Russia-US: Will Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev form a US-Russia alliance? - Sergey Karaganov
In the late Eighties, as Mikhail Gorbachev was steering the Soviet Union away from its standoff with the West in a bid for a “new thinking” foreign policy, Georgiy Arbatov, a prominent foreign policy expert, made a remark: we will do the most horrible thing to you; we will leave you without an enemy. Barack Obama seems to be doing something similarly horrible to the entire world by depriving it of a long-established opponent and scapegoat. Bush and Clinton before him (though considerably less resented) were convenient bogeymen for both US rivals and allies. Governments could comfortably blame Washington for all their national and global mishaps and cite its rigid unilateralism to account for their own inaction.
Yet, both the American elite and general public found the strength to veer off the self-destructive course and elect Obama, a president representing hope and change.The new president has launched a radical overhaul of American foreign policy. Obama put forward a new philosophy of cooperation in place of unilateral leadership and global domination, discarded the democratic messianism, replaced the ill-concealed hostility to the Islamic world with words of respect and friendship, and made statements signalling a political U-turn on climate change.
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