Anatol Lieven — Here is What I Saw at the Valdai Club Conference

As a number of participants (including myself) pointed out, compared with these existential threats to existing states, the issues currently dividing Russia and the West are likely to seem to the historians of the future (if there are any) so minor as to be almost insignificant. One hundred years from now, our descendants are likely to look back on disputes over Crimea, the Donbas and Syria with the same combination of incomprehension and contempt with which we regard the European elites who went to war over geopolitical issues in 1914. They, too, failed to see that the real threats to their comfortable, civilized world came from within their own societies.

The National Interest

Here is What I Saw at the Valdai Club Conference

Anatol Lieven | British author, Orwell Prize-winning journalist; Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar; Senior Researcher (Bernard L. Schwartz fellow and American Strategy Program fellow) at the New America Foundation, and Associated Scholar of the Transnational Crisis Project, Chair of International Relations and Terrorism Studies at King's College London