How Putin outmaneuvers a blundering United States on the world stage
IHow Putin outmaneuvers a blundering United States on the world stage
By Stephen Kotkin, Washington Post
The United States and its allies won the Cold War, a prolonged struggle across the globe, but news accounts nowadays give the impression that the West has lost the post-Cold War “peace” amid a resurgence of authoritarianism.
Exhibit A: Russia.
“Russia is a regional power,” President Barack Obama said dismissively at an international gathering in March 2014, after Moscow’s forcible annexation of Crimea. Back then, a Washington consensus largely belittled the United States’s former Cold War rival as a fatally declining has-been with less than a 3 percent share of global gross domestic product, compared to a U.S. share more than seven times as great.