Washington Should Have No Illusions Regarding Russia’s Strategic Interests

Russia pursues its own strategic interests and the Baltic Sea is an important strategic space for its further development, Yuan Zheng from the Institute of American Studies (IAS) under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told People’s Daily Online, referring to the recent series of incidents between Russia and the US in the Baltic Sea.

“With the series of actions [in the Baltic Sea] Russia has sent strong and clear signals that it will be firm in defending its state interests and strategic space,” the website quotes him as saying.

The US however wants to protect its global leading position and continues to suppress Russia’s strategic development, the expert added.

Washington should change its position towards Russia and drop its confrontational activities, lift anti-Russian sanctions and bring Moscow back into G8. Otherwise there will be no improvement between the two.

However, Yuan Zheng added, there will be no consensus reached within the US on the relations with Russia in the nearest future.

The mutually provocative activities in the Baltic Sea might lead to even more strained relationship between the two, he further warned.

‘The World Didn’t Rally Behind the US as Its Undisputed Global Leader’

In a separate analysis of the US foreign policy, a Sydney-based senior journalist and academic  noted that Washington's “ham-handed efforts” to assert supremacy created lots of problems worldwide.

“The world didn’t rally behind the US as its undisputed global leader, so it is time to recognize that US power has declined and has clear limits and other countries have their strategic interests,” reads his article at the Daily Times website.

The US ‘victory’ in the Cold War created new problems, he says. The US not only regarded it as assertion of its political and strategic dominance, being now the only superpower, but also the manifest superiority of its system of political democracy and free market capitalism.

However in the post-Cold War period, the US has “tended to overreach itself in all sorts of directions”, thus creating serious weaknesses and flaws in its foreign and strategic policy.

“Freed from the constraints of the cold war…the US turned more and more from diplomacy to its unparalleled military power,” he quotes Jessica T Mathews as writing in The New York Review of Books.

As a result, “America has been engaged in conflict for nearly all of the past quarter-century, having undertaken nine military actions, including the two longest wars in its history,” in Iraq and Afghanistan, still plunging the region into an unending nightmare.

And it high time for the above to change, the author finally states.