In my view, Europe and its NATO allies have recently won a very important victory against Russia in the way they have reacted to her behaviour against Georgia. This assessment is in view of the last over 150 years history of events in Europe. What the Russians do not seems to realise, and I doubt that the Europeans and the American for that matter does, is that human History has a thread to it which is not always what it seems to be on the outside. It takes a bit of insight and self control to know how to correctly deal with issues and to be in control. The aggressive, reckless and arrogant approach of the Russians clearly demonstrates that they do not have these virtues and therefore can not be in real control of what they seem to be pursuing. This is probably a good explanation as to why they would be more reliant on Nostradamus predictions about dominance and power rather than the simple approach base on the virtues of wisdom, self control and the rule of law.

The best conclusion I can come to is to say that their lack of insight and the virtues of wisdom and self control is very likely to a legacy of the old communist ideology which once had a grip on that and other regions but have already served its purpose. I am very convince from all the evidence so far that Russia’s behaviour is not base on deterrent but on bullying and aggression. There is also an Imperial agenda in its behaviour which is backward and contradictory of the aspirations of 20th century communist and socialist driven 3rd world regimes.

No, they’re just flexing their striving-to-return-to-great-power-status muscles.

They’re also genuinely pissed off about the BMD deployments, US policy towards Russia in the 1990s, NATO expansion, our virtual abandonment of the PfP project, etc. But there’s not all that much we can do, or ought to do, to make up for that as this point.

Perhaps a greater concern is the proliferation of nuclear missiles throughout the world. Iran is the case study that was discussed yesterday at CSIS by former US national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft.

Brzezinski thinks that Iran wants to give itself a capability similar to what Japan possesses today: “to be a peace-oriented nuclear power with a capacity for rapid acquisition of nuclear weapons if they decide to go that way.”

Scowcroft agreed, but cautioned that the way things are going now the world is standing on the brink of another forward surge in proliferation. “It’s not nearly so much just will Iran develop a nuclear capability. But the consequences would be you would have Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey in the region and then who knows who else around the world would want to do the same thing just to prepare themselves for a different kind of a world. And we can have 30, 40 countries months away from a nuclear. That is not a better world. And to me, that’s what we’re really focusing on. And to me, whether or not Iran itself has it is a less important question than what it will do to proliferation around the world.”