On close to a weekly basis, Rossiya-1 TV channel journalist Pavel Zarubin poses questions to Russian President Putin of which snippets are reported on by Russian media, but the transcripts of those sessions I’ve never seen published by the Kremlin at the Russian President’s website, which I find both odd and frustrating as I want primary sources if at all possible, not secondary or tertiary as the reliability degrades the further away from the primary source.
"Use the source, Luke!", a play on Yoda of Star Wars fame, is what I know from my years of programming. Source meaning "the original source code". Same is true in the context of history: Nothing like the ORIGINAL transcripts to figure out context and meaning. Odd that these are not automatically available always. However Putin is so prolific that it may just be a matter of overworked transcribers.
thanks karl.. i am sorry you are frustrated at not getting the full transcript.. however, some of the things discussed in this have already been mentioned by putin in the questions from the public earlier this week.. the idea of him being naive and thinking the west was their friend - that was previously mentioned by him.. and of course he is absolutely correct that the western elites wanted to divide up russia for rape and pillage, but they have yet to be able to do this... it is a good thing to focus on - nationalism - and that the west elite want to tear russia apart... russia will have to keep an eye on its own elite too, because these types of jackels don't share the idea of nation, so much as money and power..
it will be a long time before russia has a leader on the level of putin.. its possible, but i think he is a once in a lifetime leader with great clarity, stamina and vision.. that is a rare combination of traits and not seen anywhere else on the world stage at present as i see it.. russia is lucky to have him... for him to clarify the seriousness of where russia is at present and the serious threat posed to it is very wise indeed.. aside from being true, it is important to galvenize this perspective in the russian people so they will not be fooled as he was 20 odd years ago.. kudos to him for acknowledging all of this..
Thanks james. I knew he mentioned most of all that and more--but this wasn't the first time with that channel/format/reporter, and I wanted to put that into the record so when the Russians read it they will know I'm serious. As for Putin being a one-shot deal, I've been impressed with some of the younger people in both government and business that have demonstrated similar grasp/ability. Yes, Putin has set the standard, so it ought to be possible to keep that standard going. And of course, we are also talking about the whole government and society as they're all doing this together like an orchestra with Putin as composer and conductor.
I think that what makes Putin unusual, if not unique in the politics of the last generation, is that he survived the heavy dose of Kool Aid that came in as an antidote to the 'failure' of communism.
In fact the failure was a failure of the nomenklatura whose one achievement after 1953 was to defend their positions against democracy.
Stalin knew that without the re-introduction of democracy, inthe party and the soviets the state was doomed. And he was right.
During the war there were increasing prophecies of a new dawn a coming; the Thaw that would follow victory and seal the Great Patriotic War with a renewal of the revolution which had been lost, if anyone wants a date, on Jan 15 1919. After which the likelihood of the Revolution morphing into a world explosion of national uprisings diminished to the point of making the subsequent Comintern and discussions of international work sometghing vrery different: the Proletarian reolution became the Colonial National Liberation movement- the one of which putin recently spoke.
What aborted that Thaw were two interacting trends each feeding into the other and developing from it in a dialectical process.
The first was the determination of the Stalinists, Stalin's apparatchiki, the likes of Krushchev and Bulganin, Kaganovitch and Beria, not to give away the power that the Cehtre had accumulated in the run up to the inevitable war and during the war. The second, re-inforcing their position, was the Imperial ruling class's determination to crush Russia and communism while the Soviet Union was weakened by war.
They were motivated patyly by the long held detestation of communism but much more by the determination to purge the societies of the West of the overwhelming admiration that its working people had for the Soviet Union, the Red Army and the role that they had played in sparing them-the British for example- from the horrors into which Russia had been plunged, the millions of dead, the armies lost in their entirety, the famines and the fruits of defeat.
These things are often forgotten but the influence through the Soviet Union of the left even in US society, which was the least exposed, was such as to give rise to such bellwethers as Henry Wallace 's campaign, the newspaper PM in New York and everything else that the Dulles brothers, McCarthy and the Kennedys feared so much.
In France and Italy-and speak it not aloud but Germany too- the Communists would have won any election held before 1948, and most for years afterwards. The Story of how they kept the Reds out of power is only partly the story of the Cultural Cold War and Operation Gladio, it was the history of the world- from the coups in Guatemala to the Emergency in Malaya, to the Mau Mau, British Guyana, Vietnam, Korea... it was all about discrdditing the communists, cutting the Giant which had emerged underrStalin, down to as manageable size. No expense was spared, millions died in the cause, and they are still dying because of the direction set under Acheson, Truman, Bevin and Attlee.
