What Does Anyone Want But To Feel A Little More Free?, Part N+1

Ellen Barry, the Times' Moscow bureau chief, published a news analysis in Wednesday's paper, positing why Russia's president, Vladmir Putin, has been so adamantly opposed to foreign intervention in Syria's cruel civl war. Is it because of his KGB days, when he watched the Soviet Union dissolve? His distaste for the post-Soviet states' "color revolutions" during the last decade, when the West supported administrations that turned away from Russia? Or maybe he doesn't want to lose the large arms buyer that Russia has in Syria?

But isn't the answer much simpler: That eventually Russia's growing, liberal middle class will rebel against the country's thin democracy in such numbers that Putin (or a like-minded successor) will have to face the same choice of repression or resignation, and he won't want the West to intervene when he chooses the military as his defense? And can't the same be said to explain China's support of Syria these days, on perhaps an even larger scale? This probably a very simplistic opinion, but I think Putin's administration recognizes that this is in the realm of possibility and it needs to keep all of its options available. Strategy is sometimes only self-preservation, no?

Thanks to Godspeed You! Black Emperor for again giving this post's title.