ROTFL!
It seems that there's a certain Russian political analyst who is so unqualified for his job that thinks the US is on the verge of breaking up the way the USSR did. Not only that, but he apparently expects Russia to be one of the countries that picks up the financial pieces when American economic power simply dissolves!
That we're headed for a decline in America's relative power, and toward a politically and economically multi-polar world order, is beyond doubt. But no rational assessment has the United States functioning politically, economically, diplomatically, or militarily in the new order as anything less than first among equals.
I'm often amused by the cluelessness even of other democracies- who have, after all, been in the democracy business a much shorter time than we have- when it comes to the whole idea of how a government such as ours functions. In France, you can still be jailed for insulting a governmet official; even in Canada, political correctness has run amok to the point where it is not altogether clear that free speech in any meaningful sense will survive there. But the fact of the matter is that no major nation of any political ideology approaches the stability of the American republic. Professor Igor Panarin (who, after all, has never lived in either a democracy or, for that matter, a nation governed by anything resembling a sustainable system) is so utterly out to sea that he truly expects the fact that states want Federal aid to help deal with the current financial crisis to signal the dissolution of the Union!
If the Union navigated the Civil War, I have a hunch it will come through the current financial crisis in one piece, too.
It doesn't seem to register with Panarin that he's talking about the nation with the second oldest continuously-functioning government on earth (the British monarchy is technically older, but has long since evolved into something very different than it was even in 1776). France is on its third Republic, scattered among three monarchies, since the year the American Constitution was adopted; Germany only became a nation in the modern sense in Bismarck's day, and has had a fairly stable system only since the end of the Hitler era a mere sixty years ago. In roughly the same time period, Japan's ancient imperial order became a constitutional monarchy, and China's hoary empire gave way to Chaing- Chaing, in turn, then gaving way to Mao.
The Romanov dynasty, it's true, fell back in 1917, but the inherently inefficient and unstable Soviet system that succeeded it lasted less than a century. Russia, having experimented with a kind of half-baked democracy, seems to be evolving into a kind of corrupt, totalitarian state without even the veneer of ideological rationale the Soviet nightmare had.
Perhaps it's no wonder that Panarin has no feel for the stability of the American system. But wait... it gets even better: he claims that we only "leased" Alaska from the Russians, and that they may reclaim it!
I wouldn't hold my breath, Professor.
HT: Drudge
That we're headed for a decline in America's relative power, and toward a politically and economically multi-polar world order, is beyond doubt. But no rational assessment has the United States functioning politically, economically, diplomatically, or militarily in the new order as anything less than first among equals.
I'm often amused by the cluelessness even of other democracies- who have, after all, been in the democracy business a much shorter time than we have- when it comes to the whole idea of how a government such as ours functions. In France, you can still be jailed for insulting a governmet official; even in Canada, political correctness has run amok to the point where it is not altogether clear that free speech in any meaningful sense will survive there. But the fact of the matter is that no major nation of any political ideology approaches the stability of the American republic. Professor Igor Panarin (who, after all, has never lived in either a democracy or, for that matter, a nation governed by anything resembling a sustainable system) is so utterly out to sea that he truly expects the fact that states want Federal aid to help deal with the current financial crisis to signal the dissolution of the Union!
If the Union navigated the Civil War, I have a hunch it will come through the current financial crisis in one piece, too.
It doesn't seem to register with Panarin that he's talking about the nation with the second oldest continuously-functioning government on earth (the British monarchy is technically older, but has long since evolved into something very different than it was even in 1776). France is on its third Republic, scattered among three monarchies, since the year the American Constitution was adopted; Germany only became a nation in the modern sense in Bismarck's day, and has had a fairly stable system only since the end of the Hitler era a mere sixty years ago. In roughly the same time period, Japan's ancient imperial order became a constitutional monarchy, and China's hoary empire gave way to Chaing- Chaing, in turn, then gaving way to Mao.
The Romanov dynasty, it's true, fell back in 1917, but the inherently inefficient and unstable Soviet system that succeeded it lasted less than a century. Russia, having experimented with a kind of half-baked democracy, seems to be evolving into a kind of corrupt, totalitarian state without even the veneer of ideological rationale the Soviet nightmare had.
Perhaps it's no wonder that Panarin has no feel for the stability of the American system. But wait... it gets even better: he claims that we only "leased" Alaska from the Russians, and that they may reclaim it!
I wouldn't hold my breath, Professor.
HT: Drudge
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