5/5 stars
recommended
I recommend you read this book. It was a very informative read and I’m glad I picked it out. The intro to the book was a very pleasant crash course on Russia’s interference in American politics (This book was written in 2017, so for the most part, you’re getting current enough information to learn a lot from). The author did a good job explaining their interference with the 2016 US presidential election. You’ll learn why exactly Paul Manafort is in jail, why Wikileaks was such a huge factor, and you’ll learn about the alleged FSB connection to the Guccifer 2.0 hacks. This is all worth knowing about, especially if you don’t follow the news cycle very closely and aren’t very informed about the background of and the extent to the Russian’s interfering in our elections (yours truly! I’m really glad the author included all this).
The next ¼ of the book is a biography on Vladimir Putin. You’ll learn the details of his unlikely (yet almost destined) rise to the top of Russia’s post-USSR political structure. The second half of the book is the most interesting in my opinion. You could get away with just reading the second half and you’d come away greatly benefited. The author picks several key dynamics in terms of Russia and its foreign policy/national interests to explain in depth. He then details the potential moves Russia will have to make in the future based on their current realities.
You’ll learn about:
Why Russia has oligarchs and how they got so rich.
Why the Russia economy is oil dependent.
Why Russia will likely spark a ‘race to the Arctic’ among the United States, Canada, Finland, Greenland
Why Russia is at war in Ukraine.
The potential future dynamics between a rising China and Russia. The author talks about Kazakhstan being so geopolitically crucial to both Russia and China that in the future it might be plausible to see a Ukraine annexation situation there... Potentially with either Russia OR China being the one doing the annexing! VERY interesting stuff.
Technical details:
This book has a lot of information packed into it, considering its sort of a small book and quick read. I noticed about 5-6 typos and sloppy sentence structure (the majority of which seemed to be at the beginning of the book). I sensed the author's philosophical worldview (in terms of international relations) to be a mixture of constructivism and liberalism. I feel some of his outlook in terms of “Russia being destined to fail” based on its current structure is assuming too much. The author (in my opinion) is discounting the possibility that an economically globalized, values-based, democratic political framework for nation states (like how the EU and America have currently) might end up being a liability instead of an inherent advantage like how it has been for us in America. It’s an alternative point of view that he didn’t really explore much.