Negotiating with Russia is a liberal delusion

True to form, Russia is busy stealing and destroying Ukrainian grain. No surprises there.

And we should all condemn the EU and NATO for forcing Russia to do this lol.

This has grim implications for poorer parts of the world which depend heavily on such grain supplies.

Yesterday however, after 2 months of negotiations, a glimmer of seeming hope:

Today, more Russian humour in action:

How dumb are these people who negotiate with the Russians?

You do not waste time negotiating with Russians.

In the late 1940’s, Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist and sociologist, predicted that the Americans and the British would make a mess of their diplomacy with the Russians, because they would assume that Russians are gentlemen, and that they would not make agreements which they would have no intention of carrying out.

“What you can’t believe,” Myrdal said, “is what every Swede knows in his bones. The Russian culture is not a gentleman culture.”

Writing in 1985, the late Eugene V. Rostow, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs of the United States and Dean of Yale Law School, noted that:

“The Soviet Union … is embarked on a policy of indefinite expansion fuelled by the practice of open aggression … And as a practical matter, the refusal to confront the profound differences between the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union leads to all sorts of error and naivete in the formulation of Western policies … The Soviet Union is in the imperial mood of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a distinguished British historian has remarked – the imperial mood which the peoples and governments of the West have long since given up with relief. And the Soviet thrust for empire now threatens the state system which has evolved through trial and error since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.”

Article here:

Tsars, Soviets, Putins – the lipstick changes from time to time, but the underlying reality is unaltered. For ideological reasons, liberal and left-wing Westerners have always glossed over the fact that the USSR was a “union” in much the same way the UK became a “union” – that is, a powerful country imposing “union” on its smaller neighbours, be they Celtic or Asian, respectively. Vis a vis the world outside its borders, Russia is the same imperial aggressor that it always has been.

Until the West accepts this fundamental point about Russia, then this well-intentioned foolishness will continue.