Wanted: Detente Advocate For Major Superpower

By Cernig

My pal Blue Gal has a great post up at "They Gave Us A Republic" in which she points to a worrying McClatchy article which gives some insight into Russian hardline thinking.

"We remember very well the Tonkin Gulf incident" in which untrue reports of North Vietnamese ships firing on U.S. ships started the Vietnam War, said Sergei Markov, a Duma member who's also with United Russia.

Markov, who's close to the Kremlin, accused the Bush administration of playing "a very dirty and bloody game" in which it was intentionally provoking Russia to create the appearance of a new cold war to help McCain's hawkish presidential campaign and further U.S. attempts to hem in Russian power.

Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst in Moscow who works with the U.S.-based Jamestown Foundation, agreed that relations between the countries were dangerously tense, but blamed the Kremlin.

"Russia is probing the West, as it often did during the Cold War, (to see) how far is the West willing to go: What will happen if Russia continues to push?" Felgenhauer said. "There is a party of war within the ruling party. . . . It seems that for now the hard-liners are winning."

Aleksandr Dugin, a hard-line Russian theorist whose ideas about weakening American geopolitical standing are popular with many Kremlin leaders, said Russia was challenging U.S. domination and that confrontation may be unavoidable.

Russia's move into Georgia was "an "irreversible decision that will mean in the future a serious, profound, irreversible confrontation with the United States. . . . The stakes are so high that Moscow has placed all its (chips) on the table," he said.

Dugin said he thought the strategy was a good one.

It probably is. Russia is fat with oil revenues right now, has a good grip on Europe's energy pipelines and is forging relationships with everyone who has come out on the short end from the stick of Bush's neocon hegemonic dreams. Meanwhile, the US and its main allies are slipping into deep recession and overcommitted miliraily due to bush's Iraq misadventure. It's a window of opportunity to reclaim their prestige - deliberately denied them by post-perestroika US policy - the likes of which the Russians couldn't have dreamed. That might be unpleasant reading, but its just a fact.

Blue Gal writes:

...in the wake of the dust-up in South Ossetia, the United States and Russia are right now on a firmer war footing than we have ever been at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.  No matter where in the world you read this from or which side you see things from, you have to hope that, once again, cooler heads will  prevail.   

Those cooler heads remain a fond wish, but far from reality.  It was Dick Cheney who was dispatched to the region last week, to visit Georgia and the Ukraine.  (This had the additional advantage of  getting him almost far as earthly possible from the Republican convention in St. Paul.)   

... Now the odds of a confrontation with the United States is, perhaps not inevitable, but increasingly likely.  And the stakes are higher than they have ever been.   

This is the area we need to be focusing on right now, and we certainly do not need our next president to be a bellicose little Napoleon whose idea of diplomacy is "I'll tell them to knock this shit off."

Indeed. As I wrote the other day, John McCain has more in common with Dick Cheney than George Bush when it comes to foreign policy. Neither are safe hands to be steering the world through this confrontational time.

Update:

Russia has agreed to pull its forces out of Georgia proper within a month - although not out of the two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The deal was brokered by French president Nicholas Sarkozy.

While Cheney was shooting his mouth off defending the indefensible Saakashvili, Sarkozy was doing some actual work in Moscow. No-one is waiting for America to solve problems any more. That's the Bush legacy.

Comments

[Warren Street]

On behalf of my blog partner, thank you for the link--and thank you for recognizing the brilliance of her point about "detente."

Do you get detente from McCain? Of course not. End of story.

[Blue Gal]

BTW there are two blue gals. They gave us a Republic is Blue Girl, I think. I'm the one you get four thousand emails from in three months. It's okay we get that all the time...xo

Blue Gal (the other one)