"... The risk of the forcible imposition of democracy is that it leads to a
growing chaos and it can evolve into a serious crisis of manageability
on a global scale"...
.. The Minister refers to H.Kissinger's words and
stresses the grotesque nature of juxtaposing the so-called realpolitik
and the values-based policy. Apparently, the world today needs
reasonable combination of these two concepts, taking into consideration
that "crusades" and policies not based on moral values are equally
senseless.
.. We stand for agreeing a fundamental set of values that
can help to build a system based on the partnership of civilizations. If
the values are shared, than we have to define them together, giving up
on messianic ideas, which can only do harm to politics. Is the West
ready for this?
http://rt.com/community/columns/ambassador-yakovenko/agreeing-henry-kissinger-summary/
"... Not so long ago former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited
London and spoke at the London Stock Exchange. I was invited to a lunch
in his honour by the president of the Stock Exchange. I was seated right
by the patriarch of the US establishment. We discussed many things,
including, of course, the Arab Spring. Literally a week later I received
the new issue of my favorite magazine ‘Russia in Global Affairs’ which
included Mr Kissinger's article ‘The limits of universalism’. I was
fascinated by his thoughts on the neo-conservatives' ideas. He writes
that the neo-conservative approach postulates that universal peace is
achievable by engineering a world of democratic institutions and that,
if history does not move quickly enough; we can move it along by
military force. My concern is that this ultimate goal is in practice so
remote, and the method of reaching it so uncertain, that it leads to an
interventionism exhausting our society and ultimately to abdication, as
in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The difference is less one of
destination than of pacing. The point is not that what exists is
unalterable, but that the effort required to implement change will be
more sustainable, if we temper the visionary aspect of policy with the
recognition of the variety and complexity of circumstance.
The
current situation in the Middle East is instructive. The Arab Spring was
initially greeted with exuberance as a regional, youth-led revolution
on behalf of liberal democratic principles. But, as Burke recognized,
revolution succeeds through the confluence of many disparate grievances;
the dissolution of the old regime inevitably brings with it the need to
distil from these grievances a new version of domestic authority. This
process is often violent and far from automatically creates a tradition
of civil tolerance and individual rights; it is, at best, the beginning
of a journey toward these goals. America can, and should, assist on this
journey. But we will fail if we settle for one-party elections and
sectarian dominance as a democratic outcome".
.. And here is what
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said to Russian political
scientists in December 2012: "Imposing one's own political and
socio-economic system on others in most cases provokes the opposite
reaction and may contribute to extremist, repressive forces putting off
the prospect of real democratic change. This is one of the fundamental
issues of contemporary international politics directly related to the
topic of a future world order. And it is not about Russia, "by inertia",
confronting Western influence, or throwing a spanner in the works of
the Western-inspired projects just "out of its meanness". The fact is
that the policy of promoting democracy by blood and iron simply does not
work. We see evidence of this today; we have been seeing it in the last
year and a half, even over the last decade. Iraq, the continuing
problems in this country have become an ongoing concern. Nobody fully
understands what will happen in the Middle East in the near future.
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