Stratfor – the “Shadow CIA” – has attracted some attention with its recent prediction that Russia will break apart in the next decade.

But Stratfor is very late to the party – the CIA, back around 2005, predicted that Russia “could fall apart at the seams in a decade and split into as many as eight different states”. Summarised here by The Independent.

The report, Global Trends 2015, has sparked a lively debate in Russia about the country’s territorial integrity and triggered passionate denunciations from some of Russia’s leading politicians. Its unflinchingly bleak assessment of Russia’s prospects has angered many at a time when the Russian government is doing its best to talk up the economy.

The fact that the gloomy prognosis comes from its old Cold War enemy makes it all the harder for Russia to swallow. But many ordinary Russians seem to share the CIA’s pessimism.

Blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera.

Oh, and Russia’s population is 13 million more than the CIA said it would be.

But, unfortunately for the CIA’s reputation, 2015, instead of being the Year of Russia’s Collapse turned out to be the Year of the Russian Threat Redivivus. Loudly trumpeted from all corners.

Getting back to Stratfor (The “Shadow CIA“), its prediction for 2025 is:

There will not be an uprising against Moscow, but Moscow’s withering ability to support and control the Russian Federation will leave a vacuum,” Stratfor warns. “What will exist in this vacuum will be the individual fragments of the Russian Federation.”

We expect Moscow’s authority to weaken substantially, leading to the formal and informal fragmentation of Russia” the report states, adding, “It is unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form.”

The breakout of Russia’s nuclear weapons stockpile will be “the greatest crisis of the next decade,” according to Stratfor.

And the US will have to figure out what to do about it, even if it means dispatching ground troops to secure loose weapons, materials, and delivery systems.

Note the quaint assumption that the USA will be in any sort of condition in ten years to do anything much anywhere.

So, I guess that Stratfor’s claim to the title of “Shadow CIA” mostly comes from its use of the CIA’s old, discarded and worn out crystal balls.

Either that or we have to believe that Russia breaks apart every decade and miraculously re-assembles itself without anyone noticing.

Putin, China, Iran, Al Quaeda and ISIS, together again at last! The new neocon nightmare!!!!

Al Qaeda and ISIS also pose a threat to the continued existence of the world order we have known for decades through their constant and periodically-successful efforts to destroy states on which regional order depends.

Those efforts unintentionally cohere with Putin’s drive to reverse the outcome of the Cold War by truncating the territory and sovereignty of Soviet successor states, separating Europe from the U.S., and breaking both NATO and the European Union. They coincide with Chinese undertakings through the finely-calibrated use and threat of force to gain territory, separate the U.S. from its Asian allies, and acquire hegemony in the western Pacific. They interact with Iranian efforts to expel the United States, Britain, and the West from the Middle East and establish Persian hegemony from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean.

Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Jennifer Cafarella, Harleen Gambhir, and Katherine Zimmerman: U.S. GRAND STRATEGY: DESTROYING ISIS AND AL QAEDA, REPORT ONE; AL QAEDA AND ISIS: EXISTENTIAL THREATS TO THE U.S. AND EUROPE; January 2016

http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PLANEX_Report1_FINAL.pdf

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/human-rights-and-human-wrongs/ri787

I must introduce all of you out there in Internetland to the life and works of one Suzanne Nossel. She is a professional “human rights” bureaucrat: presently head of US PEN, she was earlier head of the US branch of Amnesty International and before that of Human Rights Watch.

But, before all that, she was an employee of the US State Department.

She boasts that she coined the expression “smart power” in 2004.

Washington, the theory goes, should thus offer assertive leadership — diplomatic, economic, and not least, military — to advance a broad array of goals: self-determination, human rights, free trade, the rule of law, economic development, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Unlike conservatives, who rely on military power as the main tool of statecraft, liberal internationalists see trade, diplomacy, foreign aid, and the spread of American values as equally important.

In short, Republicans just bomb you. Democrats bomb you too, but first they lecture you about your moral deficiencies.

And here is the latest example. Human Rights Watch (one of her former fiefdoms) invites us to sign a petition protesting Russia’s “increasingly repressive domestic policies”. Why those awful Russians have – not that the petition tells us so – imitated the US Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 which requires “persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.”

FARA is, of course, a Good Democratic Law while the exact Russian equivalent is an Evil Repressive Law. Hypocrisy is evidently no impairment to ”smart power”.

Oh, and incidentally, as anyone with a knowledge of the difference between Russian and Ukrainian orthography knows, the sinister helmeted riot cops in the accompanying picture are actually Ukrainian riot police. Stupidity is no impairment to “smart power” either.