But the greatest achievement of the Cold War was that it consolidated the cronies surrounding Stalin into a caste which dared not relax the grip it had on power, meaning that the people, transformed from drudging peasants into a highly educated, cutured, self confident and competent population, dredged in the reverential patriotism its mourning for the dead inculcated in it, much more capable of undertaking a democratic government of the economy and state institutions which belonged to it than the hollowed out corrupted bureacrats left in the Kremlin... the people, kept away from the power that only they had the breadth of vision and dedication of purpose to use efficiently were left to revert to the impotence that had exasperated the workers in Petrograd and the peasants in the countryside before the Revolution.
Naturally they turned their backs on a state which fearing them pretended to despise them. Hence Yeltsin.
Putin represents the real achievements of Communism in the Soviet Union men of the generation that defended Leningrad before he was born, the generation that caught up with western Atomic science in a few months, that outran Werner von Braun by years and helped through the vulnerable early years of Korean and Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions like a proud elder brother watching out for bullies.
Socialism is indistinguishable from real patriotism. Another long story but the secret of Putin's ability to re-focus a nation and save it from ripping itself apart in order to live like Masha Gessen.
Yes, The Anti-Communist Crusade was just that, a Crusade. In his meeting with the Duma parties, there was a short discourse between Putin and Gennady Zyuganov about the need to include achievements from Soviet times in the VDNKh exhibition that's a tribute to the last 20 years of Russia, to which Putin agreed, and he also said to another gathering that what made today's Russia possible were the achievements form the Soviet Era. The idea floated of a new objective text covering the years 1938-now I second as an excellent project, although IMO it ought to begin at 1914.
It should certainly begin in 1914 if not earlier,. But it is quite understandable that they do not feel prepared yet to tackle either the Revolution/Civil War or the long power struggle that followed the realisation that the Bolsheviks were on their own . No help from the west was coming.. Just aggression. Noinvestment just the urgent necessity of pressing every hard earned rouble of capital into defence spending, on heavy industrial infrastructure, and basic things, many of them replacing the losses of war and Civil war.
Those were tough times famines stalked the land- it took years to increase crop yields into double digits, to replace sickles with scythes and scythes with machine harvesters. And all while the country was louse ridden by agents of the whites, saboteurs, and external enemies intent on converting internal dissidence into disruptions of an economy all the more fragile because it was undergoing transformation.
The lucky break-if you can call anything connected with the attack in 1941 and the tens of millions it killed 'lucky'- was the epochal political education class that the Red Army's defence and final victory constituted. It was that political education which produced a population not only committed to the system but confident of its ability to run it, that paved the way for the popular participation in the Soviets and the Party that was never quite realised. For all the rasons given above.
Hi james. I agree about Putin's being a once-in-a-lifetime leader. I would imagine also that his having been trained as a lawyer and as an economist might help him anticipate what might be required from various sectors of the government or the economy in order to realize his goals for the nation.
thanks david... all of his background seems to have led to his ability and talent for leadership.. and yet, i think it is something inborn that transcends the details of his life.. i guess this is the 'which came first?' idea put in motion..
"..Russia does not have the slightest reason to attack NATO, President Vladimir Putin has said,..."
Not true any longer, unfortunately. To defend itself from the obviously aggressive intentions of NATO, which are not choices it can make or unmake but are its very raison d'etre, Russia is bound both to ready itself to respond to NATO attacks by counterattacks, perhaps even pre-emptive operations like the SMO in Ukraine, and to dedicate a large part of its material and human resources to presrving itself.
The Soviet Union never posed a threat to NATO but it was forced to act in such a way that it was capable of becoming a threat. If it had not it would have been over run and reduced to submission.
Now Russia, symbolised in Putin's admissions of naivete in the past, is learning that in geopolitics ideology is just window dressing- the Russian Empire, the former Soviet Union is a permanent challenge to the maritime empire because the logic of Eurasia dictates its severance from the oceanic american bloc.
The logic of Eurasia is at the heart of the BRI: a melding of the super continent and Africa into an interdependent cultural and trading web of partnerships dedicated topeaceful development and the solution of the many problems that the planet as a whole faces.
Such a bloc would be impervious to Imperial aggression but in the meantime, the Empire uses every possible opening to create rifts between the peoples of Eurasia.
Those who hate the very concept of globalisation are out of luck: it is coming, not in the malignant form envisaged by western imperialism but in the shape of the ending of the empire and all appetites for empire.
