RUSSIA INSIDER: …Putin’s vision of the international system is a profoundly conservative one – a fact he actually admitted himself after the speech in answer to a question. Running like a thread throughout the speech is a typical conservative’s yearning for stability and mistrust of change, a wish for a predictable rule based system in which the sovereign rights of nations are respected and in which change when it happens is contained and managed and never encouraged.
Since Putin’s concern is for stability, an aspect of his vision, which would be instantly familiar to an old style European conservative but which is totally alien to a modern western liberal, is that it is totally value neutral. Where westerners today habitually divide nations into democracies and dictatorships and decide their attitudes to them on that basis, Putin treats them all the same, considering their domestic arrangements to be something for them to worry about.
Underpinning everything is a belief in the need for an orderly system preserved by a balance of power. For Putin, the USSR’s greatest contribution was precisely in that by providing a counter weight to the US it secured international stability. Much of the speech is a lament for the loss of the counterweight provided by the USSR… (more)
EDITOR: Putin’s position would be a lot more credible if he had not recently annexed Crimea and backed an insurgency in southern Ukraine. The concept of “balance of power” means each nation’s borders being inviolate with domestic issues, other than genocidal, being its own business. The concept originated with the Peace of Wesphalia in 1648.
