(December 2, 2018 at 11:46 am)Amarok Wrote: So now he's advocating political espionage and no bush obeying the law was not a blunder .
It has to be said that prior to Clinton great powers largely respected eachother’s Right to decide how it wished to run itself. Even Cold War efforts to subvert eachother was limited to largely limited to influence on peripheral players in eachother’s heirarchy.
It was under Clinton that the US took advantage of the chaos resulting from collapse of soviet union to attempt to weave the disparate political fractions in the former Soviet Union into a web through which the US can menipulate political outcomes in the former Soviet States, and used it with the singular goal of crippling forever Russia’s position in Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
Shortly after Putin ascended to Russian presidency in 2000, he took advantage of the opportunity afforded by 9/11 to try to play nice with the US in the hopes of calling a truce with the US in the american war to subvert core Russian geopolitical interests. Bush junior pretty much just laughed and spat in his face. The US under Bush continued to try to subvert Russian influence in Ukraine, Armenia and Syria. It can be said what Putin has done since around 2006 was to,push back on american efforts to roll back Russian influence in traditional Russian sphere of influence.
The Russian electoral meddling of 2016 was precisely the sort of brilliant political influence stroke that changes the world’s balance of power at a stroke, doing grave and difficult repair to harm to the adversary across multiple fronts, while securing one’s own geostratetic interests, with no bloodshed. It is the sort our friend the cherubic fool here advocates.
But we are the loser. We instigated the conflict. We sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind in the political espionage and covert influence game.
It should be a guiding principle of American covert operation:
Where ever the conflict involves careful assessment of the interests, motives, conflicts and weaknesses of human elements in societies, America will lose. Our opponents will win. Because we are ego driven and congenitally suck at assessing other people. So we should not play.
