Sounds great when you consider the size of their economy versus the U.S. , also the amount of debt they are currently accumulating, I sure am glad I’m not trying to live my day to day there
Odd - this Putin love is something all my right wing friends are into now…
That’s why I made sure to use **percentage ** of GDP of the respective economies.
Do you understand how the concept of percentages work?
If yes, allow me to reiterate my previous post, using slightly different wording:
Russia’s debt as percentage of GDP is 6-7 times less than that of the US.
It follows that it is the US and not Russia that’s
but don’t let the facts get in the way of your preconceived notions.
Yes but also among some left wing people too, sadly.
So sad Russia’s economy is a one trick pony, mostly dependent on oil and gas.
They are a gas station, the U.S economy on the other hand…
The Russian GDP will shrink this year and fall from the top ten biggest economies. And let’s not compare the per capita figures for both nations, it’s laughable. But don’t let facts get in YOUR way.
Plenty of nations have low debt, Iran and Algeria among them. So what? Does that make them great, heck no!
Yup, and they have to regain territory from ISIS, then they have to persuade the Turks to let them have the water they used to get from the Euphrates - because Syria has big water problems now.
Have you followed the conversation? At all? I most certainly am NOT the one who brought the debt into this conversation and claimed that Russia is
.
If Putin could win the war in Syria for his client I’d tip my hat to him, it’d be an unequivocal good and also would be him doing something I frankly consider impossible.
My theory is you could send a major modern military force there, but it ours or Russia’s, and “win” temporarily by just killing a shit ton of people from all the “bad” groups. (I say bad in quotation marks because I’m skeptical if any are good, some of the groups we’ve tentatively supported in the past have turned over captured American journalists to al-Qaeda in the past, for example–these aren’t good people.) But they just reform again a bit later and you have a bloody insurgency that maybe you can tamp down, leave, “declare victory” and then a couple years later they’re back again.
The West tried to create nation-states in the desert, and failed, this dates back a hundred years almost now. The simple reality is we can draw maps, give money to people in those countries who agree to respect the lines on the map and then kill people when they don’t–but we can’t fundamentally alter the ethnic and religious reality of those regions. Much like Europe until very recently multicultural societies simply don’t work here, and the people involved have to sort that out themselves and draw their own borders. [It’s debatable if multiculturalism even works in Europe today, what with various separatist movements, albeit peaceful ones, in several European countries winning elections.]
Not a chance, Turkey the modern State may have been created in 1920 by Turkish reformers and nationalists under Ataturk, but Turkey essentially has existed for like a thousand or so years, it gets murky when you talk about its transformation from the heartland of the Eastern Roman Empire with a largely Greek ruling class to the heart of the Ottoman Empire with a largely Turkish ruling class but yeah, this country has been established and around for way longer than any other country in the region with a consistent history–aside from Iran/Persia. Much of the Levant and the Arabian peninsula has always been a patchwork of sheikhdoms and city-states for ages, under the Ottomans a large portion of it may have kowtowed to Istanbul but it was still pretty feudal.
Well, I see the isolation of Putin is working a treat. Like it or not Russia is a player in the Middle East and let’s face it, could Putin make a bigger mess than Western leaders have done with their idiotic meddling in the area? It’s unlikely.
End game in Syria? Trust me, we’ve only just begun the dance.
And, of course, Putin is considering joining the US and France in air strikes on ISIS forces in Syria. I assume he won’t be sending Assad the bill for that.
Look, I’m not defending American policies in Syria. They have roundly failed.
On the one hand, you criticize the guy who wasted $500 million on a failed attempt to find and fund the right group of rebels - arguably a fool’s errand. On the other hand, you applaud the guy who supplied 1.5 billion in weapons and ammunition to the head goon who in turn contributed directly to the death toll and general misery in the region.
In other words, your measure of success is: Who profits ($) by contributing to chaos, death and misery?
…That’s your definition of winning?
No further explanation needed, indeed.
“Until recently”? The Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians both had multicultural empires. So did Rome. I’d say the push into nationalism caused problems for Europe.
I agree that Turkey is probably highly stable, but for entirely different reasons. The territories of Anatolia and Thrace changed borders, and Constantinople changed hands, repeatedly over the last thousand years, and the present state of Turkey is not a continuation of the Roman Empire.
