To Learn about Ukraine, Follow the Money
Thomas L. Friedman, NYT
APRIL 1, 2014
If you follow the debates about Ukraine, you can see three trends: those who use the crisis for humor, those who use it to reinforce preconceived views and those trying to figure out if it’s telling us something new about today’s world.
For humor, I like Seth Meyers’s line: “Despite the fact that the Ukraine has been all over the news for the past few weeks, a survey found that 64 percent of U.S. students still couldn’t find Ukraine on a map. Said Vladimir Putin, ‘Soon nobody will.’ ”
For self-reinforcement, the op-ed pages are full of the argument that Putin’s seizure of Crimea signals a return of either traditional 19th-century power politics or the Cold War — and anyone who thought globalization had trumped such geopolitics is naïve.
For new thinking, I’m intrigued by an argument made by Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist, and Nader Mousavizadeh, a geopolitical consultant and Reuters columnist, in different ways: That Putin represents a new hybrid — leaders who are using the tools, and profits, from globalization to promote, as Mousavizadeh put it, “strategic choices in direct opposition” to Western “values and interests.” Or as Gessen said in The Washington Post: “Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world. ... This is exactly how Russians see the events in Ukraine: The West is literally taking over, and only Russian troops can stand between the Slavic country’s unsuspecting citizens and the homosexuals marching in from Brussels.”
(More here.)
APRIL 1, 2014
If you follow the debates about Ukraine, you can see three trends: those who use the crisis for humor, those who use it to reinforce preconceived views and those trying to figure out if it’s telling us something new about today’s world.
For humor, I like Seth Meyers’s line: “Despite the fact that the Ukraine has been all over the news for the past few weeks, a survey found that 64 percent of U.S. students still couldn’t find Ukraine on a map. Said Vladimir Putin, ‘Soon nobody will.’ ”
For self-reinforcement, the op-ed pages are full of the argument that Putin’s seizure of Crimea signals a return of either traditional 19th-century power politics or the Cold War — and anyone who thought globalization had trumped such geopolitics is naïve.
For new thinking, I’m intrigued by an argument made by Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist, and Nader Mousavizadeh, a geopolitical consultant and Reuters columnist, in different ways: That Putin represents a new hybrid — leaders who are using the tools, and profits, from globalization to promote, as Mousavizadeh put it, “strategic choices in direct opposition” to Western “values and interests.” Or as Gessen said in The Washington Post: “Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world. ... This is exactly how Russians see the events in Ukraine: The West is literally taking over, and only Russian troops can stand between the Slavic country’s unsuspecting citizens and the homosexuals marching in from Brussels.”
(More here.)
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