Russia very much does not see itself as a weaker/poorer country. They aren’t entirely wrong either. They don’t have as much money as we do, but they control the largest criminal network in the world which is integrated with their intelligence and special forces operations which are also the best in the world in terms of what they can actually do. Our special forces can kill you, theirs can straight up co-opt you.
They absolutely don’t want to fight any wars with the US involving conventional armies. And they don’t want to depend on keeping a positive relationship with the US to keep that from happening… So they need nukes that can get around our anti missile technology to keep things stalemated so that they don’t have to worry about matching the US military machine in sheer size and spend which is obviously totally impossible.
The anti proliferation treaties they signed with us they came to regret as we came up with better and better anti missile technology. That’s why they were so pissed off about the Star Wars stuff in the 90’s-2000’s. They saw it (with quite a bit of justification I should point out) as a violation of the spirit of the treaties we had signed with them… but they didn’t want to be seen as the ones breaking the treaties.
Trump withdrawing from these Treaties is smoking gun proof that he’s doing Putin’s bidding. Getting a US president to have the US exit from treaties the Russian security state doesn’t like is like letters to santa level level wish fulfillment.
Russia competes with us successfully on security by picking and choosing where it’s going to compete with us. They have a large conventional military, but it’s not designed to actually fight us… it’s designed to fight the kinds of wars it fights (Chechnya, Syria, Etc). The rest of their security state is aimed at competing with us, and they’re basically beating us in every area they’ve decided to focus on.
This. Putin is maybe worth $200B and it’s because of his interests in oil and gas companies. IMO, it’s the first place to look to explain anything Russia does.
So, meh to the whole post, but this reminds me of something I heard last night. Trump put the Special Forces directly under the control of some stupid flunky and outside the usual chain of command and just did this, after the election. Tin foil hat maybe, but that sounds like they have some assassinating to do on the way out. Probably favors for people like MBS and maybe Erdogan. I wouldn’t stand too close to Fethullah Gülen if I were you.
arms races are not about outright military might anymore. it’s stochastic terrorism. the more you sell, the more armed conflicts the world will have. and every such conflict is an opportunity for putin to come in and extract something for himself or to drum up local nationalists.
it’s an oil company with nukes and veto power in the security council. everything you think of exxon as being an unscrupulous greedy company, you can attribute to russia plus RusADA steroids.
It’s important to understand that the Russian system is totally different than ours. It comes from a different root and it has very different norms. A lot of this is about how different societies of humans distribute what they consider to be the top of their talent distribution, and what they consider that to mean. Vladimir Putin was a textbook example of what the USSR considered to be the top of the talent distribution and when he was my age he was a KGB colonel in the Ukraine. If he was born in 1985 in the US he’d have gone into a totally different field than spy craft.
Imagine the election was just stolen and you’re the only thing between an illegitimate executive branch coup and you’re golfing while the one key lawsuit that can stop it all is sitting unfilled on a desk somewhere
I think it’s massively overblown as an issue on its own, but the thinking on Open Skies in particular is that the US gained lots as it gave NATO and other ‘Western’ militaries reason to collaborate to overfly Russia, whereas there was no similar coalition involved for Russia to collaborate with and overfly the US. So it was a way to promote US involvement with ‘anti-Russian’ militaries.
So Putin benefits as the treaty is basically just a mini NATO where there’s no one specific threat, so much as just a bunch of people hanging out whose only purpose is being against Russia.
The planes seems a minor issue, though, as they’re obsolete anyway (though the procurement of replacements was cancelled). The big issue with Open Skies is that reinstatement is a legal grey area but likely needs a senate vote which Republicans can likely block.
I don’t think Trump is particularly pro Putin, though. I do think the above is a decent argument that Open Skies in particular is something they’d be happy to see the back of, but I doubt it’s too big an issue for them.
The counter-argument to whether Russia has the largest criminal network is that it depends on an even larger criminal network to launder it’s “profits”–the world banking system which is largely controlled and dominated by by the US. Same as when the Latin American narco-traffickers were considered to be among the foremost criminal enterprises, they still had to launder their money through complicit banks.
I don’t understand your point about Russian special forces being better than their American counterparts because they can co-opt. That’s what the CIA has been doing forever. No matter what start date we use, if we tally up the number of coups, destabilizations, and/or “co-opt-ings”; I don’t see a way that the rankings on this front are anything but USA#1.
their “special forces” are not better, they simply operate with fewer constraints and even less oversight, it’s often/usually just one crazy guy calling the shots, no actual analysis of cause and effect.
Dude the CIA is not competent. They’re a bunch of bungling assholes with briefcases full of money and guns with absolutely no regard for human life. It’s not that the Russians are more evil than the CIA or anything, we absolutely suck too… but the talent allocation is radically different and the quality of game the Russians are playing is just on a totally different level.
The criminal side of it is important because it does 2 things: 1) it lets Russian espionage have information gathering operations all over the world that are self funding and capable of doing stuff and 2) it’s a ripe vein for recruiting the kind of people you need do to espionage at scale.
Look I’m not arguing that we’re the good guys. I’m not arguing our bankers aren’t super complicit. I mean dude tax havens exist, one of them is the entire state of delaware, and we’re the worlds only super power. We are very clearly pro money laundering, pro tax evasion, and pro global shadow economy.
Skydiver convinced me otherwise but I used to be convinced that the reason classification existed was to make it illegal to talk about the various and assorted fuck ups by different three letter acronym government agencies. She’s right that it’s because there’s a lot of useful information in the technical specifications that really explain why it exists… But I still maintain that it’s a huge fringe benefit for career foreign services types that they can manage some of the most astounding fuck ups in our coutries history and nobody finds out about them until 20 years after they are dead and nobody cares enough to fight the FOIA request anymore.
The Bay of Pigs and attempts to blow up Fidel’s Cigar were not outliers. They’re perfectly representative of the work product of our intelligence agencies. By contrast Putins spy agencies successfully kill heavily guarded enemies of his who know that Putin wants them dead all the time. All the time.