{"id":15221,"date":"2015-12-13T10:39:05","date_gmt":"2015-12-13T15:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15221"},"modified":"2015-12-13T10:39:05","modified_gmt":"2015-12-13T15:39:05","slug":"cornering-russia-risking-world-war-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15221","title":{"rendered":"Cornering Russia, Risking World War III"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cornering Russia, Risking World War III<\/a><\/h3>\n

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We all know the narrative in which we (the West) are seized. It is the narrative of the Cold War: America versus the \u201cEvil Empire.\u201d And, as Professor Ira Chernus has\u00a0written<\/u><\/a>, since we are \u201chuman\u201d and somehow they (the USSR or, now, ISIS) plainly are not, we must be their polar opposite in every way.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they are absolute evil, we must be the absolute opposite. It\u2019s the old\u00a0apocalyptic tale:\u00a0God\u2019s people versus Satan\u2019s. It ensures that we never have to admit to any meaningful connection with the enemy.\u201d\u00a0It is the basis to America\u2019s and Europe\u2019s claim to exceptionalism and leadership.<\/p>\n

\"Russian<\/a><\/p>\n

Russian President Vladimir Putin laying a wreath at Russia\u2019s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on May 8, 2014, as part of the observance of the World War II Victory over Germany.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

And \u201cburied in the assumption that the enemy is not in any sense human like us, is [an]\u00a0absolution<\/em>\u00a0for whatever hand we may have had in sparking or contributing to evil\u2019s rise and spread. How could we have fertilized the soil of absolute evil or bear any responsibility for its successes?\u00a0It\u2019s a basic postulate of wars against evil: God\u2019s people must be innocent,\u201d (and that the evil cannot be mediated, for how can one mediate with evil).<\/p>\n

Westerners may generally think ourselves to be rationalist and (mostly) secular, but Christian modes of conceptualizing the world still permeate contemporary foreign policy.<\/p>\n

It is this Cold War narrative of the Reagan era, with its correlates that America simply stared down the Soviet Empire through military and \u2013 as importantly \u2013 financial \u201cpressures,\u201d whilst making no concessions to the enemy.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cornering Russia, Risking World War III Official Washington is awash with tough talk about Russia and the need to punish President Putin for his role in Ukraine and Syria. But this bravado ignores Russia\u2019s genuine national interests, its \u201cred lines,\u201d and the risk that \u201ctough-guy-ism\u201d can lead to nuclear war, as Alastair Crooke explains. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[149,6963,10896,1239,446,447,694,776,827,862,891,1823],"class_list":["post-15221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-cold-war","tag-consortium-news","tag-east-vs-west","tag-is","tag-isis","tag-islamic-state","tag-russia","tag-syria","tag-united-states","tag-war","tag-world-war","tag-world-war-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15222,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15221\/revisions\/15222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}