fuser wrote:Only that US will be a much more powerful ally than Iran or any other country.
Except it won't, because it and Russia are in competition over power in the same regions and control over the same essential resources. Combine that with a longstanding cultural clash and the prospects for a lasting alliance are non-existent.
You are contradicting yourself, on one hand you say resource scarcity is coming which will increase tensions and then you say that Russia has plenty of it and nothing to gain in middle east, what is it exactly?
It's both. Russia has plenty of oil and other essential resources. Like America, it is a resource-rich country. Not all countries are, other rising powers like China have little in the way of native natural resources. If you believe countries do not compete over resource control when they are personally resource-sufficient, you are blind and as a Marxist should probably read your Lenin a bit more closely.
Then west is far far more victim of cold war mentality than Russia as continued existence and expansion of NATO shows.
NATO expansion was probably a mistake, as Kissinger pointed out at the time, and this was due to it further inflaming Russian siege mentality. Sans that, what is the issue with forming a defense pact with the Baltic states? Is there any justification for Russia invading them?
If anything you are a great example of showing prevailing anti Russian mentality where evil Russians will stab west in back but not the upright west
An alliance with Russia does not benefit America, it does benefit Russia. They gain us off their backs as they increase their influence, we gain nothing but a state with strong incentive and desire to rival us increasing their station. If we were dumb enough to extend our hands for an alliance, that can be fairly described as stabbing the West in the back, and we would deserve it for behaving so stupidly.
see 90s, West continued undermining Russia without any provocation and even with a desire to be accepted as a part of west.
The Yeltsin regime did want to be accepted as part of the West. It was rightly hated by the Russian people for this treason, and if it got very far you would have seen nationalist backlash added onto the already extensive and also justified economic backlash.
It always has been so and not only with petroleum. I am contesting the futuristic doom and gloom predictions.
You said very explicitly that foreign policy decisions will not be made based on oil resources. They already are.
Why Iraq then? As I said it makes absolutely no sense that west went in Iraq or Afghanistan out of moral duty to spread liberalism and democracy as the real events that unfolded shows. If there existed two faction its clear which one called the shots.
Afghanistan was sheltering Osama Bin Laden. That's a legitimate military operation by any definition. The second Iraq War is more complicated. A combination of longstanding sentiment that the US "didn't finish the job" with the Gulf War by keeping Saddam in power (a view Dubya held for a decade), and PNAC-derived desire to control Iraq's oil resources to get a chokehold on China.
Also it's more like there were three factions. Wilsonian idealists like Wolfowitz, stupid realists like Cheney, sane realists like Gates. The latter group were pulled in to replace the second group in 2006, after years of urging regarding Rumsfeld's incompetence by Poppy Bush.
I was talking about post Iraqi liberal democratic government as being priority, it was absolutely not.
It was the top priority for the people who ran the transition in Baghdad which the war effort was built around protecting. The Coalition Provisional Authority of Harvard-educated wonks.
Priority was controlling the oil reserves there as the very first act of the triumphant west was to impose selling of Iraqi oil back in dollars only.
This also occurred, yes. People have a multitude of motivations and the world exists in shades of grey.
US couldn't had just chosen any dictator because of political reasons as I had already said, after much chest thumping about freedom and democracy to rally support for this war, they just couldn't had chosen any yes man dictator.
Why go to war in the first place without a Wilsonian desire to spread "democracy"?
A coup is not an American commitment of boots on the ground. It's covertly using political tumult, which already bubbled under the surface because Saddam had a long-standing habit of treating his generals like dirt, to replace Saddam Hussein's regime. Think most foreign policy actions undertaken by the Eisenhower administration and what many people suspect occurred in Egypt a few years ago.
Exactly, each nation is needed to be looked at differently, there can't be an universal rule like "it never had any history of liberal democracy" as this blanket statement can be applied to these countries as well.
Except due to their respective traditions, Japanese and South Korean democracies look very illiberal by Western standards and retain heavy elements of social organization carried over from their feudal history. India's is fractuous and Indian elites have largely copied the traditions of a country that very much has a tradition of liberal democracy, Great Britain.
In the same region Iran also had democracy without it going in utter chaos and anarchy like Iraq before US supported coup.
Iran does have a tradition of democracy, though a very centralized form of it and sans a history of liberalism. Considering the religiosity of the rural population, while I'd love it if he succeeded and oppose Churchill's BP coup against an extant secularist democracy, I'm not sure how far Mosaddegh would have gotten with liberalization if he had remained in power. It's an interesting hypothetical, certainly the Shah's rapid Westernization project inflamed Islamist backlash.
However, there is a genuine large urban movement for democracy in Iran that did not exist in Iraq, the Green Movement. My opposition to military intervention in Iran is based largely on the current post-Iraq weak morale and Iran's large/high-tech military making non-warfare-based solutions ideal, not lack of democratic tradition per se. The rural-urban cultural divide in Iran is something for the Iranian people to deal with, a successful regime would cut a balance between these traditions and only slowly liberalize.
So this is personal now?
All politics is personal. If you expect me to support policies that threaten my home, you're mistaken.
As per military exercises, NATO constantly does so near Russian borders all the time, in November this year only, Operation Iron Sword took place in Lithuania wich included 4,000 US troops.
Lithuania is a sovereign country and a NATO member state. If we intruded into Russian waters/airspace as Russia's planes did ours, then you'd have a case.
No, it isn't, its not automatically realist if its about "upcoming doom and gloom",
Realist foreign policy is defined by the idea that nation-states are in competition over power and resources. This is what I have argued for and what you have defined as "upcoming doom and gloom," as if this is a state that didn't always exist for as long as agriculture bred city-states.
"war is coming" "let's bring our big guns",
I have never said these, you are putting words into my mouth. I've actually explicitly argued against "bring[ing] our big guns."
Just being centralized doesn't mean it will go with a bang, China is transitioning power smoothly for decades now,
This is another poor counter-example, the Chinese leadership anoints and grooms heirs quite early. Their selection is based on factional consensus within that bureaucracy, they have a strong degree of internal unity because of it.
as it is developed economically and politically enough to do so, Russia is too. Cases need to be studied individually, rather than applying a grand theory everywhere.
In what scenario would a leader who power is centralized around dying, sans any well-respected heir groomed for the post, not lead to a power vacuum and struggle?
You keep claiming this is about "individual cases," but a power vacuum is just that. It is a fact of life, and the only examples you have given are vacuum-less non-answers. With a centralized state, people do not just passively agree on a new leader if none is lined up and prepared beforehand. Factions compete for the slot and panic swiftly sets in.
Sigh, this is just too much of a speculation to go into. You think there is a major discord between neoliberal wing and Puinists?
I'm not sure why you're condescendingly using the laughing emoji here. Yes, there is a major discord between the neoliberal wing of Russian politics and the Putinists, one section of which are essentially "market uber alles" Europhiles and the other of which wants to gain a predominant footing for Russian national oil interests in the global marketplace. The competition between these two interest groups is very high-profile. In Leninist terms, it is international bourgeoisie versus national bourgeoisie.
West may not like it but Russia is democracy, it may be not the "right" kind of democracy but it still is.
It is the capitalist version of an autocratic, bureaucratic state of a type Russia has been for centuries. As such, power is centralized around one reigning figure and the clique of bureaucrats/oilgarchs who are benefited by his regime.