Russia in the World

If you want to know just how sorry relations in between Russia and the United States have become, look for the current Ambassador to Russia. America’s closest connect with Moscow via appointment by President Donald Trump, Jon Huntsman Jr. is the son of billionaire businessman Jon Huntsman Sr. of the Huntsman Corporation. I’ll wager very few reading this will have ever heard of Huntsman. So, let me introduce you to U.S. détente in the Trump era.

Nations like Russia and China make billions of dollars a year in the arms industry. Their arming of other nations with the latest in defence technology is not only a means of supporting their respective economies, it also fits into a diplomatic and national defence strategy of their own.

“Canada’s decision to extend its anti-Russia sanctions under the false pretext of hypocritically championing human rights is absolutely pointless and reprehensible,” read a November 3 statement from the Russian embassy in Ottawa.

The first time I took on The Economist was in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Eduard Schevarnadze as Foreign Minister after the death of Andrei Gromyko, known in the West for his intransigence. When The Economist headlined something like “Schevar-Who?”, I opined that the two probably went back a long way, which turned out to be true: together they ushered in Perestroika, which successfully influenced East-West relations.

What do Wikipedia, notorious Russian mafioso, nincompoop Putin adversaries, dissident Russian business TV, CNN, CNBC, Facebook, Google, Twitter and the United States Senate have in common? Well, Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia once had nothing much to do with fake news and globalist propaganda, but the rest of these share the stain of obvious wickedness that comes from pursuing malicious skulduggery. This is a good story, read on.

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” was the title of a highly influential book by Dale Carnegie published in 1936 and still read today by people seeking to improve their chances of success. (The author was unrelated to Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, and in fact was the poster-child of the ‘self-made man’).

Since the 1928 Red Line Agreement between British and French and American oil majors to divide the oil riches of the post-World War I Middle East, petroleum or more precisely, control of petroleum has constituted the thin-red-line of modern geopolitics. During the Soviet time Russian oil exports were largely aimed at maximizing dollar hard currency income in any possible market.