Stephen Cohen Is Late. We Are Past The Turning Point.

I stumbled recently on Stephen Cohen's good and sensible interview to The Grayzone. It is an interview of a competent Russia scholar who does know subject but the core, the central point of this interview is not just about outright imbecility of American "elites", such as ignoramus Strobe Talbott (surprisingly a student of Isaiah Berlin who abhorred Talbott's policies towards Russia in 1990s), but the main point, correctly emphasized by Cohen, starts at a minute 18. 

If Russia is the West? Was Russia pushed away by the West to eventually form alliance with China? Here is the problem--the interview is dated by 24 September this year. If you may recall, a week after that Putin drops a bomb--Russia helps China to build her own Missile Attack Early warning System (SPRN). As I already stated then, this stunning and unprecedented fact throws all Western views, not that they ever were reality-based, on Russia-China arrangements in a total disarray not only by he fact of a demonstration of Russia's military-technological superiority once one considers what such a system actually is, but in terms of the mutual status of Russia and China in this duopoly. That blew, as I stated not for once, Western wet dreams of Russia being a "junior" partner in such a de facto alliance out of the water. 

But building China's SPRN is the most telling sign of Russia making her civilizational choice and moving away from the West. One does not build only the third system of this power and capability in the world without a full commitment to a full fledged alliance. This, plus, of course, Russia having a vested interest in China having such a system for the sake of averting a possible war between the United States and China with Russia not being able to sit this one out. In essence, Russia defends herself by defending China this way. That's alliance, my friends, in substance, if not form. It was, in the end, West's, not Russia's choice and it is true today--Russia is not West, not modern nominal West anyway, and she, it seems, is back on her very own and unique civilizational journey, the final frontier of which is probably not even on this planet.  We are past the turning point.