Ok, Vladimir. Enough of the belligerence. Crimea was an outrage and eastern Ukraine doubly so. So was Georgia. Speaking for myself and possibly millions of my fellow Americans, we don’t want a renewal of one of our worst mutual eras, the Cold War.
Many of us admire and envy your history and culture. In particular, your nation’s demonstrated willingness to change and try to improve. Take your 20th century revolution, for example. You set aside many centuries of brutal oppression by your Tsars, turned them out and tried a grand experiment.
Ok, so communism didn’t serve its intended purpose and became oppressive in its own right. But one of my hero’s, Mikhail Gorbachev, had the courage to admit it wasn’t working and instituted in the same century a second major reform, Glasnost and Perestroika. We’re still waiting here for needed reforms to the failures of our economic system, capitalism. The world and many American’s hailed his guts and balls. And many members of your Union appreciated the autonomy Mikhail and his team gave them, though it has been a rough transition for many. You can be admired like that too. Through fear? Not so much.
Yes, a few mistakes were made along that path, including bringing over American’s best and brightest consultants from such institutions as Wharton and Harvard to result in privatization moves that created a Russian oligarchy of insiders that has become the envy of our own oligarchs.
But now, your mimicry of our own history of imperialistic overreach stuns the imagination. For that matter, the mimicry of your own overreach in the closing days of our grand partnership in WWII in eastern Europe causes one to wonder about why we both fail to learn the lessons of history which have so much to teach us both. That imperialism doesn’t work for anybody.
Let’s not do this. We shouldn’t make your feel hemmed in and caught in a vise with our NATO alliance. You shouldn’t begin recreating your Union in response to that vise. Let’s get together and loosen the vise and work out mutually autonomous partnerships in that region and grow the economic pie for everyone’s benefit.
Look, there’s alot of admiration over here for your huge contributions to humanity and culture. Your ballet and classical music has made the world a better place. As have your brilliant contributions to science, architecture and art. And your willingness to end our nuclear campaigns of mutual terror.
We should have learned from your admission that Afghanistan was unfixable. And many of us here are grateful for your strategic brokerage in Syria to retire their chemical stockpile without blasting an already ruined populace off the face of the earth.
Vladimir, cut Pussy Riot and the gay community there some slack. There’s much creative energy for building your democracy pent up with these folks, just waiting to be unleashed for good. Just as I, as an atheist admire your country’s willingness to allow the Orthodox Church to surface from the underground and serve some of your people who seem to need them, Russia will not be harmed by political dissidents and those with lifestyles which you might not understand. You’re better than that. Hopefully, we are too.
Finally, I have an idea. Let’s put all this crap aside and form a partnership to address the imminent catastrophe of climate change. Let’s together lead a new Union of enlightened countries possessing passionate survival instincts and use our scientific resources to redirect our huge energy interests toward limiting carbon dependence and assure our planet of clean air and water.