But when the US financed street revolutions to bring about regime changes to install puppets reached into the very heart of central Asia i.e. Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, it was too close for comfort not only for Russia but also for Kyrgyzstan’s eastern neighbor China, which is also facing US moves to hem it in from east and south (Formosa, South Korea, Maynamar & others).

Shanghai Cooperation Organization was founded in 2001 by the great powers of Eurasia: Russia, China and the various former Soviet republics, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan (with India, Pakistan and Iran as observers later on), as a dialogue forum for cooperation on terrorism incubated down south. It might end up like the European Union (some Union except as a an US outpost and a fortress to keep out their former native subjects long exploited and looted), but is a beginning for some kind of cohesive policies affecting them. It certainly has the West worried which is determined that the idea of coming together of the great powers of Eurasia has to be prevented at all cost. Sir Halford Mackinder, the British geographer in his famous essay in 1904, “The Geographical Pivot of History“, talked about Russia and its landmass as “the Heartland” of the world. Brzezinski and Kissinger both students of Mackinder and schooled in the British geopolitics strategy agree. It is the ultimate Halford Mackinder nightmare for American geopolitics, because as Brzezinski wrote quite openly: The only place on this globe that has the human resources, the scientific base, the industrial base, the energy raw materials base to present a challenge to American global power is Eurasia. 

So after the 2005 SCO meeting , along with the announcement of massive joint Russian Chinese military exercises in the wake of notice to USA by Tashkent that its base would not be available ,SCO also set a time table for withdrawal US troops from bases in central Asia. Similar strategic moves and countermoves have been made on the Eurasian chess board since then. Russia has separated the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) into a core group which with measures to transform it into a full-fledged collective security organization.  

Unprecedented joint military exercises by China and Russia;   

In a clear message to the United States and others , in an unprecedented move China and Russia carried out a joint military exercises from August 18 to 25 near Russia's far-east port city of Vladivostok, before moving to the Yellow Sea and then to an area off the coastal Chinese province of Shandong. Apart from 2000 Russian troops, the exercises involved Russia's Il-76 transport planes with paratroopers, Tu-95MS bombers firing cruise missiles at targets in the sea and Su-27SM fighter jets simulating coverage of ground forces.  

Darkness Under the Lamp

Even 20 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the neo-liberal or neo-cons are still celebrating but are still clueless how and why it then happened, in spite of massive budget of CIA , think tanks and Kremlinologists in universities and elsewhere .In mid 1980s Henry Kissinger is alleged to have confided that US will have to live with the Soviet Union system. One of the architects of the U.S. strategy in the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote soon after the collapse that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union." Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading American historian of Russia and an advisor to President Reagan, called the collapse "unexpected."

In a June 20, 2011 article in magazine Foreign Policy titled ‘Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union is Wrong’, Leon Aron, one of the Neo-cons , the infamous tribe that with their hubris laden plan to control and dominate the world, revisits the fall of USSR.

"A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country," Gorbachev told the Central Committee at the January 1987meeting where he declared glasnost -- openness -- and democratization to be the foundation of his perestroika, or restructuring, of Soviet society. "A reappraisal of values and their creative rethinking is under way." Later, recalling his feeling that "we couldn't go on like that any longer, and we had to change life radically, break away from the past malpractices," he called it his "moral position." According to Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, the "moral state of the society" in 1985 was its "most terrifying" feature: [We] stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another. And all of this -- from top to bottom and from bottom to top.”

To Russian thinkers and leaders, a moral resurrection was essential. Not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject. Mikhail Antonov declared in a seminal 1987 essay, "So What Is Happening to Us?" in the magazine Oktyabr, the people had to be "saved" -- not from external dangers but "most of all from themselves, from the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the noblest human qualities.”

“The best investment [the state can make in man] is Liberty and the Rule of Law. And respect for man's Dignity. It was the same intellectual and moral quest for self-respect and pride that, beginning with a merciless moral scrutiny of the country's past and present, within a few short years hollowed out the mighty Soviet state, deprived it of legitimacy, and turned it into a burned-out shell that crumbled in August 1991. The tale of this intellectual and moral journey is an absolutely central story of the 20thcentury's last great revolution.” Concludes Leon Aron vainly and satisfyingly.

But what about the crushing moral and economic degeneration and strategic decline of early 21 century’s hyper power.

US leaders have no such moral political or economic qualms or doubts or even hesitations, at least publicly and continue to misguide the US economy , dragging and forcing the rest of the world with its military might to frighten and invade illegally because of assumed economic infallibility after the Bretton Woods ,like in the film’ Runaway Train’ towards a worldwide economic wreck .

Decline and ‘Break-up’ of USA Predicted in 1998!

But the moral degeneration, decline and fall of the New Rome, is taking place in front of our own eyes. Why, a Russian economist Prof Igor Panarin had predicted so far back in 1998 at an international conference in Linz, Austria. Prof Panarin, shocked 400 delegates by dramatically asserting US break up into five entities by 2010. After charts and graphs, "When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," Panarin recalls. Most in the audience were skeptical and didn't believe him, although many got him to autograph copies of a dismembered U.S. map. But after the September 2008 US economic crisis, which continues to get worse by the day, people have begun revisiting his thesis.

Panarin  based his forecast on classified data and analyses supplied by various Russian agencies. He maintains that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. Wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the Union. Social unrest, even a civil war could follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states, Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will return to Russia.

"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time," says Prof Panarin. He even has a framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hanging from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says meaningfully.

The whole thing may appear somewhat farfetched but who had thought or forecast demise of the mighty Soviet Union. In the case of USA there are clear signs of decline and decay for all to see.

But Panarin insists this is no cause for celebration. Russia is too dependent on the dollar and trade. But he considers the United States foreign debt a "pyramid scheme" and says "China and Russia would take up Washington's role as a global financial regulator." Groupings like Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are seriously contemplating to move away from the corroding ,inequitable and debilitating tyranny of the US Dollar , which lacks backing of gold or goods.

Fifty year old Panarin is now dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for training diplomats and began his career in the KGB (Putin is also from KGB) in 1976. He has a doctorate in political science, has studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, the Russia’s National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for President Yeltsin.

Continued to September 2008 Economic Crisis and Paralyses