Russia

CNN apparently sent a reporter to Little Diomede, the Alaskan island where you can actually see Russia from your house.  Some rather amusing trivia was uncovered:

We were curious if Sarah Palin has ever visited this island. According to the natives, the answer is no.

As a matter of fact, no Alaska governor in the state’s nearly 50 year history has ever visited the remote outpost that still has little running water. We were curious what the Little Diomeders thought about Palin’s claim of foreign policy experience because of the proximity of Siberia. Interestingly, many of these Alaskans had no idea who Sarah Palin was! It turns out they have no TV on the island, and therefore, many don’t follow the news.

The island’s mayor has heard of her though. No American mayor resides in a city closer to Russia than Andrew Milligrock, and he says being two miles from Russia doesn’t give him any foreign policy expertise.

Rather than dance around her lack of foreign policy experience, shouldn’t Sarah Palin instead be promoting her executive and reform credentials?

If you haven’t already encountered it elsewhere, folks interested in the why’s and wherefore’s of Russia’s invasion of Georgia might want to check out this assessment published (and made freely available) by Stratfor.

Stratfor is a private specialist in geopolitical intelligence.  The subscription price for full access to their articles is too rich for my blood, but I have found their publicly-released articles and teasers interesting in the past….although I don’t always agree with their analysis.

For example, on the Georgia mess, Stratfor opines:

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

Granted, I’m no expert on Georgia…but from other sources, I had developed the impression that the trigger for the Russian invasion, Georgia’s drive to stifle long-simmering secessionism, could easily be a manifestation of nationalism blinding leaders, triggering bad decisions.

I’d discount Stratfor’s assessment…except wasn’t it dogged adherence to bad intelligence which officially got us into the mess in Iraq?

Oh well.   If the coming homestretch for the general election campaign needed a little spice to liven things up, the cries of hawks demanding up-sizing of the military in order to respond to such affronts to American interests, budget-be-damned should make the foreign policy debate more interesting.

I note that the Air Force’s hyped Cyber Command has been shelved.  While I’m aware that that decision could be a reflection of inter-bureaucracy turf-squabbling and a desire to not duplicate other entities’ efforts….well, if we’re transitioning to a period of history where Russia is our adversary again, shouldn’t we be beefing up domestic network security from the potential antics of the Russian (and Chinese) hacker corps?

After having spent the last few weeks visiting large urban areas with underdeveloped road systems, we now head to Russia, to visit the mighty (infamous?) original beltway of Moscow, the MKAD (the Moscow Automobile Ring Road).

An interesting looking interchange can be found on the southern edge of the city:

The MKAD is a 109km beltway.  Originally built in 1961 as a four-lane express road circling the administrative border of Moscow, it has in recent years been upgraded to a 10-lane urban beltway and is compared to the Capital Beltway (I-495) around Washington DC or the M25 around London.

Seen at Business Insurance:

“The very rapid expansion of retail business lines has led to important changes in the operating environment, exposing local insurance companies to the risks of inadequate pricing and reserving in less mature segments,” said Anastasia Voronkova, associate director with Fitch’s insurance team in Moscow.

Fitch noted that motor lines were a key driver in the 18% growth of the non-life insurance segment through the first nine months of 2007. However, motor “contributed to the worsening of loss trends in this segment,” Fitch noted.

That sounds like it’ll be an entertaining mess to clean up.
(Obligatory bad Yakov Smirnov joke: In Soviet Russia, the insurers can claim YOU.)