Maroc - EURASIAREVIEW.COM - A la une - 15/Jun 02:07

Putin Successfully Exploiting Widespread Anti-Americanism To Gain International Support – OpEd

Vladimir Putin has “very successfully” exploited both widespread anti-Americanism especially in the global south and the belief which exists there and more broadly that Russia today plays the same role in relation to the US as did the Soviet Union, Anton Shekhovtsov argues. “If something unites the contemporary world, that is anti-Americanism,” the director of Vienna’s Center of Democratic Principles continues. And Putin exploits that by saying that “we are against the Americans, and we are fighting with American proxies in Ukraine,” a message many accept (svoboda.org/a/anton-shehovtsev-rossiya-ispoljzuet-v-mire-temnuyu-silu-/32983783.html). According to Shekhovtsov, “this is one of the main strategic narratives which Russia uses in its conversation with ‘the global South,’ one that allows it to present itself as being a leader of the struggle with American imperialism and an anti-colonial power,” even as it conducts its own neo-colonial war in Ukraine. Many people in the global south and in the west view today’s Russia in the ways they viewed the USSR,” despite the fact that Putin’s Russia is “a hyper-capitalist state.” And “even many on the left as before view Russia as a certain counter-balancing force with regard to the US,” which they denounce as capitalist ignoring the fact that Russia is capitalist too. Putin’s success in exploiting unquestioning anti-Americanism helps him to obscure his own raw capitalism and his own imperial goals, especially because few are prepared to expose what Russia today is doing and just how unlike it is from its Soviet predecessor in this regard, the Russian émigré analyst suggests