Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov was quoted last December – “The weak are not loved and not heard, they are insulted, and when we have parity they will talk to us in a different way.”
Russia has learned from their failures and short-comings of the 1990s and early 2000s. They were militarily impotent and culturally irrelevant for the past 15 years. They were neither loved, feared, nor heard. They will not go down that path again. As much as I support Bush I agree with the author of this article that he has largely ignored the rise of Putin and his totalitarian tendencies. But a Russian population that is declining at an annual rate of 0.5-1.0% begs the question “Can Russia compete against the US and China over the coming years/decades despite its demographic crisis?”
