Sonyuke_Songpaisan
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so we hug each other for warmth. But we'd better keep in mind Russians can not be trusted, we have lessons from history
The Great Game Changer: Belt and Road Intiative (BRI; OBOR)
- Thread starter Pk_Thunder
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Beidou2020
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Sonyuke_Songpaisan
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trust yourself
Chinese-Dragon
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Russia is a former superpower, and a modern day energy superpower. And they still have one of the most powerful militaries on Earth, with an arsenal that could wipe out the planet many times over.
It is wrong to underestimate Russia, they are still a superpower at their heart.
China (i.e. the PRC) has a lot to gain from strategic partnership with Russia, that's why our Government has been working overtime on improving strategic ties with Russia, including the half-trillion gas pipeline deal that we recently signed.
TaiShang
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Chinese Premier to visit Russia next month
September 24, 2014, 8:11 am
File photo of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Beijing, China in October 2013 [Xinhua]
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will visit Russia next month to boost bilateral ties between the two BRICS members.
Li will co-chair the bilateral prime ministers’ regular meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on 13 October. The two states’ premiers will also hold a meeting at the international forum Open Innovations on 14 October.
Li told visiting Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko in Beijing on Tuesday that the Chinese leadership is keen on further strengthening cooperation with Russia in trade, investment, energy, technology and culture.
He said China’s equipment manufacturing industry, having an edge in quality, cost-effectiveness and market competitiveness, is willing to participate in Russia’s infrastructure construction, mainly high speed railway projects and railway upgrades.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year that the Sino-Russian ties, including those on approaches to international problems, are at an unprecedented level.
“As for our relations with China’s People’s Republic, they develop successfully and are at an unprecedentedly high level – both at the level of trust and the level of cooperation. I mean also the political sphere, our common approaches to estimations of international situations and to security in the world,” he said during a Q&A session in April in Moscow.
Russia’s trade turnover with China is almost thrice as big as that with the US.
“It is absolutely clear that we will be expanding collaboration with China. Our trade with the United States is 27.5 [billion], but trade with China is 87 billion, and it is growing. And experts will agree that China is gradually becoming the number one economic power. The question is when it will happen: in 15, 20 or 25 years. But everybody understands that it is inevitable,”asserted Putin.
The Russian and Chinese central banks have recently agreed on a draft currency swap agreement, which will allow them to increase trade in domestic currencies and cut the dependence on the US dollar in bilateral payments.
A Bloomberg report says the yuan-ruble trade on the Moscow Exchange has jumped 10-fold this year to $749 million in August.
Earlier this month, Moscow and Beijing have entered into a pact to boost use of the rouble and yuan for trade transactions.
“We’re going to encourage companies from the two countries to settle more in local currencies, to avoid using a currency from a third country,” Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said referring to the US dollar.
Moscow is looking to increase trade and banking cooperation with Beijing, even as it battles new rounds of sanctions imposed by the EU and US over the Ukraine crisis.
“We talked about the infrastructure of investment cooperation, expanding trade in rubles and yuan, banking cooperation, the possibility of Russian companies opening accounts and being issued loans from Chinese banks, as well as the possibility of facilitating Chinese companies’ access to Russian banks,” Shuvalov said.
The European Union had earlier in July published a law to cut off financing for five major Russian banks over Moscow’s alleged support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Earlier this month, Putin oversaw the start of construction on a giant gas pipeline that will ship $400 billion worth of Russian gas to China for the next 30 years.
“Just now, we along with our Chinese friends are starting the biggest construction project in the world,” Putin told Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, who was also present at the launch.
Russia also plans to sign a 30-year gas supply contract with China via the western route, Russian energy giant Gazprom’s CEO Alexei Miller told President Vladimir Putin last week.
The route to supply gas to China via western Siberia may be implemented faster than the eastern route, through which Moscow has agreed to ship the fuel to its Asian neighbor in May.
***
Screw the US and its allies; it is China's national interests that rein supreme. Nothing else.
September 24, 2014, 8:11 am
File photo of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Beijing, China in October 2013 [Xinhua]
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will visit Russia next month to boost bilateral ties between the two BRICS members.
Li will co-chair the bilateral prime ministers’ regular meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on 13 October. The two states’ premiers will also hold a meeting at the international forum Open Innovations on 14 October.