Turkish stability, if it exists, is the product of a hundred-year-old program of deliberate Turkicization of the populace, aimed at deliberate cultivation of national unity. It was launched with the “annihilation war” from about 1915-1923, to make sure that nationalistic Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians simply wouldn’t exist; lest they ally with the then-growing Russian and English empires and rip away Anatolia as Syria and everything beyond it was ripped away by the French and English. (The Kurds were apparently less Christianized and I suppose therefore less of a target.)
Anatolian Greeks (what survived of them) relocated across the Aegean to the Kingdom of Greece. Armenians, apparently, were largely slaughtered. I think some pockets of Assyrians remain near the Turkish-Syrian border, too small to be a threat.
Turkey’s stability is only about three generations old, and it can still lose territory to the Kurds, especially if any other power bothers to back the Kurdish revolution.
Note that I am not endorsing the Young Turks and the attempt to purge Anatolia of Christians. I think a different bunch of Ottomans could have continued on in the territory as a mostly peaceable, multicultural empire, for a while. They chose nationalism, and the path of grabbing as much land as they could. And now they have very, very angry remnants of what had been the Christian peoples of Anatolia on their borders.
When the Greeks kicked the Cham out of Epirus, or when the Armenians destroyed villages (actual atrocities) to purge the corridor between the Armenian Republic and Nagorno-Karabakh; to a Muslim, that’s just proof of how terrible and hateful to God’s people the Christians are, and that the Young Turks had it right; to a Christian, however, it’s an unfortunate but understandable fallout of people pushed into ethnic cleansing and nationalism in the name of security, thanks to those same Young Turks.
I don’t deny that Greek nationalists have caused both Turkey and themselves problems, going back to the 19th Century, and up to the coup in Cyprus. But I think there was a better way to handle them than burning Smyrna and trying to purge the whole country of “Roman” Christians. 
Back to [del]ISIS[/del] Daesh.
These guys are an interesting problem in the sense that they are attacking ethnic Muslims. Shi’ites they slaughter, Sunnis they persecute, and Christians they tolerate (I am told). “Pagans” they enslave, notoriously.
They seek power through the brutal replacement of a society with themselves. I don’t think there’s a point at which they let the Alawites live. So long as they follow the anti-Shi’i doctrines of al-Zarqawi (may he be reincarnated as swine), the Alawites will be under siege. And we know they have designs on Israel and Jordan.
What does “containing” them even look like?
Defeating them probably will look a lot worse than the atrocities we have excoriated Assad for. It’s going to be nasty. Maybe not bombing of Dresden nasty, but nasty all the same. One endpoint I could see right now is, probably, a smaller Alawi/multicultural Syria; a slightly larger Kurdistan; some kind of small, nervous neo-Ba’athist state between Kurdistan, Syria, and Iraq; and an Iraq that has maybe half its pre-war territory. And that’s not necessarily highly stable, unless & until people accept it as an improvement over something a lot worse.
I hate to agree with Alkash (mostly because he seems to be a Putin fan-boy and I can’t stand Putin) but Putin managed, at least so far, to do a brilliant maneuver by bringing together Assad, Iran and Iraq in this anti-ISIS coalition that leaves US (and the Obama administration), especially after the latest revelations of the ridiculous failures like spending $100M per trained “fighter” in Syria, looking like utter incompetents at best.
When you spend literally trillions on building/propping up a regime and it turns around and allies with your political opponents, that’s a failure of epic proportions, and when that turn around forces you to either do a 180 on your vehemently stated policy (“Assad has to go!”) or look even more impotent that you have been before, that’s just rubbing salt on the wounds.
Putin is a corrupt autocratic demagogue who is really screwing up Russia (of course, so did all his predecessors). But this maneuver of his is brilliant. So far. If he manages to follow through (which means blunting Daesh in Syria while keeping his puppet Assad in power in perpetuity), without enormous expense (Russians are usually pretty good at keeping such costs down) that would go down as a huge success and a political boon for Russia, and a finger in the eye for the US.
You mean, The Performance-Art Collective Formerly Known as Daesh.
