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9 questions about Russia you were too embarrassed to ask
Source: Vox
Vladimir Putin and the nation he leads lurked in the background of the 2016 campaign for months and months, perhaps even shaping the outcome of the race. And now Putins preferred candidate, Donald Trump, appears ready to embrace him as an ally a stunning shift in US-Russia policy.
This is a source of growing alarm among cosmopolitan-minded liberals. Putin is bad, they say, and so are the European far-right parties that are aligning with him a multicontinental alliance undergirded by Islamophobic politics that alarms respectable opinion throughout the West.
And among political elites there really is a fairly firm consensus that this is, in fact, bad. Americas military leaders have repeatedly called Russia the greatest threat to the US-led world order. Among Republicans, its the ones focused on national security who put up the greatest resistance to Trump, and since the election hes gotten more pushback from Senate Republicans on the Russian hacking issue than on anything else. Hillary Clintons campaign clearly sought to make hay out of this, arguing that Trump would be Putins puppet.
But the mass public is relatively indifferent to foreign affairs and mostly doesnt seem to care about this. Foreign policy is the classic sort of issue that doesnt matter in politics until something goes badly wrong, at which point it starts to matter a lot.
National security leaders across the spectrum worry, with good reason, that the kind of friendly arrangement Trump seems to want to make with Russia would only shift the ratchet and end up involving the United States in more direct military engagements in Europe that wed rather not put to the test.
But the Cold War has been over for a long time, and both the US-Russian relationship and Russias approach to Europe have changed while most Americans werent paying attention. Here, then, is an attempt to answer some of your most basic questions about the contemporary US-Russian relationship and where it might head in the Trump era.
This is a source of growing alarm among cosmopolitan-minded liberals. Putin is bad, they say, and so are the European far-right parties that are aligning with him a multicontinental alliance undergirded by Islamophobic politics that alarms respectable opinion throughout the West.
And among political elites there really is a fairly firm consensus that this is, in fact, bad. Americas military leaders have repeatedly called Russia the greatest threat to the US-led world order. Among Republicans, its the ones focused on national security who put up the greatest resistance to Trump, and since the election hes gotten more pushback from Senate Republicans on the Russian hacking issue than on anything else. Hillary Clintons campaign clearly sought to make hay out of this, arguing that Trump would be Putins puppet.
But the mass public is relatively indifferent to foreign affairs and mostly doesnt seem to care about this. Foreign policy is the classic sort of issue that doesnt matter in politics until something goes badly wrong, at which point it starts to matter a lot.
National security leaders across the spectrum worry, with good reason, that the kind of friendly arrangement Trump seems to want to make with Russia would only shift the ratchet and end up involving the United States in more direct military engagements in Europe that wed rather not put to the test.
But the Cold War has been over for a long time, and both the US-Russian relationship and Russias approach to Europe have changed while most Americans werent paying attention. Here, then, is an attempt to answer some of your most basic questions about the contemporary US-Russian relationship and where it might head in the Trump era.
Read more: http://www.vox.com/world/2016/12/22/13982102/russia-putin-trump-hacking
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9 questions about Russia you were too embarrassed to ask (Original Post)
demmiblue
Dec 2016
OP
eppur_se_muova
(36,289 posts)1. Good article, hard for a short excerpt to do it justice. nt
yurbud
(39,405 posts)2. these are the key words: "the greatest threat to the US-led world order"
because they don't let us call all the shots everywhere all the time.
Putin has said before he wants a multi-polar order, where the US would still be the FIRST--among equals.
But banking and certain other interests cannot tolerate that degree of democracy or peace.