These are highly interrelated. and you can add the United States. After two of the best quarters in 2014, it had a huge anti-administration landslide. Partisan American papers like the New York Times pretend they did not occur and pretend that Hillary Clinton has a chance.



The US has a "left-wing" President who, as Elizabeth Warren said on the Senate floor on Dec. 13, is totally controlled by Citigroup. He hails three achievements: the Heritage Foundation health care plan, an asset-stimulus plan that tripled the market and cut wages for (according to the Fed) 90% of the population, and a TPP that even Paul Krugman opposed.



Obama's foreign policy is unbelievably Neo-Conservative. Robert Kagan and his wife are the real Secretaries of State. Unless Kasich reverses all this in 2017, American politics is headed the European path.



After the Greek crisis, Europe must begin with Russia. From 1970 to 2000, I was one of America's top specialists on the Soviet Union--Broookings' specialist. (Check me on Amazon). I can say as an active particulant that the distortions of the press of the Soviet Union during the Cold War are not remotely as bad as they are now. Even Jack Matlock, Ronald Reagan's top specialist on the Soviet Union, cannot believe either our policy or the impossibility of criticizing it.



Imagine that Russia were involved in the overthrow of the Canadian gpvernment or even mildly supported the movement of Canada towards the Russian bloc. Even now we are slow to change policy towards Cuba.



Putin is not trying to take eastern and southern Ukraine. He wants the Russians to stay and be a stabilizing force in its Parliament. The problem is that Western Ukraine (the Poland that Stalin got from Hitler in 1939) wants to expel the Russians so it can dominate the Parliament. We, including NATO, are supporting that division of Ukraine when we have total power to make Ukrainian leaders to move in a more accommodating direction.



What Putin wants is for Ukraine to be a Canada. A bilingual state whose Quebec areas (the east and south) are federal provinces like Germany and Quebec with bilingual guarantees like Quebec. He wants it to have a basic "friendly" foreign and foreign economic policy towards Russia, but would have no objection to it being integrated in the West if that meant no economic barriers to Russia. That is in Western interests.



Europe has to take control of Russian policy. It is hard to imagine it returning to rationality in the US unless, perhaps, Richard Haass comes to guide US policy.

