generalspeaking

Hail The Conquering Hero

"They'll never be a super-power. They can't, they don't have the population, they don't have the innovation. Russia could be a very successful, advanced, industrialized state of about 140 million people. But Putin doesn't see that. He bought into the imperial ambitions that when he came to power he was dismissive of. So he began to be seduced by power.... He has bought into the fantasy."
"That's what's going to happen to Russia. It will be Greece on the Black Sea."
[For Russia, hosting Sochi -- a Winter Games in a sub-tropical climate is] "one exorbitant, costly, unaffordable Putin party that, no matter how good it will look at the time, will leave a terrible economic and political smell afterward for which Russia is ill-equipped to pay."
Aurel Brain, Canadian visiting professor of international relations, Harvard University

Athens 2004 Olympics beach volleyball arena, abandoned

"They lost that in the Soviet collapse, and then in the Russian collapse, and he has been trying to get back on the pedestal."
"What he's done is to create a very tempting target for people in the North Caucasus who don't like him."
"The one that's really going to get him, I bet, is he says the Olympics cost $14-billion. Others say it cost $51-billion. So where is the $37-billion? I can surmise that a lot of it has been stolen. By whom? People with access. Friends of Putin. That's not going to go well."
"In Russia, of course, nothing is what it seems. We don't realize what a pathetic remnant Russia is, and how a lot of this is smoke and mirrors.... Sochi's basically a fantasy. It is a fantasy of a Russia that is a superpower It is a fantasy of a Russia that is a technologically advanced state."
"The Olympics might be the trigger for that tipping point where he starts to go down. Then the question is: What does he do then?"
Neil MacFarlane, Lester B. Pearson professor of international relations, University of Oxford

Vladimir Putin in his presidential suite during the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremony Photo: AP

Depends. Depends on whether the Russian population can be depended upon to reject the absurd fantasy of power that Vladimir Putin exudes. They have, after all, seen their president gull, entrap, and out-play the man who is recognized as the most powerful in the world, U.S. President Barack Obama. Mr. Obama, like Mr. Putin is a man of words; in Mr. Obama's instance, those words are soaring ones of fantasy, but he also issues words of warning, and makes no effort to back them up.

Famously as well, Mr. Putin, while being a man of words, those words are usually gruffly intimidating, since that's his style, and he does tend to back up his words with action; he is not averse to military action following warnings and threats of action. For Mr. Obama, who has turned out to be a shrinking violet on the world stage, the magical effect of reassuring words are meant to control events, but they do not when they are merely empty rhetoric.

As for Mr. Putin's delusions of power, and his reversion to venerating the Soviet Union and its master criminal Joseph Stalin, it is a symptom of nostalgic regret. And Mr. Putin feels, as the powerful figure he feels he is, if Joseph Stalin could be such a successful dictator as to absorb Russia's hegemonic multi-state union, powerfully increasing the population numbers swift to obey his orders, why not he, equally charismatic and given to displays of his physical prowess?

Hasn't he demonstrated his foreign relations credentials more than amply? By deft diplomatic actions ushering President Obama toward forgiveness of the damnably atrocity-loving regime of Bashar al Assad, enabling him, for the small price of appearing to surrender his chemical arsenal, to continue his mutilation of a country, persecuting its majority, arresting, torturing, murdering, bombing, assaulting and finally starving Syrian civilians to death?

From there it was a simple process to similarly disarm the intentions of the world's most powerful figure -- simple because he really had no heart in his threats to prevent Iran, by all and any means available, from acquiring nuclear warheads -- to agree to a simple-minded process that would significantly offer the Republic more time it needs to proceed uninterrupted by rude interventions by a concerned West, to complete the process it set about in refining ballistics and purifying weapons-grade uranium.

The triumphant third of the series of gallant intervention to secure another victory, was to appear to save the hide of a colleague. Coercing an already-convinced President of Ukraine that the country would be better off aligning itself with its old mentoring state of Russia than taking a rescue package from the European Union which obviously has an underhanded plan in mind, which pure-minded Russia obviously does not, willing to bail out its old satellite-dependent out of the goodness of Putin's heart.

Labels: Economy, Olympic Games, Russia, Security, Sports

posted by Pieface @ Monday, February 10, 2014