That was the weakness of the Bushcons. They alienated the world because they were aggressive to everyone. It made America weaker.

Obama came along, tried a different approach in his first term and the world started to like and trust America again.

But now in the second term it seems to be back to the neocon policy of confrontation rather than reconciliation.

And boy is that article littered with examples. Nevertheless, Mr. Friedman draws a picture much closer to my perceptions about what is going on in Ukraine than most of the crap we are being inundated with. I generally have a low opinion of Stratfor, considering them to be largely a mouthpiece for the US government daily line, so I find that interesting.

and appears to be an honest appraisal.

Like you, I don't share the assumptions he had at the beginning, so I find his conclusions unsurprising while mostly agreeing with them

However, it illustrates that those inside the intelligence/political/media bubble don't necessarily have any greater perceptive skills than we humble citizens do.

and the policy tools they have to work with, I'd say they suck at it.

Both are under the assumption that all bad things that happen to them are the fault of somebody else. The only recourse is to endure and nurture their sense of humiliation until their true supremacy is revealed. They have no friends. It's just a matter of who's going to oppress the other, although their view is "you may oppress us, but when we do the same to you it's going to be righteous benevolence."

If they lose a fight or an encounter, it reinforces that mindset.

The problem is, that if they win a fight or an encounter, it also reinforces that mindset. It means their true inner greatness is no longer facing an unsurmountable threat. It encourages them to restore their true greatness, the greatness that was their forefathers' and is theirs by right of history and nationhood.

In this view, victory in a small matter presages future victories, if they are only daring enough to seize them.

There are two ways to live in peace with such a foe. Accept domination or have the attitude behind "we're oppressed supreme rulers" or "we're emerging supreme rulers" change to "we're doing good to manage our own affairs and have some way elsewhere in defense of our own interests."

We and others succeeded in changing the Germans' viewpoint after WWII. The devastation of a crushing military and economic defeat combined with the enormity of what had been done in their name was enough to trump any pretense at civilizational supremacy, however great many German cultural and scientific achievements may have been. Coupled with ability came a sense of humility.

Japan still has trouble with many of its past transgressions. The military defeat, though, was crushing and it seems to have done fine finding alternative reinterpretations of its culture without needing to fully come to grips with Nanjing and Korea (etc.).

Narratives have been constructed and carefully nurtured to abnegate and deny any true military or economic defeat on the part of China, Russia, and Islam. The massive deaths as a result of Chinese "culture" have been denied; it's a bad thing to mention that the GULags and purges in the USSR were horrible; one can only speak of the glories of the Golden Age of Islam and not the harsh oppression that occurred at various times and places, or the bloody conquest and oppression that was imposed. Instead, outside forces unjustly oppressed their glorious and righteous ancestors. Defeat is taken as more humiliation to be undone; victory is taken as a sign of burgeoning might and future recognition of their true goodness and might. Religion, history, culture, and race are all central to these narratives, even if there's this redefining of "race" or "nation" = "ummah" for Islam.

American exceptionalism has nothing on these views.

I guess we could put N. Korea in this view.

One side effect of these views, though, is that concessions or gestures intended to show reconciliation are seen as "owed," even if the language of a treaty or agreement phrases them in quaint ways for the sake of those providing them. There is no sense of concession, just "you're finally coming to your senses and doing what you've been obliged to do all along." You're complying with a right owed to them. They have rights. You have obligations.

AUSTIN -- War, terror, unrest: We are flooded with daily reminders that the world can be a cruel, chaotic place, but within that chaos there is also a road map to the future.

"We have a model for how the world works," said George Friedman, founder and chairman of Stratfor, short for strategic forecasting. The company describes itself as a geopolitical intelligence firm providing analysis and forecasting. It has more than 130 people in its downtown Austin headquarters with several hundred contractors around the world.

---

Then the question is: What should we be concerned about?

