Putin’s favorite justification for his invasion of Ukraine was that the US made him do it:
But the United States, having declared itself the winner of the Cold War, saw no need for this. Instead of establishing a new balance of power, essential for maintaining order and stability, they took steps that threw the system into sharp and deep imbalance.
Putin has been reiterating this overwhelmingly stupid idea for years and doesn’t seem to tire of it. This is understandable since it’s his only justification for invading one country after another (the one before Ukraine was Georgia, and before that there was Chechnya.)
The Cold War ended, but it did not end with the signing of a peace treaty with clear and transparent agreements on respecting existing rules or creating new rules and standards.
Here, of course, Putin is treating his listeners as the idiots they probably are. The world is changing for a variety of reasons, and none of them are even remotely related to the absence of presence of post-1991 treaties. Putin himself has been breaking the post-1991 agreements like a man possessed. This doesn’t seem to bother him a whole lot when he is the one violating “clear and transparent agreements.”
Pardon the analogy, but this is the way nouveaux riches behave when they suddenly end up with a great fortune, in this case, in the shape of world leadership and domination. Instead of managing their wealth wisely, for their own benefit too of course, I think they have committed many follies.
There is nobody who knows what nouveaux riches are like better than Putin because his oligarchy is based precisely on surrounding himself by this sort of people and ensuring that nobody but them ever has a chance to do anything in Russia.
The hand-wringing over the end of the “objective and just” Cold War era goes on for a while:
We have entered a period of differing interpretations and deliberate silences in world politics. International law has been forced to retreat over and over by the onslaught of legal nihilism. Objectivity and justice have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Arbitrary interpretations and biased assessments have replaced legal norms.
I want everybody to stop and ponder the excruciating shamelessness of calling the world order that existed between 1945-91 “objective and just.” We are arriving at the extremely important part of Putin’s speech and it is crucial that we understand exactly what he is saying.
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