Li told visiting Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko in Beijing on Tuesday that the Chinese leadership is keen on further strengthening cooperation with Russia in trade, investment, energy, technology and culture.
He said China’s equipment manufacturing industry, having an edge in quality, cost-effectiveness and market competitiveness, is willing to participate in Russia’s infrastructure construction, mainly high speed railway projects and railway upgrades.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year that the Sino-Russian ties, including those on approaches to international problems, are at an unprecedented level.
“As for our relations with China’s People’s Republic, they develop successfully and are at an unprecedentedly high level – both at the level of trust and the level of cooperation. I mean also the political sphere, our common approaches to estimations of international situations and to security in the world,” he said during a Q&A session in April in Moscow.
Russia’s trade turnover with China is almost thrice as big as that with the US.
“It is absolutely clear that we will be expanding collaboration with China. Our trade with the United States is 27.5 [billion], but trade with China is 87 billion, and it is growing. And experts will agree that China is gradually becoming the number one economic power. The question is when it will happen: in 15, 20 or 25 years. But everybody understands that it is inevitable,”asserted Putin.
The Russian and Chinese central banks have recently agreed on a draft currency swap agreement, which will allow them to increase trade in domestic currencies and cut the dependence on the US dollar in bilateral payments.
A Bloomberg report says the yuan-ruble trade on the Moscow Exchange has jumped 10-fold this year to $749 million in August.
Earlier this month, Moscow and Beijing have entered into a pact to boost use of the rouble and yuan for trade transactions.
“We’re going to encourage companies from the two countries to settle more in local currencies, to avoid using a currency from a third country,” Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said referring to the US dollar.
Moscow is looking to increase trade and banking cooperation with Beijing, even as it battles new rounds of sanctions imposed by the EU and US over the Ukraine crisis.
“We talked about the infrastructure of investment cooperation, expanding trade in rubles and yuan, banking cooperation, the possibility of Russian companies opening accounts and being issued loans from Chinese banks, as well as the possibility of facilitating Chinese companies’ access to Russian banks,” Shuvalov said.
The European Union had earlier in July published a law to cut off financing for five major Russian banks over Moscow’s alleged support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Earlier this month, Putin oversaw the start of construction on a giant gas pipeline that will ship $400 billion worth of Russian gas to China for the next 30 years.
“Just now, we along with our Chinese friends are starting the biggest construction project in the world,” Putin told Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, who was also present at the launch.
Russia also plans to sign a 30-year gas supply contract with China via the western route, Russian energy giant Gazprom’s CEO Alexei Miller told President Vladimir Putin last week.
The route to supply gas to China via western Siberia may be implemented faster than the eastern route, through which Moscow has agreed to ship the fuel to its Asian neighbor in May.
***
Screw the US and its allies; it is China's national interests that rein supreme. Nothing else.
haidian
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Japan PM Abe Says Seeks Better Ties With China, South Korea, Russia
by Wochit 0:34 mins
by Wochit 0:34 mins
Japan PM Abe Says Seeks Better Ties With China, South Korea, Russia | Wochit - Yahoo Screen
Very elating news, indeed. Abe Sensei has to be pragmatic, as well as hopeful.
Do you know that Japan Maritime Self Defense Force and the Russian Navy are conducting naval exercises right now?
Japan Plans Joint Navy Exercises With Russia Late September | Military & Intelligence | RIA Novosti
Beidou2020
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Japan is making enemies with China, Russia and South Korea.
IsaacNewton
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Speech made by Nixon in 1994, 20 years ago. A controversial president, but a person that I hold in high regards for he changed the history of the world with his visit to China and USSR in 1972. He is a man with incredible vision, it is fascinating how everything that his words still hold high relevance today.
Nixon's Final Words
China
During one of our meetings in San Clemente 21 years ago, Leonid Brezhnev expressed concern about the growing threat of China. When I said that it would be at least 25 years before China became a significant economic and military power, he held up both hands with fingers outstretched in what I thought was a sign of surrender.
The translator finally interpreted his gesture. "Ten years," he said. Brezhnev was closer to being right than I was. The world's largest communist society could become the world's richest capitalist economy in the next century.
