Russia devalued giant US investments in one fell swoop
The centuries-long dominance of the West in the world political system is coming to an end, and the US pursuit of military superiority, in fact, is now becoming a waste of money.
Sergei Karaganov, Dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Politics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, writes about this in an article published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
He believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech to the Federal Assembly on readiness to deploy new high-tech weapons could serve to create another function for nuclear weapons – preemptive deterrence or the prevention of an arms race in the strategic sphere, since new types "make the Americans' pursuit of superiority and invulnerability pointless."
“The desire to translate one’s economic and technological advantages into military superiority through the combined deployment of a new generation of offensive nuclear weapons, high-precision and long-range conventional systems and the gradual deployment of a multi-tiered missile defense system is becoming meaningless. The pursuit of military superiority, in fact, becomes a waste of money, self-exhaustion. The main argument in favor of these systems, that they can increase America’s security, provide both political and economic benefits, and return it to the role of hegemon that it considered itself in 1991-2007, does not remain,” Karaganov points out.
“The declared systems, apparently, at the same time devalue gigantic investments in areas of military development, which Russia, for example, cannot and should not afford. Judging by the description of the systems, some of them, even in a non-nuclear version, make aircraft carriers and other warships, whose weapons can threaten the security of Russia, its allies and friends, extremely vulnerable, if not defenseless,” the expert notes.
He believes that the intensity of rage towards Russia and the desire to get a piece of the military pie will not immediately disappear, but the measures announced by Putin “will strengthen the realistic principles in the minds of the American and other elites,” and then the readiness to negotiate.
In addition, the author writes that the readiness declared by the President of the Russian Federation to deploy new super-technological strategic systems is not only a “preemptive containment” of the arms race.
“This once again reminds our partners of the irreversibility of the end of the 500-year dominance of Europe, then the West, in the world system. To reverse the course of history, the United States, and partly the Europeans, are essentially launching a second “Cold War” in order to regain positions lost over the past decades. But the world is different, and the result will be different. Preliminary analysis shows that the military, political, economic, moral, intellectual assets of Russia, China... are radically higher than those of those who are plotting revenge,” Karaganov sums up.
Russia has devalued the US's massive investment in one fell swoop.