Russia Is In Danger Of Collapsing Upon Itself
And it could do so with reverberations that would rock America and the rest of the world.
Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council sounds the alarm in Implosion: The End of Russia and What It Means for America. While America is preoccupied with threats from the Middle East and China, a monumental transformation is underway in the most massive nation on earth: nuclear-armed Russia.
Russia's first crisis will be a social one: a demographic collapse of the Slavic population, gutted by alcoholism, early death, and abortions that historically have outnumbered live births. Filling the void is a rising Muslim population, including radical Islamists who seek to subvert the nature of the Russian state. In the background is an emerging strategic rivalry with neighboring China, which has growing designs on Russia's resource-rich east.
Ilan Berman paints a grim picture of Russia's precarious future, how the former superpower might unravel, and what impact the end of the Russian state as we know it would have on America.
