Unlike the USSR, Putin’s Russia has no regional or international allies to speak of, and wields little ideological soft power. The US’s $700 billion defense budget alone would account for half of Russia’s GDP.īiden’s dislike of Putin is as much personal as ideological Per capita, it’s 61st, in the neighborhood of Bulgaria and Grenada. Russia’s economy is nominally the 11th largest in the world, between South Korea’s and Brazil’s. But in every other sense Russia remains, as Henry Kissinger put it, ‘Upper Volta with nuclear missiles’. Yes, Putin commands the only nuclear arsenal in the world that can match America’s. There must have been laughter in the Kremlin the next day when Biden slipped not once but thrice clambering up the stairs to Air Force One. Given that Biden had just publicly accused Putin of being a poisoner, this came across as the slightly sinister ‘mind your step’ valediction of a mafia boss. He also wished Biden ‘the best of health’. ‘When I was a kid, when we were arguing with each other in the playground, we used to say, “What you say is what you are,”’ said Putin. Putin’s response to the ‘killer’ charge was effectively to call Biden a killer himself. Whether Putin understands Biden is less clear. Donald Trump called him ‘extremely strong and powerful’. Bush found Putin ‘very straightforward and trustworthy’ after looking into his eyes and getting ‘a sense of his soul’. Maybe Biden does understand Putin, though. Putin smiled and replied, ‘We understand one another.’ At least that’s what happened if you believe Joe Biden. ‘I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,’ the vice president said. The last time Joe visited Vladimir in the Kremlin was back in 2011, when Biden was VP and Prime Minister Putin his counterpart, having temporarily swapped positions with Dmitry Medvedev. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have been taking potshots at each other for at least a decade. Arch-Russiagaters in the US get to write off Donald Trump’s election as a Kremlin plot rather than try to understand it as a popular revolt against the Washington establishment. America’s insistence that Russia is interfering with her democracy and that her spies are everywhere gives Putin a wonderful domestic boost to his status as international evil genius and all-powerful spymaster. The old thrill may be long gone, but both former partners still manage to kick up a few sparks from the old Cold War ashes. And many Americans still secretly love to have a reliable foreign baddie to blame when their democracy wobbles. Russia is still dependent on her ex’s power and glamour to prove her continued status in the world. Russia and the United States are like an old divorced couple, still bickering 40 years after their stormy superpower marriage broke up. ‘Other than being crazy enough to press a button, there is nothing that Putin can do militarily to fundamentally alter American interests.’ No one is close,’ Biden told Ukrainian lawmakers in Kiev in 2014. ‘We no longer think in Cold War terms, for several reasons. Once a deadly serious enemy whose rivalry threatened to destroy life on the planet, Russia’s diminished status means that, these days, there’s little left to the grand old conflict except mere mudslinging. Today? Biden can insult Putin with impunity because he believes that Russia is, quite simply, no longer important or dangerous. Once, that would have been fighting talk. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Does Joe Biden think that Putin is a killer? asked ABC host George Stephanopoulos. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Now, Lebedev was saying, the changes that had taken place since 1991 had left Russia essentially unaltered - the nuclear façade had simply been replaced by energy. Like the Potëmkin villages of the eighteenth century, which were all façade and no substance, the Soviet Union had become a Potëmkin state. Speaking in respect of Russia’s energy conflict with Ukraine at the end of 2005, Aleksandr Lebedev, millionaire businessman and erstwhile deputy of the Russian State Duma, referred to Russia as ‘Upper Volta with gas’ (Parfitt 2006) in a deliberate echo of the widespread suggestion that the Soviet Union in the early 1980s had become ‘Upper Volta with rockets’, a third world state that just happened to have nuclear weapons.
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