War or maneuvers? How far will America go in confrontation with Russia

As you know, back on February 18, US President Joe Biden spoke at the Munich Security Conference, pointing out the danger that Russia poses to peace and democracy today. Biden also said:

“Democratic values must resist those who try to suppress others. This is how we can deal with the threat from Russia. The Kremlin attacks our democracy and uses corrupt practices to undermine our system of government. Russian leaders want to prove to their people that our system is even more corrupt than theirs. But the whole world knows that this is not true!"

This event, as well as its possible consequences, is still actively discussed by Russian analysts.

For example, political scientist Alexander Morozov makes far-reaching conclusions

“If we understand the situation correctly, then it is as follows: on February 18, Joe Biden gave the Fulton Speech in Munich. The next day, February 20, Vladimir Putin had a planned annual speech at the FSB board, he changed his ready-made text and began his speech with a response to Biden.

On the eve of the CNN television company, citing its own sources, reported that the Biden administration and the EU leadership are actively consulting on anti-Russian sanctions and that the decision will supposedly be announced not at the meeting of the heads of state of the European Union on March 25-26, but earlier, in the first half of March. Consolidated US and EU sanctions are a somewhat new situation.

The course in the domestic policy of the Russian Federation is formed as a projection of the foreign one. This means that we are waiting for "the third form of Putinism". The first started from Putin's Munich speech (2007) during the period of George W. Bush, the second - from the intervention in the Ukrainian political crisis (2014). And now a new stage will begin.

Putin's "Munich speech" was a "manifestation of resentment": "We have lifted Russia from its knees, restored its power, and we are being held in a side chair in the global community." In domestic politics, this form of Putinism was "Medvedev's." The second form started with an extraordinary hybrid attack on Ukraine. In domestic politics, the seven-year period after Crimea became a period of "sanctioned" transformation, Putinism took the form of an anti-liberal phalanx with the ideology of an active conflict with the West.

But in the imaginary West in this seven-year period there were no those who would like to accept Putin's challenge - neither in the United States under Obama, let alone Trump, nor in the European Union. The degree of conflict with the West in the domestic policy of the Russian Federation was convulsively rising during these years, but on the external stage the conflict was very viscous due to the fact that the West refused to demonstrate any unity and enter the frontier of the conflict.

But Biden sets himself an ambitious task: to shake up the entire box of global politics and form a new “axis of democracies” on top of international institutions, a new alliance of states that defend liberal democracy, seeing this as a historic mission. If this is so, and Biden's speech in Munich is an analogue of the “Fulton speech” in new historical conditions, if this is really a new call for democracies on different continents, then very big changes await us in the domestic policy of Russia too..."

Telegram channel expert Druid, however, does not believe that the West will go to the end in its confrontation with Russia. And that's why:

“There is no doubt that Joe Biden will act. Recently, the Russian elites have only been fighting back and expressing disagreement, but do not go to confrontation. It is characteristic that there is less anti-Western propaganda in the media and on television. This is a reaction to the demand of society for peaceful coexistence, but not only.

There is also the factor of Western pressure. Synchronizing the approaches of the United States and the European Union to sanctions against Russia is a long-standing desire of Washington. After the story with Alexei Navalny, the likelihood of such a scenario should be considered highly. At the same time, both Germany and France do not want to lose economic and other contacts with Europe and they do not really need these crusades of D. Biden for democracy (read - strengthening of American imperialism).

Plus, any rigidity has its limits. American elites will not want to push Russia into the arms of China. And this means that the rigidity has its reasonable limits..."

For his part, network analyst Dmitry Sevryukov believes that so far the confrontation between Russia and the West has not resulted in a full-fledged cold war only because one side did not consider it necessary to go to the extreme aggravation, and the other could not go to it due to limited resources. technological and other dependence on competitors:

“When some didn’t want to and others couldn’t, it turned into hybrid models of conflict. Now the situation is changing, partners with the filing of the United States clearly intend to raise rates. But the situation in the opposing camp did not improve, but worsened, the potentials did not increase, but decreased. Given the mentality of the party that announced the "fortress" plan, this provokes a desperate determination to stand their ground, regardless of the price. The costs and continuation of such a course in domestic policy are the extreme rigidity of administration - as much as it is generally possible in the current state of the country and the authorities. Hence the appeal to the experience of the Soviet design, borrowing not only its symbols, but also solutions. However, in order to completely loop the system, as it did forty or fifty years ago, the authorities would have to radically screw up and shake up the mechanisms, which in the current situation is fraught with collapse and cataclysms, that is, unacceptable risks. But even the half-hearted measures to tighten the screws, which are being undertaken by enormous efforts from above, are not at all sufficient to build a model, even remotely similar in parameters to the Soviet fortress. And it is impossible to keep a commercial state with a declining economy and a crisis in the social sphere in such tension and uncertainty even in the medium term. Therefore, a hybrid model of foreign and domestic policy with elements of Soviet tightening is designed for a short distance, during which the authorities will have to build backup scenarios, over which the work of the brightest minds is probably in full swing..."

The Kremlin political scientist and TV presenter Alexey Pushkov did not see, for his part, nothing new in this situation:

“It is inappropriate to compare Biden's speech at the Munich conference, full of commonplaces and anti-Russian platitudes, with Churchill's Fulton speech. Churchill opened with his speech a new stage in the relations between the West and the East and in world politics - the stage of the Cold War. Biden did not discover anything new, but only introduced an additional aggressive-ideological element into US foreign policy. The US coordinated sanctions against Russia with the EU and under Obama. Within the framework of NATO, the United States and Europe acted together in the Russian direction and under Trump. There was nothing qualitatively new in Biden's speech, except for the repeated slogan "America is back!" (America is back!). But this is more from the field of rhetoric. Otherwise, the third Obama administration is in power in the United States..."