A May 23 article by Dmitri Trenin, “How Russia Must Reinvent Itself To Defeat the West’s ‘Hybrid War’” may be one of the most significant in recent times, both because of its content and its authorship, writes Anatol Lieven in Responsible Statecraft. (https://www.rt.com/russia/555916-russia-west-hydrid-war/)
Dr. Trenin was the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center until its closure in April, and was, according to Lieven, “one of the most important pragmatic Russian voices in support of cooperation with the West and the ‘Westernization’ of Russia.”
Trenin writes that the goal of the West is to cripple or destroy the Russian state: “The U.S. and its allies have set much more radical goals than the relatively conservative containment and deterrence strategies used toward the Soviet Union. They are in fact striving to exclude Russia from world politics as an independent factor, and to completely destroy the Russian economy.”
“Such an attitude on the part of the adversary,” writes Trenin, “does not imply room for any serious dialogue, since there is practically no prospect of a compromise, primarily between the United States and Russia.... It looks more like the drawing of a clearer dividing line between them, with the West refusing to accept even the perfunctory neutrality of individual countries.”