Some observers contend that we no longer need a close relationship with China, since the threat of Soviet aggression has disappeared. The other side of that coin is that the Chinese no longer need the U.S. to protect them against possible Soviet aggression. Both concepts are wrong. In the era beyond peace, China and the U.S. need to cooperate with each other for reasons completely unrelated to the Soviet Union or Russia.
China has emerged as the world's third-strongest military and economic power. It is strong enough to play a major role in regional conflicts in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. It is the only country that possesses the necessary leverage to rein in North Korea's ominous nuclear weapons program. We should not underestimate China's ability to disrupt our interests around the world if our relationship becomes belligerent rather than cooperative.
While most Americans give China high marks for its free-market economics, they rightly criticize the government's continuing denial of political freedom to the Chinese people. However, cutting back our trade with China by revoking China's most-favored-nation status would be a tragic mistake. We cannot improve the political situation in China through a "scorched earth" economic policy. Revoking China's most-favored-nation status would hurt the free-market reformers and entrepreneurs who hold the key to China's future. Not only would it devastate the mainland's economy, it would lay waste to the surrounding region as well. No other nation in Asia supports our linking MFN status to human rights.
Today China's economic power makes U.S. lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade, it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades, it will make them laughable. By then the Chinese may threaten to withhold MFN status from the U.S. unless we do more to improve living conditions in Detroit, Harlem and South Central Los Angeles.
I vividly recall calling on Deng Xiaoping in the fall of 1989, four months after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. After he greeted me in the Great Hall of the People, I told him that there had never been a worse crisis in the relationship between our countries and that it was up to China to take steps to deal with the outrage of the civilized world. With dozens of journalists from around the world looking on, he gave a boiler-plate reply about not tolerating interference in China's internal affairs.
After the cameras left, he became far more animated. By then China's battle-scarred old survivor was almost totally deaf. The conversation took on a surreal character, with the official translator shouting my comments into his left ear and his daughter screaming them into his right. But while he had great difficulty hearing, he had no difficulty seeing his responsibility as his country's paramount leader. He told me that after years of subservience to foreigners, China was now united and independent and that the Chinese people would never forgive their leaders for apologizing to another nation. In almost the next breath he introduced the subject of Fang Lizhi, the dissident who was then being sheltered at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and made a highly constructive proposal for ending the standoff.
Deng's message was unmistakable: Our differences could be bridged by discussion behind the scenes but would be exacerbated by red-hot exchanges of public rhetoric. A few months later, Fang Lizhi was released, but on China's initiative, not in response to demands by the U.S.
In late 1992 Deng was widely believed to have given the Chinese government these marching orders for dealing with the new Administration in Washington: "Increase trust, reduce troubles, develop cooperation and avoid confrontation." In its first moves, the Clinton Administration responded by increasing distrust, stirring up trouble, threatening noncooperation and fomenting confrontation. A letter from President Clinton to Beijing, which listed fourteen criticisms on issues ranging from human rights to trade, set off months of diplomatic skirmishing that came close to imperiling the constructive relations between our countries. In the future, particularly on foreign policy issues, we should treat China with the respect a great power deserves and not as a pariah nation.
Russia
No other single factor will have a greater political impact on the world in the century to come than whether political and economic freedom take root and thrive in Russia and the other former communist nations. Today's generation of American leaders will be judged primarily by whether they did everything possible to bring about this outcome. If they fail, the cost that their successors will have to pay will be unimaginably high.
Will Boris Yeltsin be able to continue to provide the leadership Russia needs to achieve the goals of the second Russian revolution - political and economic freedom at home and a nonaggressive foreign policy abroad? The product of a unique period in Russian history, Yeltsin cannot be judged as if he were the president of a stable democracy with an established constitutional order. If he acted like one, he would probably fail. Yeltsin is a tough and sometimes ruthless Russian patriot. Otherwise he would never have been able to come to power and withstand the numerous challenges to his rule. Mikhail Gorbachev started reforms without understanding their likely consequences and then backed down when the dangers became apparent, exposing himself - as one former senior Soviet official described him to me - as a "brutal wimp." In contrast, Yeltsin acts pre-emptively and decisively. This is the key to the continuing support he has among the Russian people despite all the pain associated with his country's transition to democratic capitalism.
