Joseph Weisberg. Russia upside down: an exit strategy for the second Cold War.

 Judging by the bookstore shelves, this book attracts much more attention than a usual Russian-bashing agitprop. Also, by its contents, this book must belong to my section "Books that defeat their message". It begins with young idealistic (sic!) Joseph interviewing for the CIA in the late 80s. In the rest of the book he, with many caveats and excuses, harangues on the subject that Russia, though bad enough, is not Mordor as the FT, NYT and "Economist" describe it in every issue. 

    The most powerful message is concentrated in p. 306 when the author is happy about "Latvians, Armenians, Ukrainians" etc. who now enjoy freedom and prosperity. Had the learned CIA analyst looked at statistics lately? Lithuania and Latvia since their independence lost ~1/3 of their population, and, together with Croatia are less populous than after the Second World War when they - without much help from the Germans - exterminated their Jews and Roma and expelled most Russians (Latvia, Lithuania) or Serbs (Croatia) as refugees. Lithuania is also the world champion or strong contestant of alcoholism and suicide rates. This hardly testifies to the vitality of the population. With Ukraine, belatedly, demographic statistic is heavily manipulated to increase the freebies from the EU but the population under control of the Kiev Government is hardly 3/4 of the Soviet-era population. At the fall of the USSR, the living standards were on par with Russia proper, or even slightly higher. Now they are about as different as USA and Mexico. 

    The second amazing scoop, also on p. 306, bewails the state or Russia as "...If United States collapsed after slavery ended, or during the civil rights movements. The Soviets never got that chance..." But Russia did not collapse with the fall of the Soviet Union. 

    Between opening pages and p. 306, Weisberg claims that almost every evil real (and mostly imagined by CNN, etc.) committed by Russian Government can be matched by the behavior of the US Government. But some evils are really outstanding, for instance the murder of Boris Nemtsov. To remind you, this "opposition politician" retired as a Deputy PM after the 1998 default, never had a gainful occupation thereafter -- he went as an adviser to some provincial city government -- and, yet succeeded in accumulating fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Nemtsov lived in a penthouse of a five-star hotel and chartered a plane to fly another model girlfriend to Switzerland for abortion. People like that usually acquire many enemies with big guns and scant respect for the law, irrespectively of the political regime.  

What are his recipes out of a current disastrous situation? That Russian Government must unilaterally disarm, allow unrestricted work of foreign NGOs (what about allowing Al Qaeda in the US?) and negotiate with the so-called opposition. In contrast, to the Gorbachev era he does not even pretend that above-mentioned measures will be in any way reciprocated by the US and the titular West. A possible impact of these steps on Russian society is never enunciated by Weisberg. But, at least, he thinks about these problems rather than the "Foreign Policy" neocons, which have a boilerplate recipe for any foreign policy problem of the US - a "regime change" through sanctions, which never work, and war. 

Ray Dalio. The Changing World Order.

Ray Dalio & Friend 

It is surprising how enlightened the book is, given his advisers, Thomas "Make-the-war-war-war" Friedman and Niall Ferguson, thanked in his "Acknowledgements".  But all the correct things there are non-original and most original - incorrect. Previously, incomparable Azar Gat developed a static approach to measure the "strength of nations" quantitatively. His formula was based only on population and GDP and was not subject to much ideology-driven manipulation. Dalio's approach is dynamic -- it has a predictive power - but it includes many subjective factors. Not surprising that Dalio, a hedge fund tycoon, gives an exaggerated weight to the financial markets. That would not be so wrong, even if one remembers that most of the world largest banks at the end of the Cold War were in Japan, and that by 1900 the strongest bourses were London, New York, but also St. Petersburg (grain) and Buenos Aires (meat). But his ignorance of cultural factors and poorly digested history makes one suspect of his conclusions. 

The largest European powers by the controlled territories on the eve of XVII century were the Polish Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. They also had the mightiest armies. The problem with them was that they were dominated by militaristic elites with narrow-minded sectarian outlook, bent on incessant conquest and religious proselytization of subject populations. A string of Catholic bigots on the Polish throne reduced this world power to insignificance and then to the disappearance by the end of the XVIII century. Another Catholic bigot, Louis XIV refused to consider any pragmatic solutions and emptied the treasury of then the richest land in Europe in futile search of military gloria. He could not contemplate neither deportation of the Huguenots to the French America -- proposed by Colbert -- nor mending his religious fervor by the alliances with Protestant powers. A relative financial weakness of France on the eve of the Revolution had its roots in the destruction of the most productive class of the French population in the late XVII century by Louis and his bigoted mistress, Madame de Maintenon. 

But all that said, Dalio, because of his independent wealth, can publish books on social policy, which can inspire some thought apart from a conventional neocon garbage. Yet, even he cannot or would not openly challenge neocon orthodoxy.