Thank you bevin, I suspect the lamebrains in NATO thought they would simply drive down the freeway to Moscow and then auction off the real estate to the east. They likely felt that it was now or never given the reports of significant Russian missile advances. How wrong they are!
However they will never stop as for UKUSA it is imperative to destroy the slavlands and their friends. They are still at it in the stans, persistent undermining, blocking, fomenting discontent. No end to it as the past few centuries will evidence. Now they are desperately trying to fragment the arabs and persians with another of their mendacious aggressions combined with genocides. They seem to have quarantined potential EU/Rus alliances for the next decade or two as well.
I read it that the Westies have continued doggedly along the Brzezinski path of divide and rule and before that Brzezinski got it from some englander theory or fear that Russia was going to steal their Indian treasure from them. It is an endless stupidity and the entire other parts of world is sucked in to the empty minded vortex.
I see that the SMO and associated jolt to the Russian MIC has forced their innovation cycle to the point where warfare has been rewritten on the run (as it usually is) resulting in the overtaking of the westies and their $$$ locked, lazy and unaccountable - business as usual. However it is heartening to hear that the Russian team are now talking around nothing less than complete Ukrainian capitulation. Sounds good enough for me as that may at least snuff the latest nazi awakening.
Your last point on globalisation is pertinent. One can almost hear the rock crushing under the wagon wheels as the eurasian cart approaches.
Related to your, "One can almost hear the rock crushing under the wagon wheels as the eurasian cart approaches," comment is this photo Pepe Escobar posted to his Telegram of a Turkmen street that's actually a mosaic, https://t.me/rocknrollgeopolitics/9367
bevin and karl - what are you suggesting here?? when nato and friends destroy nordstream, do you advocate for doing something similar to the west? essentially russia is dealing with a terrorist state... responding to a terrorist state with more terror is one option.. is that the option you are talking about here? thanks..
IMO, NATO has already been defeated by Russia without Russia having to rely on anything specifically offensive. As I've written often, NATO is guilty of scoring many own-goals that have debilitated it without Russia needing to do much.
All the circumstantial evidence that's already available points to the Empire as the Nord Stream culprit, but that's not enough to convict despite the objective global public having already rendered its verdict, which makes Russia's explanation of events far more objective leading more nations to side with Russia. It created blowback for both the Empire and its European Vassals, yet it didn't harm Russia at all. That's three Own-Goals! in one event. And the one undamaged string is ready to use but the Germans refuse to allow it to send gas. So, add another Own-Goal. Soon, Europe won't have a head remaining to shoot itself in, the feet being shot-off long ago..
The nature of the relationship between Russia and the NATO is implicit inthe geography: Russia dominates Eurasia, the World Island, the Atlantic alliance raids it, as it always has from the sea, and from the peripheries.
When the Empire began, back in the sixteenth century the relationship was similar. n those days it was the Ottoman Empire that dominated and stood astride the trade routes between east and west. The Atlantic powers broke that dominance by discoveing the route around the Cape, longer than the routes through the silk roads or the Red sea but untroubled by Ottoman power. The chance discoveries of the vast riches of America -which effectively fell into their laps- allowed the maritime imperialists to expand their trade by using silver, for example, in China and through the use of the fruits of the 'Columbian Exchange.' This strengthened them and for five plus hundred years the maritime empire, its capital scooting from Cadiz to Lisbon, to Antwerp to Amsterdam to London, to NewYork the World Island struggled to match the maritime powers.
Of course it is complicated but in modern times the question in the west has hinged, as Mackinder predicted, on the position of eastern and central Europe. In essence its been about the two dominant powers Russia and Germany- united (as in the Dreikaiserbund) they dominate, but when Germany is allied with the west Eurasia is disadvantaged-it runs up against an iron curtain before it unites the Pacific with the Atlantic.
Don't thank me-it's self indulgence. It only works if there is response. You know that-you're a musician.
As to the 'terrorism' I really do think that it is part and parcel of piracy and piracy is what the Empire has always, in one form or another, the opium trade with china for example, practised.
It is called an outlaw empire because that is what it is- the only laws it recognises are the laws of the sea and laws of war, both sets of which are nebulous and honoured traditionally in the breach rather than in being observed. The outlaw empire believes and always did that so long as it can retain hegemony those it wrongs may whistle-there is nothing that they can do.
Ask Nicaragua for example. Or Serbia.
They call it the rules based order because all the rules were buried in its foundations.