Yeltsin should be supported but not idolized. By idealizing Yeltsin's government, the West runs the risk of personalizing its Russian policy and creating a potential trap for itself. If he fails to live up to our overly optimistic expectations, the West's Russian policy - while basically sound - may lose public support. While supporting Yeltsin, we should remember that there are other democrats in Russia - many of whom have disagreements with him about the constitutional division of labor. If we do not develop good working relationships with the new generation of Russian leaders, we will be caught flat-footed by unexpected shifts in the political landscape, as we were by the strong showing of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party in December's elections.
On March 14, 1994, I had the privilege of being the first American to address a meeting of an elected Russian Parliament, when I appeared before a committee of the State Duma, the lower house of the new Russian Parliament. The Duma is the breeding ground for future Presidents. Every leading candidate in the 1996 elections, with the exception of Alexander Rutskoi, is a Duma Deputy.
Many in the West were shocked when former Vice President Rutskoi and others charged in the armed uprising against the Yeltsin government last October were released from prison by the State Duma's grant of amnesty to them and to those who tried to overthrow Gorbachev in August 1991. For all this, Rutskoi's almost certain re-entry into public life will have a positive political impact.
In March 1994, I called on Rutskoi, whom I had met twice before, in his apartment in Moscow. He is a ramrod-straight war hero who looks at the world in a pointedly direct way. He had been out of prison for only 10 days and was still wearing the beard he had grown during his five months there. Our talk had an eerie quality because of a simultaneous and totally incomprehensible conversation between two large parrots in separate cages in the middle of Rutskoi's sitting room. He apologized for the noise, saying that the birds had had more room in his dacha, but that the Yeltsin government had taken the dacha away. The birds were not speaking English, and I knew enough Russian to know they weren't speaking Russian. He said that he had acquired them during a tour in Kuala Lumpur and that they spoke only Malaysian.
Rutskoi said that he intended to run for President in 1996 but added ruefully that while he was in prison Zhirinovsky had "appropriated a lot of my political base." As we discussed his impressions of the domestic scene, including the shocking rise in both organized crime and street crime in Russia, he said somewhat ominously, "I am able to bring law and order. I know how to do it." He predicted that Russia's transition to true democracy would take a minimum of 10 years.
Russia will inevitably be strong again. The only question is whether a strong Russia will be a friend or an adversary of the West. We must do everything in our power to ensure the former rather than the latter. The most dangerous mistake we could make would be to ignore our differences or attempt to drown them in champagne and vodka toasts at feel-good summits. Rather than papering over differences with diplomatic gobbledygook, we must find ways to disagree without damaging one of the world's most important strategic relationships.
The second most dangerous mistake would be to neglect our responsibility for assisting Russia in its transition to freedom, or arrogantly to scold or punish it for every foreign or domestic policy transgression, as though it were an international problem child.
What the U.S. wants most from Russia is a nonaggressive foreign policy. That Russian policy has become more assertive, even heavy-handed, is not in dispute. Yeltsin and his pro-Western Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, talk proudly about the newly muscular defense of Russian interests in the "near abroad" - the Russians' term for the other former Soviet republics. Still, I do not think a new imperialism looms. I have spoken with many Russian politicians of different persuasions, including President Yeltsin, who were nostalgic for at least some aspects of the former Soviet empire. But with the exception of the supernationalistic fringe, all the Russians with whom I have spoken seem to understand that the past can no longer be re-created.
As I write these words on March 30, 1994, the overwhelming conventional wisdom in the U.S. foreign policy establishment is that the prospects for the survival and success of economic reforms in Russia are bleak. The reformers are assumed by all the so-called experts to be in retreat after their election losses. Anti-reformers - most of them ex-communist bureaucrats - are ominously gaining strength. It is tempting, in view of the political and economic disarray, to throw in the towel. But this is the time for the West to become a more active participant in Russia's success, not a passive observer of its failure.
Nixon's Final Words
China
During one of our meetings in San Clemente 21 years ago, Leonid Brezhnev expressed concern about the growing threat of China. When I said that it would be at least 25 years before China became a significant economic and military power, he held up both hands with fingers outstretched in what I thought was a sign of surrender.
