Low Oil Prices Impact On Russia - Cold War Redux?

bobbymike

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/11181297/Oil-slump-leaves-Russia-even-weaker-than-decaying-Soviet-Union.html

......... "They have outsourced their brains and lost their technology. The best Russian engineers go to work for Boeing. The Russian railways are run on German technology. It looked as if Russia was strong during the oil boom but it was an illusion and now they are in an even worse position than the Soviet Union," he said........................

..........By then President Reagan was spending 6.6pc of GDP on defence and building his 15 aircraft carrier battle groups (never quite achieved), inviting ruinous attempts by the USSR to keep up.................

......... For details, try the World Economic Forum's index of competitiveness. Russia ranks 136 for road quality, 133 for property rights, 126 for the ability of firms to absorb technology, 124 for availability of the latest technology, 120 for the burden of government regulation, 119 for judicial independence, 113 for the quality of management schools, 107 for prevalence of HIV, 105 for product sophistication, 101 for life expectancy and 56 for quality of maths and science education. This is the profile of decline...............
 
Lets turn that frown upside down! This is not a catastrophe, it is an opportunity! Just sell us all your nukes, your fissile material, and your centrifuges! You didn't need all those pesky dooms day weapons anyway! We will give you some really sweet sweet American green backs for it all!!! Don't wait, call 1-800-lets-make-a-deal NOW!!! :)
 
BBC2's Newsnight had an interview with Gary Kasparov and discussion with Michael Sandel on Russia and Putin.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04mgxqh/newsnight-24102014

Starts at 18:00 minute in.

Chris
 
Looks like all that talk about how weak President Obama was on Ukraine and how Putin outfoxed Obama and America has evaporated like fog in the sun as we see how sanctions and sanctions alone have driven big bad Putin and Russia into the ditch.


And not one drop of American blood has been spilled.
 
VH said:
Looks like all that talk about how weak President Obama was on Ukraine and how Putin outfoxed Obama and America has evaporated like fog in the sun as we see how sanctions and sanctions alone have driven big bad Putin and Russia into the ditch.


And not one drop of American blood has been spilled.

That would explain why Russia pulled out of Crimea, stopped harassing aircraft, and has toned down the rhetoric. Oh, wait. . .
 
The Eurasian Economic Union treaty will still officially go into effect on 1 January 2015. The Russian Federation seems to have very little interest in joining the United States-led hegemony of the "New World Order". Europe is still importing crude oil and natural gas from the Russian Federation. I will wait and see whether the economic and political consolidation of some of the former Soviet Republics will slowdown or cease. I believe that news of the death of the Russian Federation or the Eurasian Economic Union is a bit premature.
 
Triton said:
I believe that news of the death of the Russian Federation or the Eurasian Economic Union is a bit premature.

Not if you are social engineering. Then you want to start that belief as soon as possible.
 
sferrin said:
That would explain why Russia pulled out of Crimea, stopped harassing aircraft, and has toned down the rhetoric. Oh, wait. . .


Yes today Russia is still kicking but these kicks are just the spasmodic jerks of a sick animal. Russia is grappling for ways to ease their shortage of hard currency which is exacerbated by the sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine. Meanwhile Russia is burning through its $452 billion reserves as oil slumps to a four-year low. Many have been saying that oil will sink to a $50. A per barrel price of $50 will spell real trouble for Putin and Russia. I suggest a bumpy ride for Russia and Putin as we move into 2015. Putin is a proud man and to be bested by a person he despises, Obama, may force him into irrational actions..
 
VH said:
Putin is a proud man and to be bested by a person he despises, Obama, may force him into irrational actions...

While it is largely accurate to describe the escalation of this conflict in personal terms on Putin's part - his siloviki clique espouses "vertical power" "ideals" all the way back to Ivan the Terrible, after all - the democratic, liberal, human rights believing counterweight in the rest of us constitutes very much an empirical, evolved and multidimensional value based system rather than personality driven one. Therefore I would be disinclined to describe the developments mainly in terms of leaders personifying their respective "sides".