"Use the source, Luke!", a play on Yoda of Star Wars fame, is what I know from my years of programming. Source meaning "the original source code". Same is true in the context of history: Nothing like the ORIGINAL transcripts to figure out context and meaning. Odd that these are not automatically available always. However Putin is so prolific that it may just be a matter of overworked transcribers.
As I said to james, this isn't the first time, and is actually specific to this one channel/program/reporter.
thanks karl.. i am sorry you are frustrated at not getting the full transcript.. however, some of the things discussed in this have already been mentioned by putin in the questions from the public earlier this week.. the idea of him being naive and thinking the west was their friend - that was previously mentioned by him.. and of course he is absolutely correct that the western elites wanted to divide up russia for rape and pillage, but they have yet to be able to do this... it is a good thing to focus on - nationalism - and that the west elite want to tear russia apart... russia will have to keep an eye on its own elite too, because these types of jackels don't share the idea of nation, so much as money and power..
it will be a long time before russia has a leader on the level of putin.. its possible, but i think he is a once in a lifetime leader with great clarity, stamina and vision.. that is a rare combination of traits and not seen anywhere else on the world stage at present as i see it.. russia is lucky to have him... for him to clarify the seriousness of where russia is at present and the serious threat posed to it is very wise indeed.. aside from being true, it is important to galvenize this perspective in the russian people so they will not be fooled as he was 20 odd years ago.. kudos to him for acknowledging all of this..
Thanks james. I knew he mentioned most of all that and more--but this wasn't the first time with that channel/format/reporter, and I wanted to put that into the record so when the Russians read it they will know I'm serious. As for Putin being a one-shot deal, I've been impressed with some of the younger people in both government and business that have demonstrated similar grasp/ability. Yes, Putin has set the standard, so it ought to be possible to keep that standard going. And of course, we are also talking about the whole government and society as they're all doing this together like an orchestra with Putin as composer and conductor.
I think that what makes Putin unusual, if not unique in the politics of the last generation, is that he survived the heavy dose of Kool Aid that came in as an antidote to the 'failure' of communism.
In fact the failure was a failure of the nomenklatura whose one achievement after 1953 was to defend their positions against democracy.
Stalin knew that without the re-introduction of democracy, inthe party and the soviets the state was doomed. And he was right.
During the war there were increasing prophecies of a new dawn a coming; the Thaw that would follow victory and seal the Great Patriotic War with a renewal of the revolution which had been lost, if anyone wants a date, on Jan 15 1919. After which the likelihood of the Revolution morphing into a world explosion of national uprisings diminished to the point of making the subsequent Comintern and discussions of international work sometghing vrery different: the Proletarian reolution became the Colonial National Liberation movement- the one of which putin recently spoke.
What aborted that Thaw were two interacting trends each feeding into the other and developing from it in a dialectical process.
The first was the determination of the Stalinists, Stalin's apparatchiki, the likes of Krushchev and Bulganin, Kaganovitch and Beria, not to give away the power that the Cehtre had accumulated in the run up to the inevitable war and during the war. The second, re-inforcing their position, was the Imperial ruling class's determination to crush Russia and communism while the Soviet Union was weakened by war.
They were motivated patyly by the long held detestation of communism but much more by the determination to purge the societies of the West of the overwhelming admiration that its working people had for the Soviet Union, the Red Army and the role that they had played in sparing them-the British for example- from the horrors into which Russia had been plunged, the millions of dead, the armies lost in their entirety, the famines and the fruits of defeat.
These things are often forgotten but the influence through the Soviet Union of the left even in US society, which was the least exposed, was such as to give rise to such bellwethers as Henry Wallace 's campaign, the newspaper PM in New York and everything else that the Dulles brothers, McCarthy and the Kennedys feared so much.
In France and Italy-and speak it not aloud but Germany too- the Communists would have won any election held before 1948, and most for years afterwards. The Story of how they kept the Reds out of power is only partly the story of the Cultural Cold War and Operation Gladio, it was the history of the world- from the coups in Guatemala to the Emergency in Malaya, to the Mau Mau, British Guyana, Vietnam, Korea... it was all about discrdditing the communists, cutting the Giant which had emerged underrStalin, down to as manageable size. No expense was spared, millions died in the cause, and they are still dying because of the direction set under Acheson, Truman, Bevin and Attlee.
