Josh Marshall, 20 February --
Russia poses little if any geopolitical risk to the United States or its vital interests. It is at best an irritant on the margins.
Josh Marshall, 1 March --
Lets say that Russia proceeds and formally annexes Crimea and perhaps goes ahead and slices off the most Russified eastern portions of Ukraine. Setting aside relations with the US, that will undoubtedly spawn a new and darker era in relations with the rest of Europe and a post-partition Ukraine that is hyper-European in its posture both because of renewed Russian aggression and a transformed composition of Ukrainian and Russian percentages of the population ... The crux of current crisis, or the central issues at stake, is not which slabs of land, in the abstract, should be part of Ukraine or Russia but that borders shouldn't be changed by force or the threat of force.
You'll be staring for a long time before you'll see how an "irritant on the margins" has spawned a "new and darker era in relations with the rest of Europe" or put into play the question of changing borders by force. But that's the privilege of being a VSB (Very Serious Blogger).
In the humility files, this blog made fun of Mitt Romney during the last campaign season for talking about the possibility of a new US rivalry with Russia. As the Glenn Reynolds meme has it, they told them that if they voted for Mitt Romney, we'd be dragged back into a futile Cold War with Russia, and they were right!
UPDATE: Bonus serious tweeting from Josh Marshall --
Countries that fear encirclement while also being very powerful are usually very dangerous.
Who was it complaining two weeks ago about trite historical frames for analyzing contemporary US-Russia relations?
Russia poses little if any geopolitical risk to the United States or its vital interests. It is at best an irritant on the margins.
Josh Marshall, 1 March --
Lets say that Russia proceeds and formally annexes Crimea and perhaps goes ahead and slices off the most Russified eastern portions of Ukraine. Setting aside relations with the US, that will undoubtedly spawn a new and darker era in relations with the rest of Europe and a post-partition Ukraine that is hyper-European in its posture both because of renewed Russian aggression and a transformed composition of Ukrainian and Russian percentages of the population ... The crux of current crisis, or the central issues at stake, is not which slabs of land, in the abstract, should be part of Ukraine or Russia but that borders shouldn't be changed by force or the threat of force.
You'll be staring for a long time before you'll see how an "irritant on the margins" has spawned a "new and darker era in relations with the rest of Europe" or put into play the question of changing borders by force. But that's the privilege of being a VSB (Very Serious Blogger).
In the humility files, this blog made fun of Mitt Romney during the last campaign season for talking about the possibility of a new US rivalry with Russia. As the Glenn Reynolds meme has it, they told them that if they voted for Mitt Romney, we'd be dragged back into a futile Cold War with Russia, and they were right!
UPDATE: Bonus serious tweeting from Josh Marshall --
Countries that fear encirclement while also being very powerful are usually very dangerous.
Who was it complaining two weeks ago about trite historical frames for analyzing contemporary US-Russia relations?