The translator finally interpreted his gesture. "Ten years," he said. Brezhnev was closer to being right than I was. The world's largest communist society could become the world's richest capitalist economy in the next century.
Some observers contend that we no longer need a close relationship with China, since the threat of Soviet aggression has disappeared. The other side of that coin is that the Chinese no longer need the U.S. to protect them against possible Soviet aggression. Both concepts are wrong. In the era beyond peace, China and the U.S. need to cooperate with each other for reasons completely unrelated to the Soviet Union or Russia.
China has emerged as the world's third-strongest military and economic power. It is strong enough to play a major role in regional conflicts in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. It is the only country that possesses the necessary leverage to rein in North Korea's ominous nuclear weapons program. We should not underestimate China's ability to disrupt our interests around the world if our relationship becomes belligerent rather than cooperative.
While most Americans give China high marks for its free-market economics, they rightly criticize the government's continuing denial of political freedom to the Chinese people. However, cutting back our trade with China by revoking China's most-favored-nation status would be a tragic mistake. We cannot improve the political situation in China through a "scorched earth" economic policy. Revoking China's most-favored-nation status would hurt the free-market reformers and entrepreneurs who hold the key to China's future. Not only would it devastate the mainland's economy, it would lay waste to the surrounding region as well. No other nation in Asia supports our linking MFN status to human rights.
Today China's economic power makes U.S. lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade, it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades, it will make them laughable. By then the Chinese may threaten to withhold MFN status from the U.S. unless we do more to improve living conditions in Detroit, Harlem and South Central Los Angeles.
I vividly recall calling on Deng Xiaoping in the fall of 1989, four months after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. After he greeted me in the Great Hall of the People, I told him that there had never been a worse crisis in the relationship between our countries and that it was up to China to take steps to deal with the outrage of the civilized world. With dozens of journalists from around the world looking on, he gave a boiler-plate reply about not tolerating interference in China's internal affairs.
After the cameras left, he became far more animated. By then China's battle-scarred old survivor was almost totally deaf. The conversation took on a surreal character, with the official translator shouting my comments into his left ear and his daughter screaming them into his right. But while he had great difficulty hearing, he had no difficulty seeing his responsibility as his country's paramount leader. He told me that after years of subservience to foreigners, China was now united and independent and that the Chinese people would never forgive their leaders for apologizing to another nation. In almost the next breath he introduced the subject of Fang Lizhi, the dissident who was then being sheltered at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and made a highly constructive proposal for ending the standoff.
Deng's message was unmistakable: Our differences could be bridged by discussion behind the scenes but would be exacerbated by red-hot exchanges of public rhetoric. A few months later, Fang Lizhi was released, but on China's initiative, not in response to demands by the U.S.
In late 1992 Deng was widely believed to have given the Chinese government these marching orders for dealing with the new Administration in Washington: "Increase trust, reduce troubles, develop cooperation and avoid confrontation." In its first moves, the Clinton Administration responded by increasing distrust, stirring up trouble, threatening noncooperation and fomenting confrontation. A letter from President Clinton to Beijing, which listed fourteen criticisms on issues ranging from human rights to trade, set off months of diplomatic skirmishing that came close to imperiling the constructive relations between our countries. In the future, particularly on foreign policy issues, we should treat China with the respect a great power deserves and not as a pariah nation.
Russia
No other single factor will have a greater political impact on the world in the century to come than whether political and economic freedom take root and thrive in Russia and the other former communist nations. Today's generation of American leaders will be judged primarily by whether they did everything possible to bring about this outcome. If they fail, the cost that their successors will have to pay will be unimaginably high.
Will Boris Yeltsin be able to continue to provide the leadership Russia needs to achieve the goals of the second Russian revolution - political and economic freedom at home and a nonaggressive foreign policy abroad? The product of a unique period in Russian history, Yeltsin cannot be judged as if he were the president of a stable democracy with an established constitutional order. If he acted like one, he would probably fail. Yeltsin is a tough and sometimes ruthless Russian patriot. Otherwise he would never have been able to come to power and withstand the numerous challenges to his rule. Mikhail Gorbachev started reforms without understanding their likely consequences and then backed down when the dangers became apparent, exposing himself - as one former senior Soviet official described him to me - as a "brutal wimp." In contrast, Yeltsin acts pre-emptively and decisively. This is the key to the continuing support he has among the Russian people despite all the pain associated with his country's transition to democratic capitalism.