But the greatest achievement of the Cold War was that it consolidated the cronies surrounding Stalin into a caste which dared not relax the grip it had on power, meaning that the people, transformed from drudging peasants into a highly educated, cutured, self confident and competent population, dredged in the reverential patriotism its mourning for the dead inculcated in it, much more capable of undertaking a democratic government of the economy and state institutions which belonged to it than the hollowed out corrupted bureacrats left in the Kremlin... the people, kept away from the power that only they had the breadth of vision and dedication of purpose to use efficiently were left to revert to the impotence that had exasperated the workers in Petrograd and the peasants in the countryside before the Revolution.
Naturally they turned their backs on a state which fearing them pretended to despise them. Hence Yeltsin.
Putin represents the real achievements of Communism in the Soviet Union men of the generation that defended Leningrad before he was born, the generation that caught up with western Atomic science in a few months, that outran Werner von Braun by years and helped through the vulnerable early years of Korean and Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions like a proud elder brother watching out for bullies.
Socialism is indistinguishable from real patriotism. Another long story but the secret of Putin's ability to re-focus a nation and save it from ripping itself apart in order to live like Masha Gessen.
Yes, The Anti-Communist Crusade was just that, a Crusade. In his meeting with the Duma parties, there was a short discourse between Putin and Gennady Zyuganov about the need to include achievements from Soviet times in the VDNKh exhibition that's a tribute to the last 20 years of Russia, to which Putin agreed, and he also said to another gathering that what made today's Russia possible were the achievements form the Soviet Era. The idea floated of a new objective text covering the years 1938-now I second as an excellent project, although IMO it ought to begin at 1914.
It should certainly begin in 1914 if not earlier,. But it is quite understandable that they do not feel prepared yet to tackle either the Revolution/Civil War or the long power struggle that followed the realisation that the Bolsheviks were on their own . No help from the west was coming.. Just aggression. Noinvestment just the urgent necessity of pressing every hard earned rouble of capital into defence spending, on heavy industrial infrastructure, and basic things, many of them replacing the losses of war and Civil war.
Those were tough times famines stalked the land- it took years to increase crop yields into double digits, to replace sickles with scythes and scythes with machine harvesters. And all while the country was louse ridden by agents of the whites, saboteurs, and external enemies intent on converting internal dissidence into disruptions of an economy all the more fragile because it was undergoing transformation.
The lucky break-if you can call anything connected with the attack in 1941 and the tens of millions it killed 'lucky'- was the epochal political education class that the Red Army's defence and final victory constituted. It was that political education which produced a population not only committed to the system but confident of its ability to run it, that paved the way for the popular participation in the Soviets and the Party that was never quite realised. For all the rasons given above.
Hi james. I agree about Putin's being a once-in-a-lifetime leader. I would imagine also that his having been trained as a lawyer and as an economist might help him anticipate what might be required from various sectors of the government or the economy in order to realize his goals for the nation.
thanks david... all of his background seems to have led to his ability and talent for leadership.. and yet, i think it is something inborn that transcends the details of his life.. i guess this is the 'which came first?' idea put in motion..
Hi james. I agree that inborn characteristics tend to have the most influence. (If my previous reply suggested otherwise, it was unintentional.)
"..Russia does not have the slightest reason to attack NATO, President Vladimir Putin has said,..."
Not true any longer, unfortunately. To defend itself from the obviously aggressive intentions of NATO, which are not choices it can make or unmake but are its very raison d'etre, Russia is bound both to ready itself to respond to NATO attacks by counterattacks, perhaps even pre-emptive operations like the SMO in Ukraine, and to dedicate a large part of its material and human resources to presrving itself.
The Soviet Union never posed a threat to NATO but it was forced to act in such a way that it was capable of becoming a threat. If it had not it would have been over run and reduced to submission.
Now Russia, symbolised in Putin's admissions of naivete in the past, is learning that in geopolitics ideology is just window dressing- the Russian Empire, the former Soviet Union is a permanent challenge to the maritime empire because the logic of Eurasia dictates its severance from the oceanic american bloc.
The logic of Eurasia is at the heart of the BRI: a melding of the super continent and Africa into an interdependent cultural and trading web of partnerships dedicated topeaceful development and the solution of the many problems that the planet as a whole faces.
Such a bloc would be impervious to Imperial aggression but in the meantime, the Empire uses every possible opening to create rifts between the peoples of Eurasia.
Those who hate the very concept of globalisation are out of luck: it is coming, not in the malignant form envisaged by western imperialism but in the shape of the ending of the empire and all appetites for empire.
As is said, the best defense is a good offense.
Thank you bevin, I suspect the lamebrains in NATO thought they would simply drive down the freeway to Moscow and then auction off the real estate to the east. They likely felt that it was now or never given the reports of significant Russian missile advances. How wrong they are!
