A quote from Spengler in The Asia Times, 10 September 2008

 
The fact is that there won't be any Georgians or Ukrainians in the not-too-distant future. By coincidence, Washington's two favorite beacons of liberty happen to be the two countries with the world's fastest rate of population decline. By mid-century they will have barely half as many inhabitants as they do today, and half of those who remain will be elderly. Hardly men of military age and women of child-bearing age will remain. Their economies will implode long before the mid-century mark, as soaring retirement costs crush state budgets, and young people emigrate to escape the burden of supporting the elderly.

Who are these countries, and why are they there? They don't seem to want to be there much longer.
 
 

Source: United Nations

[…]

The Georgian crisis began, as everyone knows – but nobody in Washington will say – with the Bill Clinton administration's decision to bomb Serbia in defense of Albanian Muslims in the Serbian province of Kosovo. [...] Why did America throw its influence behind the gangsters of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and provoke the present crisis with Russia? Senator Joe Biden blurted it out in an op-ed for the Financial Times of London on January 2, 2007: "The people of Kosovo – already the most pro-American in the Islamic world - will provide a much-needed example of a successful US-Muslim partnership. Stability in southeast Europe would be a welcome bit of good news and offer hope in a season of tremendous foreign policy challenges."

A "successful US-Muslim partnership" was the centerpiece of American policy in the Balkans. Why? Because America has not come to grips with the prospect that the Muslim world may not make it, either. One can blame naivete, or Saudi influence, or any number of factors, but the fundamental weakness of American policy lies in the inability of Americans to conceive of unhappy endings for some important stories. That is what has turned America's foreign policy into a George Carlin routine.

Over the long term, Russia's own survival is at risk, as I have argued elsewhere (Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess and Russia's hudna with the Muslim world). Whether Russia survives or not, it still will be a power in 2050 when the Ukraine and Georgia will exist only as obscure PhD topics in linguistics.

To say that Russia is brutal is a pleonasm, for Russia is not so much a noun as a gerund: what is Russian, is the result of Russification, a brutal business by definition. I hope that Russia will become a liberal democracy resembling the United States and that it will dispense with men like Vladimir Putin in the future. For it to become a liberal democracy, however, first it must survive, and most Russians today believe that they must be led by hard men to survive.