PROVIDED BY CNNNEXT.COM
Published on Aug 21, 2015
Russia’s mighty army and its nuclear arsenal are an obstacle to the global US hegemony, an American political analyst from Virginia says.
“Russia continues to be the second most significant nuclear power after the United States,” said Keith Preston, chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, a website dedicated to encouraging revolt against domestic and foreign US government policies.
“The Russians continue to have the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal, which is viewed as a potential obstacle to American hegemony worldwide,” he told Press TV on Friday.
“Also, there is the fact that Russia is a key component in the emergence of the BRICS axis, which is essentially trying to create a reserve currency -- an international reserve currency -- that’s independent of dollar,” he added, referring to the BRICS group -- constituted of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
“Essentially, Russia is in a position of having a massive multi-national military alliance really camped out right on its border,” Preston said.
“All of these things have the effect collectively of blocking the American global hegemony; it’s clear from American policy documents that this is what the policy makers in Washington want,” he noted.
“There are of course many nations that resist that.
Russia is one of the primary nations that does resist this.
They are the most significant nation to do so, because of the size of their army, because of their nuclear arsenal, and so forth, also because of their growing alliance with China,” he continued.
In a statement on Thursday, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter declared Russia a "very, very significant threat" to the American national security.
Carter was referring to an assessment by a chorus of top military officials, who had made a comparison between Russia and Daesh terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
On July 9, Marine General Joseph Dunford told lawmakers that his assessment was that Russia posed "the greatest threat to our national security." Carter said he agreed with the assessment "by virtue simply of the size of the nuclear arsenal that it (Russia)'s had."
“The objections that the [Defense] Department has raised to Russia are really in line with the similar criticisms that the [Defense] Department has raised, concerning China, concerning Iran,” Preston said.
“The goal of American foreign policy throughout Asia is to eliminate potential rivals to the American dominance in Asia,” the analyst added.
But, he said, “Russia today is a much different society than the Soviet Russia.
The United States’ elite, however, are still behaving as though the Cold War was still going on.” “The only rational explanation for this is the fact that Russia does stand in the way of continued American expansionism in Eastern Europe and in Central Asia and the efforts by the American elites to push the NATO alliance right to Russians border, to encircle Russia to achieve hegemony over various natural resources in Asia by excluding Russian influences, and by the same token, it’s the same thing that the Americans are trying to do to the Iranians, they are trying to do to the Chinese as well," Preston observed.
