Via
Daily Timewaster
I’m skeptical that anyone outside of the Kremlin could diagnose its
view of American foreign policy with real certainty, but Fyodor Lukyanov
is probably about as close as an outside observer can get.
He’s the
editor of a journal called Russia in Global Affairs, which is published
in partnership with Foreign Affairs, and he sits on all sorts of foreign
policy councils in Russia. So, while his estimation of Moscow’s
viewpoint is drawn in part from imperfect inference, it’s probably still
got some truth so it.
According to
Lukyanov’s latest article in Al-Monitor,
an assessment of the lessons that he believes Russia drew from the Iraq
war that began 10 years ago, President Vladimir Putin and his
government are convinced that U.S. foreign policy is basically running
on madness at this point. Here’s a snip, with my emphasis added, from
Lukyanov’s article:
The conclusions drawn by Putin from the situation
surrounding Iraq were concerned less with Russian-American relations,
and more with general idea of how the world works in the twenty-first
century. The strong do what they want: they don’t contemplate
international law, global reality or the costs incurred by themselves
and others. …
In the 10 years since the Iraq war, Putin’s worldview has only
strengthened and expanded. Now he believes that the strong not only do
what they want, but also fail to understand what they do. From Russian
leadership’s point of view, the Iraq War now looks like the beginning of
the accelerated destruction of regional and global stability,
undermining the last principles of sustainable world order.
More @
Washington Post
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A Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) “urgent bulletin” being sent to
Embassies around the world today is advising both Russian citizens and
companies to begin divesting their assets from Western banking and
financial institutions “immediately” as Kremlin fears grow that both the
European Union and United States are preparing for the largest theft of
private wealth in modern history.
According to this “urgent bulletin,” this warning is being made at
the behest of Prime Minister Medvedev who earlier today warned against
the Western banking systems actions against EU Member Cyprus by
stating:
“All possible mistakes that could be made have been made by them, the
measure that was proposed is of a confiscation nature, and
unprecedented in its character. I can’t compare it with anything but …
decisions made by Soviet authorities … when they didn’t think much about
the savings of their population. But we are living in the 21st century,
under market economic conditions. Everybody has been insisting that
ownership rights should be respected.”
