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Why Did Putin Turn?
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Unicorn
Feb 25, 2015, 1:30:16 PM2/25/15
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Why Did Putin Turn?
PRINCETON – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policy toward his country’s
“near abroad” and the West has been badly misunderstood. Instead of focusing
on broader geopolitical patterns – in particular, the effect of the
2007-2008 financial crisis on global politics – commentators have been
turning Kremlin policy into a psychodrama that can be understood only
through a deep exploration of the Russian soul. The result has been rampant
misconceptions about what drove Putin’s shift from what seemed to be a
modernizing, conciliatory, and even pro-Western stance to aggressive
revisionism.
View comment on this paragraph Two such flawed explanations for Russia’s
current foreign policy have been offered. The first, proposed by Germany’s
self-described Putin-Versteher (“Putin sympathizers”), is that Russian
policy is a logical response to the West’s strategy of encirclement. The
eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union, they contend, was an
unnecessary provocation. In fact, none other than George Kennan, the
originator of America’s Cold War containment strategy, opposed NATO
enlargement in the 1990s on precisely these grounds.
[...]
more....
Read more at
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/putin-politics-global-financial-crisis-by-harold-james-2014-12#MoXOAkjsiqXqmXvj.99
PRINCETON – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policy toward his country’s
“near abroad” and the West has been badly misunderstood. Instead of focusing
on broader geopolitical patterns – in particular, the effect of the
2007-2008 financial crisis on global politics – commentators have been
turning Kremlin policy into a psychodrama that can be understood only
through a deep exploration of the Russian soul. The result has been rampant
misconceptions about what drove Putin’s shift from what seemed to be a
modernizing, conciliatory, and even pro-Western stance to aggressive
revisionism.
View comment on this paragraph Two such flawed explanations for Russia’s
current foreign policy have been offered. The first, proposed by Germany’s
self-described Putin-Versteher (“Putin sympathizers”), is that Russian
policy is a logical response to the West’s strategy of encirclement. The
eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union, they contend, was an
unnecessary provocation. In fact, none other than George Kennan, the
originator of America’s Cold War containment strategy, opposed NATO
enlargement in the 1990s on precisely these grounds.
[...]
more....
Read more at
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/putin-politics-global-financial-crisis-by-harold-james-2014-12#MoXOAkjsiqXqmXvj.99
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