That being said, all of this does bring Obama a full circle of sorts towards the end of his presidency. It came out before Obama was first elected that one of his favorite philosophers is Reinhold Niebuhr ("Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." - Niebuhr). Obama should well remember what he told of his ideas about Niebuhr in an interview with (conservative NYT columnist) David Brooks in 2007: "... there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism." In other words, he does essentially believe in progress, growth, dreams and happiness beyond and within an individual. "Hope", as we would come to recall the succinct slogan, its opaqueness inviting ridicule which nonetheless did manage to belie the irreducibility of value based thinking into blunt propaganda form. Whereas blunt, unintellectual tools do conform to propaganda very well, which brings me to ...

Contrast(ing) this (value based thinking) with Putin whose World view is that everything is a zero sum game, all "interests" being mutually exclusive and him essentially being the state. Therefore his type of pragmatism is, once liberated of the largely superficial but nonetheless restrictive constraints of communist iconography, that everything is power and unrestrained power - be it dressed in politics, religious, financial, military or whatever guise - is ultimately just for the wielding. A cause in itself - thus everything is a conflict, a war on various levels of boil. He's also getting on in years and the timing of his actions has as much to do with his (and his siloviki friends') "biological clock" as anything - have fun with it now or never. This "doctrine" - if it can be called that - was described by General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation not too long ago in these terms (edited for brevity, see link for full text): "In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template. ... The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures — applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population. ... All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special-operations forces. The open use of forces — often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation — is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict."

This is Putin, Gerasimov et al. essentially justifying their power grabs on previous, more or less flawlessly altruistic international interventions (by whatever means i.e. UN, medical, financial, or even plain military) even in places that could only benefit from those, declaring fundamental human value(s) and equal opportunity merely a ruse. Making a deadly caricature of the intentions, means and motives of those who consider values very real (despite being human and thus imperfect), pointing to our failures of our standards and corruption to rationalize theirs. Make no mistake, they don't point to and celebrate the failings of others to correct anyone but to perpetuate them. No, this is not cold war. Oil is fungible and entangles us with Putin so we've also got to think and act beyond that while dealing with the sort of practicalities that Assad, ISIS an Iran as Putin's proxies/allies might entail locally. I would posit that the outcome (be it considered in ultimate or continuous form) does not hang solely on what we can do about this state of affairs or to Putin and his ilk - rather our success depends on our ability to act and improve despite him.
 
U F: if I say: calmly thought provoking, pls do not think me to be patronising. Thank you.

Nothing is new. Malthus c.1780 focused on the mismatch in life prospects between Europeans and others, and foresaw a migrant flood Northwards. The West broadly believes in the wealth-multiplying effect of Free Trade and has been wiling to accept unemployment in sectors, in exchange for cheaper imports - exporting jobs, to avoid importing migrants. When I lived in Bavaria, 1970s: BMW cars were Turkish, Audi, Greek, Merc. Moroccan...that is, the preponderance of the assembly labourforces came from there. Now such machines are imported into (Germany et al) from newly-developing countries.

The Task for Putin (Modi, the Party in Beijing, the re-elected President of Brazil...) is to feed people in quantities we can scarcely comprehend. They all need to bring their people up to a level of prosperity which puts them at the same level of dignity, respect as any of us on here. We do that quickest by helping them to help themselves. That is the way to undermine leaders that invent "barbarians at the gate".
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11197145/Nato-jets-track-unusual-Russian-bomber-sorties.html

http://theaviationist.com/2014/10/28/german-typhoons-intercept-7-ruaf-planes/
 
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-10/russia-china-add-to-400-billion-gas-deal-with-accord.html

China and Russia deepened their energy ties with a second blockbuster deal that lessens Russian reliance on Europe and would secure almost a fifth of the gas supplies China needs by the end of the decade.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed the preliminary gas-supply agreement in Beijing as U.S. President Barack Obama arrived in the Chinese capital for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. The deal is slightly smaller than the $400 billion pact reached earlier this year, shortly after Russia annexed Crimea.

Russian oil firm OAO Gazprom is negotiating the supply of as much as 30 billion cubic meters of gas annually from developments in West Siberia to China over 30 years, it said. At the same time, another Russian producer, OAO Rosneft, agreed to sell a 10 percent stake in a Siberian unit to state-owned China National Petroleum Corp.
 

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