Yeltsin should be supported but not idolized. By idealizing Yeltsin's government, the West runs the risk of personalizing its Russian policy and creating a potential trap for itself. If he fails to live up to our overly optimistic expectations, the West's Russian policy - while basically sound - may lose public support. While supporting Yeltsin, we should remember that there are other democrats in Russia - many of whom have disagreements with him about the constitutional division of labor. If we do not develop good working relationships with the new generation of Russian leaders, we will be caught flat-footed by unexpected shifts in the political landscape, as we were by the strong showing of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party in December's elections.
On March 14, 1994, I had the privilege of being the first American to address a meeting of an elected Russian Parliament, when I appeared before a committee of the State Duma, the lower house of the new Russian Parliament. The Duma is the breeding ground for future Presidents. Every leading candidate in the 1996 elections, with the exception of Alexander Rutskoi, is a Duma Deputy.
Many in the West were shocked when former Vice President Rutskoi and others charged in the armed uprising against the Yeltsin government last October were released from prison by the State Duma's grant of amnesty to them and to those who tried to overthrow Gorbachev in August 1991. For all this, Rutskoi's almost certain re-entry into public life will have a positive political impact.
In March 1994, I called on Rutskoi, whom I had met twice before, in his apartment in Moscow. He is a ramrod-straight war hero who looks at the world in a pointedly direct way. He had been out of prison for only 10 days and was still wearing the beard he had grown during his five months there. Our talk had an eerie quality because of a simultaneous and totally incomprehensible conversation between two large parrots in separate cages in the middle of Rutskoi's sitting room. He apologized for the noise, saying that the birds had had more room in his dacha, but that the Yeltsin government had taken the dacha away. The birds were not speaking English, and I knew enough Russian to know they weren't speaking Russian. He said that he had acquired them during a tour in Kuala Lumpur and that they spoke only Malaysian.
Rutskoi said that he intended to run for President in 1996 but added ruefully that while he was in prison Zhirinovsky had "appropriated a lot of my political base." As we discussed his impressions of the domestic scene, including the shocking rise in both organized crime and street crime in Russia, he said somewhat ominously, "I am able to bring law and order. I know how to do it." He predicted that Russia's transition to true democracy would take a minimum of 10 years.
Russia will inevitably be strong again. The only question is whether a strong Russia will be a friend or an adversary of the West. We must do everything in our power to ensure the former rather than the latter. The most dangerous mistake we could make would be to ignore our differences or attempt to drown them in champagne and vodka toasts at feel-good summits. Rather than papering over differences with diplomatic gobbledygook, we must find ways to disagree without damaging one of the world's most important strategic relationships.
The second most dangerous mistake would be to neglect our responsibility for assisting Russia in its transition to freedom, or arrogantly to scold or punish it for every foreign or domestic policy transgression, as though it were an international problem child.
What the U.S. wants most from Russia is a nonaggressive foreign policy. That Russian policy has become more assertive, even heavy-handed, is not in dispute. Yeltsin and his pro-Western Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, talk proudly about the newly muscular defense of Russian interests in the "near abroad" - the Russians' term for the other former Soviet republics. Still, I do not think a new imperialism looms. I have spoken with many Russian politicians of different persuasions, including President Yeltsin, who were nostalgic for at least some aspects of the former Soviet empire. But with the exception of the supernationalistic fringe, all the Russians with whom I have spoken seem to understand that the past can no longer be re-created.
As I write these words on March 30, 1994, the overwhelming conventional wisdom in the U.S. foreign policy establishment is that the prospects for the survival and success of economic reforms in Russia are bleak. The reformers are assumed by all the so-called experts to be in retreat after their election losses. Anti-reformers - most of them ex-communist bureaucrats - are ominously gaining strength. It is tempting, in view of the political and economic disarray, to throw in the towel. But this is the time for the West to become a more active participant in Russia's success, not a passive observer of its failure.
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TheMatador
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Today's domestic spying in America would make Nixon blush.
tranquilium
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What ever reputation Nixon had, he is most definitely a lot more competent than both Bush and Obama combined.
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