Стр. 10 - V

Author : A. Orlov
Director, Institute for International Studies, Moscow State Institute (University) of International Rela-
tions, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
IN RECENT YEARS, we have been watching a
grandiose performance in the theater of the absurd, di-
rected by the United States and its closest allies, that
can be called Aggressive Russia Threatens the Peaceful
and Respectable West.
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the United
States, the Alliance's flagship and engine, has moved to
the fore with its numerous and varied foreign policy
doctrines and concepts. It developed a special taste for this sort of activities after World War
Two when the wartime allies in the anti-Hitler coalition became, in no time, enemies in a new
world war. Luckily, it was a cold war.
The Soviet Union, the "comrade-in-arms" that had carried on its shoulders the heaviest weight
of deadly struggle against the common enemy that enslaved "non-Soviet" Europe and threatened
the rest of the world, was treated as an irreconcilable enemy, "the empire of evil" the struggle
with which justified the mad arms race unfolded by Washington and its allies.
During the détente, the conceptual arsenal of the United States was enriched with certain new
accents very much in line with the times.
Thirty years later, the West discovered that these instruments of intellectual propaganda, up-
graded and enriched with new elements could be used in the multicomponent, multiphase and
hybrid struggle against Russia. This can be described as a non-traditional form of war of the
twenty-first century in which the aims are achieved through protracted and varied impacts on
the enemy country, its leaders and its citizens.
While holding forth about an imagined threat from the East and diligently molding common
enemy No. 1 out of Russia the West deliberately builds up tension along Russia's borders. To
analyze the "new reality'' that is taking shape around Russia from the scholarly point of view, we
should admit that any more or less important international event or trend should be discussed
in its specific political and historical contexts otherwise they are deprived of meaning and schol-
arly value. All events and trends are rooted in the previous periods of their development and are
the results of interaction and mutual influence of a great number of factors and specific cir-
cumstances that, in the final analysis, predetermined a specific situation or a specific trend.
Today, NATO's expansionism of which the U.S. is the engine, is developing stage-by-stage or
by leaps and bounds. As soon as the conditions for another "leap to the East" or for new deci-
sions on the Alliance's further militarization have ripened it invents adequate information and
propaganda framework and unfolds targeted brainwashing of the common people.
Электронное приложение к журналу «Международная жизнь»
Born for Confrontation: On the Results of the NATO Warsaw
Summit