[kuri]

The LA Weekly had an interesting piece with an interview with a retired Russian Colonel in which he gave his perspective on Russian and American empires and foreign policy mistakes.

Twenty years ago, there were two players on the world stage,” Yuryevich says in July. “The United States and the Soviet Union. I don’t mean to be impolite, but all the other countries, including Britain, France and Germany, merely sat in the audience.

“Today, the United States is alone on the stage, but we are in the front row of the balcony taking great pleasure in your performance. We [in Russia] are in the privileged position of understanding all the mistakes you are making, because we made exactly the same mistakes just before our empire collapsed.”

.....

“Our mistakes all stemmed from our rigid adherence to ideology rather than finding a balance between principles and practicalities. Our ideology was very different from yours, but you, too, are now wedded to ideology — a privatization/free-market ideology — as an economic template for the entire world. As you are discovering, it may not be a good fit for the entire world. You now look very tired, perhaps from trying to govern the entire world by yourselves, as we once tried to do. And when a nation is tired, it makes more and more foolish mistakes. Rigid ideology is a symptom of such fatigue.”

Of course Russia appears to be making some of the same historical mistakes, but there is food for thought there.