Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The morality behind a superpower's motives.

Robert Kagan suspects that Putin might be feigning sympathy for the Ossetians:

Putin cares no more about a few thousand South Ossetians than he does about Kosovo's Serbs. Claims of pan-Slavic sympathy are pretexts designed to fan Russian great-power nationalism at home and to expand Russia's power abroad.
Who could believe such a thing? Next Kagan will be telling us that the US really don't give a shit about Iraqi freedoms and merely wanted "to expand the US's power abroad".

But, of course, Kagan would regard such a comment as blasphemy. We must always believe that the Bush White House cares about democracy before all else. That's why they loathe Saudi Arabia and were so respectful of France's democratic decision not to support the Iraq war.

The notion that the US, like Russia, might have larger geopolitical considerations doesn't fit in with the Kagan farce that every US action is always guided by beneficence.

Click title to read his tosh.

2 comments:

Ingrid said...

Kel, it's called 'American exceptionalism'..
and most people seem to take to it hook line and sinker..

Ingrid

Kel said...

I think most Americans take to it, Ingrid. I'm not sure how many of the rest of us do!