an American political scientist and former Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He currently holds the position of University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University[1] where he has been a member of the faculty since 1964. He is also the co-founder, along with Robert Keohane, of the international relations theory of neoliberalism, developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Robert Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence..It's difficult to imagine an American political analyst with more clout. Yet Nye's Huff article, published on September 3, 2014, is titled "A Western Strategy for a Declining Russia". It's a wonderful illustration of the notion of the 'Ivory Tower' that has extended from academia to the higher reaches of government:
The 2011 TRIP survey of over 1700 international relations scholars ranks Joe Nye as the sixth most influential scholar in the field of international relations in the past twenty years.[4]
In October 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Nye to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board.[8] He is the chairman of the North American branch of the Trilateral Commission.[15] Nye has also consistently written for Project Syndicate since 2002.
: While the West must resist Russian President Vladimir Putin's challenge to the post-1945 norm of not claiming territory by force, it must not completely isolate Russia, a country with which the West has overlapping interests concerning nuclear security, non-proliferation, anti-terrorism, the Arctic, and regional issues like Iran and Afghanistan. Moreover, simple geography gives Putin the advantage in any escalation of the conflict in Ukraine.
As if China were not poised to take over the US as the largest economy in the word, as if it had not signed a multibillion dollar energy deal with Russia, as if the BRICS didn't exist, Nye asserts that "Putin's illiberal strategy of looking East while waging unconventional war on the West will turn Russia into China's gas station while cutting off its economy from the Western capital, technology, and contacts that it needs."
Nye spends a paragraph musing on whether a Russian decline would cause more disruptions than that of the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman empires, ignoring the widely recognized decline of the United States.
Among Russia's liabilities, 'Putin's bullying behavior has sown mistrust; few foreigners watch Russian films and no Russian university was ranked among last year's global top 100. (It was Nye who invented the phrase soft power in the late 1980s, and apparently he still coddles that idea.)
Nye claims the Russian population is declining, actually, though that happened after the brutal shock of the 1990's, it is now recovering, with a substantial gap between men dying at around 64 and woman at 76, due to alcoholism. As of 2013, Russian total fertility rate of 1.707 children per woman[ was the highest in Eastern, Southern and Central Europe, and its infant mortality is down to 7.6 as opposed to the U.S.'s 5.2 and Sweden's 2.7.
What's really interesting is that Russia's population density is 22 per square mile, making it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, with plenty of room to spare as population pressures increase in other parts of the world. Calling it an industrial banana republic, Nye admits that with reform and modernization Russia would 'surmount its problems. Though the west is constantly hearing about the scandals associated with running Russia's big oil companies, Nye never mentions its vast stores of mineral wealth. Not only oil, but gas. Oil reserves were estimated on 1st January 2012 at 28.7 billion tons, and natural gas reserves are about 68.4 trillion cubic meters. These figures make Russian raw material reserves globally significant. It is among the top ten of world "oil countries" and its gas reserves are the second or third largest based on actual estimates of Iran or Qatar reserves.
Further according to Wikipedia: click here
in 2005, Russia ranked among the leading world producers or was a significant producer of aluminum; arsenic; asbestos; bauxite; boron; cadmium; cement; coal; cobalt; copper; diamond; fluorspar; gold; iron ore; lime; lithium; magnesium compounds and metals; mica, sheet, and flake; natural gas; nickel; nitrogen; oil shale; palladium; peat; petroleum; phosphate; potash; rhenium; silicon, sulfur; titanium sponge; tin; tungsten; and vadium.
And yet, according to Nye: "Putin lacks a strategy for Russia's long-term recovery and reacts opportunistically -- albeit sometimes successfully in the short run -- to domestic insecurity, perceived external threats, and the weakness of his neighbors. Russia has thus become a revisionist spoiler of the international status quo that seeks to be a catalyst for other revisionist powers. But an ideology of anti-liberalism and Russian nationalism is a poor source for the soft power that the country needs to increase its regional and global influence. Thus, the prospects that a Russian-led Eurasian Union can compete with the European Union are limited."
Pegging everything on his notion of soft power, Nye concludes on a somber note that should give us pause: "Whatever the outcome of Putin's revisionism, Russia's nuclear weapons, oil and gas, skills in cyber technology, and proximity to Europe, will give him the resources to cause problems for the West and the international system. Designing and implementing a strategy that contains Putin's behavior while maintaining long-term engagement with Russia is one of the most important challenges facing the international community today."
Bottom line, Putin is a trouble-maker, but not exactly an existential threat to Europe, or any other area of the world. So why is the West spilling blood on Russia's doorstep?
Nye's analysis is typical of the fantasy world Washington's foreign policy establishment has built up over the decades as the anti-Russian ethos of European refugees such as Kissinger, Brzezinski and Soros melded with America's westward ho tradition (nowhere more in evidence than in the Ivory Towers of the Northeast), of thinking it can invent the world.
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