you are the media you consume.
Here's my ill-informed and biased cliff's note of the situation:
Obviously "things" have "changed" enormously. My litmus test is standard of living and political freedom and I discount changes in ideology, hence (I think) our differences on what "change" means.
The standard of living has improved overall, though in fairness, some of the more rural areas are fairing worse since Communism. But even that is slowly changing. I'm not sure we have a lot of information about the standard of living under Communism. Or how you quantify that. People are buying homes and cars for the first time. There is a "middle class" for the first time...
Political freedom? Just because it is worse than under Yeltsin (though freedom of speech is not high on your list when you are starving) does not mean it is as bad as it was under Communism. Russia has one of the most active Internet communities on the planet. Most of the nationalization of the media has been limited to TV. At this point, there is no possible way they could return to a Soviet-style repression. "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
Magnifico said:
I think the New Cold War would need to survive at least one leadership change on both side of the U.S.-Russia equation... Russia has already "changed". So, if relationships do not improve with a new U.S. president in 2009, then it's no longer the New Cold War... it's just Cold War II: The Climate Change.
To which I asked, mostly as an agreement with his post:
Has either country changed significantly at the institutional level since 1990?
The answer, in terms of foreign relations, seems to be no. The US has always been belligerent towards the Soviet Union / Russia, and having "won" the cold war, decided that the rest of the world really does have to do its bidding, and pressed its influence into Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The Soviets were nominally belligerent while in power, but the threat they posed was overstated by the western media outside the nuclear threat, and despite a non-belligerent Russian government today, the nuclear threat still remains, if for no other reason that the continued existence of the missiles.
Somehow this turned into me being insensitive toward the suffering of the people living in the former Soviet Union. Herding cats indeed - we can knick each other with a 1000 cuts, or maybe engage with people who, you know, actually hate Russia, of which there is no shortage.
The fact is that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev was already a sort of regime change, and then you have a couple of constitutional crises: the reactionnary 1991 coup which destroyed the USSR and then the 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis which changed the constitution of Russia, ended up with prominent politicians in jail and altered the political landscape. Then you had the domestic political ramifications of the Chechen wars, and the transition from Yeltsin to Putin which in my view had the biggest effect in reining in the oligarchy created in the 1990's.
So even if now Russia's international stance looks as confrontational as in the 1980's (though I don't believe for a minute Russia would embark in an imperialist adventure like Afghanistan - and Abkhazia and South Ossetia don't count given that we're talking about ethnic Russians many of which are Russian citizens) it can hardly be said to "not have changed".
On the other hand, the Bush administration is full of cold warriors who cut their teeth in the 1970's fabricating intelligence assesments about the Soviet threat, and even Obama has Zbigniew Brzezinski (who claims to have meddled in Afghanistan to draw the USSR into a war they couldn't win) as foreign policy advisor, so that side hasn't changed. I think Russia finds itself confronting the US despite themselves because of how confrontational the US continues to be. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
I guess it depends on what you mean by "changed significantly at the institutional level". Russia has changed radically several times. Starting with that pesky fall of the Soviet Union bit. (Sorry for the snark.) Yes, Russia has changed. And changed.
The US? No and we're seeing very severe consequences of that refusal to change...
More importantly, their relationship has changed as well. Not nec. in the way either would have preferred... "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
But if something like the fall of the Soviet Union is just a "meet the news boss, same as the old boss" scenario on your book, I sincerely do not know what would constitute actual change. And entire empire collapsed. And entire economic system was destroyed. And ideological war was lost. The government was actually disolved at one point. (maybe more.) All the laws on the books became nullified, either literally or through lack of enforcement. Yes, the people in power were from the same elite group as those in Communism, because that was the ONLY system before. It's not as though democrats were waiting in the wings. Communists became democrats. Anyone with any qualifications to run any government entity got those qualifications from going through the Soviet system. People use this fact to suggest that nothing really changed between Stalin and Putin. It's like looking at a family and complaining all the children had the same parents. Where else were they supposed to come from? Outerspace? There were lots of Westerners coming into the country to advise the newly democratic government. And as a result, the bloody country crashed. People starved to death. So you can understand why they don't really trust us to tell them how to run their country. "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
Is this a series of interesting typos (And for An), or a literary construction just unfamiliar to me? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Also, modern Russia is quite rich, at least in parts. The USSR was always shabby and poor, with a few token exceptions like the occasional marble metro. With its energy reserves Russia has the potential to be richer than either Europe or the US a decade or two from now, and that's not making Washington happy.
So the US needs a Cold War. The first Cold War was started knowingly and deliberately with the usual bullshit massively exaggerated claims of Soviet nuclear capability.
The MilInd people really only have just the one pony, and they keep dragging it out over and over painted a different colour each time. But really - it's always the same animal with different stick-on horns and a dogwhistle around its neck.
So now that Bin Laden has ascended to heaven, or hung up his beard and moved to Florida, or wherever, it's time for a new enemy. Calling out China would be a little too intimate, so Russia makes a good a target as any.
By 1990 the USSR had run out of options, so it wasn't a serious possibility any more.
The US will probably go through the same process, but it's looking more likely it will try to collapse outwards in a very messy way rather than collapsing inwards as the USSR did.
You could probably make a case for suggesting that Iraq and Afghanistan are parts of the process. Aside from the oil, they're about trying to prove that it's still possible to project force successfully.
But that didn't work so well for the USSR in Afghanistan, and it's not working so well for the US either. So if Obama wins I wouldn't be totally surprised to see some serious military cutbacks - especially if he gets a second term.