I don’t see how Putin’s move with Iran, Iraq and Syria is great. First Iraq, Iraq is it’s own nation, it would have been shitty if they were our stooge also. As for the reasons Iraq did join hands, well they have a huge ISIS problem, so if you are the Iraqi government you would want more help to fight these scourges in your country. This is a perfectly normal move by Iraq, it is cooperating with others as **WELL AS WITH US. So Iraq is getting help from both the U.S and Russia, and it’s two neighbors Iran and Syria. It does not want to be dependent on just one power, Iraq is smart not only rely on us. That is not to say they have always been smart in terms of foreign relations, but this is not doom for us. The more Russia takes on responsibility is better for us. We don’t want to just have the sole burden of fighting ISIS. That is not to say Baghdad has been great, they are phuck ups, especially former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.
As what Putin will do, remains to be seen. I think **Alkash’s[/B take that he is the best statesman of the past three decades is absurd and laughable. We can see in the future that things go way out of hand in Syria and that the costs for Russia go way too high.
I will say in closing that Assad will never rule Syria as he did prior to March 2011, no matter how much help Russia and Iran give him. Down the line he has to leave power, ISIS is not the only cause of bloodshed in Syria, it’s also Assad.
… and to stick a finger into US eye, Russia pointedly conducted its first air strikes on the other anti-Assad rebel areas today, and not on Daesh strongholds.
Not really, no. They had multiple cultures swearing fealty and paying tribute to a central, ruler, but the societies weren’t integrated. There’s a major difference from pre-modern Empires which largely used local clients along with a light touch on internal governance to hold disparate lands together under one crown and a modern society in which people from different religious and ethnic groups have to like, actually interact with each other on a regular basis.
I never said it was a continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire, in fact when I specifically mentioned that it wasn’t in my post I thought it was pretty plain–but I guess not. What do you think I meant when I said it was murky when Turkey began, due to it being debatable when the Eastern Roman Empire fully transitioned to being overrun by Turkish rule, obviously the fall of Constantinople is a final exclamation point on it all, but the Turks had held most of Anatolia long before that, albeit occasionally competent rulers on the Byzantine side of things sometimes recaptured large swathes of land.
Modern day Turkey is largely a continuation of the Ottoman Empire’s central province, though.
None of those groups were ever large enough to seriously threaten Turkish control of most of Anatolia. I don’t think there’s a realistic chance of the Kurds ever getting pieces of Turkish land. The best they may get is maybe an agreement where Kurdish citizen of Turkey are allowed free movement back and forth from an autonomous Kurdistan which might be formally carved out of Northern Iraq at some point.
I think this is being overstated a little bit. Russia hasn’t “pushed the United States” out of its close workings with the Iraqi government. And the fact that Iraq’s Shiite leadership, Iran, and Assad have basically been all working for the same greater goal in the fight against ISIS is essentially something that’s been known for like 1.5 years now. The U.S. never took the step Russia did because we don’t want to openly coordinate with Iran or Assad’s military. Russia doesn’t care to do that, so the vacuum was an intentional one. It’s not like given hindsight Obama would be like “yeah, let’s work closer in public with Iran and Assad to keep Russia out.” I don’t think, at least if Obama has half a brain, he should care about Russia helping to coordinate those three groups.
It’s something that may help, and politically it’s something the United States really can’t do. As for somehow being an indicator of Putin winning more “territory” in the “New Cold War” I kind of laugh. Putin has always been close to Assad and Russia has a long relationship with Syria, the United States doesn’t care if at some point in the future Russia gets to fix up its mostly dilapidated naval refueling station there. As for Iran, we’ve not had influence there since the revolution, and Russia has. As for Iraq, eh, Iraq having a tighter relationship with Russia doesn’t “push us out” of the country. This isn’t the actual Cold War where a country can’t have good relations with both Russia and the United States. Iraq is a largely failed State now, incapable of fielding a military that will fight for anything other than sectarian territory. The Kurdish Autonomous Region has very close ties to the United States, the Shiites and Sunni regions don’t really like us much. The Shiite leadership will always be open to the billions of dollars in equipment and training we keep sending into the country, though.
Putin hasn’t really gotten anything for Russia they didn’t already have, other than a closer working relationship with Iraq–something that doesn’t really hurt the United States. If Russia is serious about pouring money into this it may help somewhat with the fight against ISIS, but I don’t think they’re willing to commit significant ground forces, which is the only thing that could cause an immediate change in the strategic picture.
Why is that a poke in the eye for the US? Please explain your reasoning.
Because US purportedly supports “moderate” anti-Assad rebels - like the Free Syrian Army. Russia conducted airstrikes against the Free Syrian Army today.