritime access and (as a whole) stretches across the continent, giving it peripheral geographic influence from Finland to China. Thickening the plot is the fact that Moscow also exercises one of the most practiced and skilled foreign intelligence services in the world. Between poisonings in London and Kiev to the use of oil and gas exports as a tool in foreign policy, Russia has no shortage of geopolitical levers it might cultivate. Russia is now the first real legitimate, near-term threat to U.S. interests across Eurasia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the country has many challenges ahead. Moscow is now fighting along its own periphery to re-establish some semblance of strategic depth while the U.S. continues to enjoy its geographic and geopolitical strengths — and the lack of a threat to the underlying factors of those strengths. But the real potential for a rising Eurasian power has always had a tendency to weigh heavily on the architects of U.S. grand strategy. But just the same, Moscow would do well to remember how Washington treats those it perceives as challengers unquote