"The idea that Germany is in a hostile relationship with most of the rest of Europe, when we look at our history, the movie unfolding, that's a scary thing," Friedman said. "Right now, the most important thing happening in the world is in Europe. The European Union is failing. We don't know what's going to replace it. But Europe is wealthier on the whole, taken together than North America. So, it's really important to the world what happens in Europe."

http://www.kvue.com/story/news/world/stratfor/2014/11/25/insidestratfor/70125286/

Sure, Russia's in trouble. But predicting President Vladimir Putin's playbook is a fool's errand. Between Western sanctions over Ukraine, the plunging price of oil on which his economy heavily depends, and the pervasive perversion of the nation's economy, the value of Russia's ruble and thus the value of every Russian's bank account has dropped. But Americans who predict that this will moderate Putin's behavior — on Ukraine or anything else — might be the fools.

The first thing to remember is that Russia isn't the United States. That means the kinds of public protest that lead to policy changes in our nation don't — make that can't — go far enough to force a revolution in Russia. By tightening up on the freedoms that Russian citizens briefly possessed after the fall of the Soviet Union — like disqualifying political parties he didn't like and putting dissenting media out of business — Putin has crafted a political system that pretty much ensures his power for as long as he wants to wield it.

The second thing is, by all accounts, Putin's popularity is still at sky-high levels that American politicians can only dream about. That's because of something Russians have told me every time I've been there: He has given them pride again, pride that they lost almost a quarter-century ago when their status as a superpower vanished. By reminding his citizens that in the good old days, the world trembled when their leaders spoke (or in the case of Nikita Khrushchev in 1960 at the United Nations, pounded the table with a shoe), he never stops sending the message that Russia deserves a place again on the world stage. This strategy is called nationalism, and Putin plays the card constantly. It helps to explain why his foreign policy is basically built on flipping the bird to the United States.

The third thing to remember is that in Russia, when the going gets tough, the tough don't get going; they just sit back and take it. This is a society where suffering is almost a part of their DNA. As George Friedman, author of "The Next 100 Years," puts it, "They can endure things that would break other nations."

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_27165458/dobbs-will-russia-endure-or-rebel

* Russians are used to having a shitty economy every now and then. The sanctions don't work. (I remember an article from an old russian woman. She complained that Russia has never been able to shake off the soviet mindset, that suffering for the greater good is the way of life in Russia.)

* They are afraid of Nato/Europe expanding their sphere of influence right to the russian border, because their subconscious strategy is "defense through distance". (As practiced with Napoleon and Hitler.)

* They cannot fathom the western argument that Russia is a military threat to Eastern Europe. They regard themselves as on the defense.

* Even if Ukraine joins the West by some treaty, Russia would like to see Eastern Ukraine as some kind (any kind) of buffer-zone to that influence.

* The US is afraid of a single power rising that might challenge them. They see an expanding Russia as a threat to a multi-polar world.

* Both sides can't talk to each other, because they talk right past each other: The one can't understand the motivations of the other.

If the US entered WWI and WWII to prevent a rising world hegemon, it's a mistake to read current (or even 1960s) states of affairs back into those events.

When the US entered it wasn't to challenge a threat to US hegemony, which is how I suspect many will try to read those lines. The US wasn't "the" power at the time. That happened as a result of WWII.

Second, "Second, the Russians do not plan a campaign of aggression." However, they don't view what they've done so far--in Abkhazia, in S. Ossetia, in Crimea, in E. Ukraine--as "aggression."

Invading and seizing the Baltics wasn't aggression. Dividing Poland wasn't aggression.

It would be completely possible for them to re-establish the Russian empire and reassert their "traditional" sphere of influence without doing anything they'd view as "aggressive." It's hard to see how what they do to others could possibly be called, by the Russian state dept., "aggression." Meanwhile, sanctions were dubbed "acts of war" and "instruments of war." This rather shows the writer managed to say something that's accurate and still miss the point of the words he repeated.

It's as if people don't want what they have to offer...