An article in the New Yorker explains what Putin is doing in Russia

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An article in the New Yorker explains what Putin is doing in Russia

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LSURussian

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[Susan] Rice had already put in place a kind of shadow National Security Council for Democrats, with various foreign-policy mavens charged with heading up regional directorates. The group was later dubbed the Phoenix Initiative, a name intended to send the message that, in the wake of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration’s Vulcans, American foreign policy, under a Democratic President, would, like the mythical bird, rise from the ashes. Rice declared that the group’s thinking had broken free of the traditional clash in American foreign-policy thinking between realist power politics and liberal idealism.

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Putin is turning his country to shite

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Buoyed by the sharp rise in energy prices, Putin was able to do what Yeltsin had not: he won enormous popular support by paying salaries and pensions, eliminating budget deficits, and creating a growing urban middle class. It was hardly a secret that Putin had also created his own oligarchy, with old Leningrad pals and colleagues from the security forces now running, and robbing, the state’s vast energy enterprises. This almost unimaginably corrupt set of arrangements, which came to be known as Kremlin, Inc., outraged nearly everyone, but the relative atmosphere of stability, in which tens of millions of Russians enjoyed a sense of economic well-being and private liberty, provided Putin with a kind of authoritarian legitimacy.

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They were against the regime—that was the main thing, being against. This happens in lots of transitions: a coalition against Them. And then what they are for gets worked out in the post-revolutionary phase.

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Russia and Putin should act in accord with the best interests of Russia, as should any wise nation.

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It just goes to show you that Putin has a strategy, Obama does not.

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Russia is on the decline

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It was an hour before Obama managed more than “hello.”

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Putin demanded that the U.S. cede to him the former Soviet republics—Ukraine above all—as a Russian sphere of influence

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In April 2008, NATO held a summit in Bucharest where the issue of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO was raised. While speaking during a closed meeting, Putin threatened that if Georgia joined NATO, Russia would be forced to create a buffer zone in between them, while Ukraine would simply "cease to exist."

Although NATO refused to admit Georgia and Ukraine at the 2008 summit, then-U.S. President George W. Bush's administration introduced a guarantee that both countries would one day become NATO members.

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