However they will never stop as for UKUSA it is imperative to destroy the slavlands and their friends. They are still at it in the stans, persistent undermining, blocking, fomenting discontent. No end to it as the past few centuries will evidence. Now they are desperately trying to fragment the arabs and persians with another of their mendacious aggressions combined with genocides. They seem to have quarantined potential EU/Rus alliances for the next decade or two as well.
I read it that the Westies have continued doggedly along the Brzezinski path of divide and rule and before that Brzezinski got it from some englander theory or fear that Russia was going to steal their Indian treasure from them. It is an endless stupidity and the entire other parts of world is sucked in to the empty minded vortex.
I see that the SMO and associated jolt to the Russian MIC has forced their innovation cycle to the point where warfare has been rewritten on the run (as it usually is) resulting in the overtaking of the westies and their $$$ locked, lazy and unaccountable - business as usual. However it is heartening to hear that the Russian team are now talking around nothing less than complete Ukrainian capitulation. Sounds good enough for me as that may at least snuff the latest nazi awakening.
Your last point on globalisation is pertinent. One can almost hear the rock crushing under the wagon wheels as the eurasian cart approaches.
Related to your, "One can almost hear the rock crushing under the wagon wheels as the eurasian cart approaches," comment is this photo Pepe Escobar posted to his Telegram of a Turkmen street that's actually a mosaic, https://t.me/rocknrollgeopolitics/9367
bevin and karl - what are you suggesting here?? when nato and friends destroy nordstream, do you advocate for doing something similar to the west? essentially russia is dealing with a terrorist state... responding to a terrorist state with more terror is one option.. is that the option you are talking about here? thanks..
IMO, NATO has already been defeated by Russia without Russia having to rely on anything specifically offensive. As I've written often, NATO is guilty of scoring many own-goals that have debilitated it without Russia needing to do much.
do you think this way about nordstream? i can see it to some extent...
All the circumstantial evidence that's already available points to the Empire as the Nord Stream culprit, but that's not enough to convict despite the objective global public having already rendered its verdict, which makes Russia's explanation of events far more objective leading more nations to side with Russia. It created blowback for both the Empire and its European Vassals, yet it didn't harm Russia at all. That's three Own-Goals! in one event. And the one undamaged string is ready to use but the Germans refuse to allow it to send gas. So, add another Own-Goal. Soon, Europe won't have a head remaining to shoot itself in, the feet being shot-off long ago..
you make a very good point here! thanks... appearances can be deceiving!
The nature of the relationship between Russia and the NATO is implicit inthe geography: Russia dominates Eurasia, the World Island, the Atlantic alliance raids it, as it always has from the sea, and from the peripheries.
When the Empire began, back in the sixteenth century the relationship was similar. n those days it was the Ottoman Empire that dominated and stood astride the trade routes between east and west. The Atlantic powers broke that dominance by discoveing the route around the Cape, longer than the routes through the silk roads or the Red sea but untroubled by Ottoman power. The chance discoveries of the vast riches of America -which effectively fell into their laps- allowed the maritime imperialists to expand their trade by using silver, for example, in China and through the use of the fruits of the 'Columbian Exchange.' This strengthened them and for five plus hundred years the maritime empire, its capital scooting from Cadiz to Lisbon, to Antwerp to Amsterdam to London, to NewYork the World Island struggled to match the maritime powers.
Of course it is complicated but in modern times the question in the west has hinged, as Mackinder predicted, on the position of eastern and central Europe. In essence its been about the two dominant powers Russia and Germany- united (as in the Dreikaiserbund) they dominate, but when Germany is allied with the west Eurasia is disadvantaged-it runs up against an iron curtain before it unites the Pacific with the Atlantic.
thanks for the overview bevin, but i am still curious of what you advocate for here with regard to russias response to terrorist acts?
Don't thank me-it's self indulgence. It only works if there is response. You know that-you're a musician.
As to the 'terrorism' I really do think that it is part and parcel of piracy and piracy is what the Empire has always, in one form or another, the opium trade with china for example, practised.
It is called an outlaw empire because that is what it is- the only laws it recognises are the laws of the sea and laws of war, both sets of which are nebulous and honoured traditionally in the breach rather than in being observed. The outlaw empire believes and always did that so long as it can retain hegemony those it wrongs may whistle-there is nothing that they can do.
Ask Nicaragua for example. Or Serbia.
They call it the rules based order because all the rules were buried in its foundations.