FIFA - Putin now supports Blatter publicly - should we boycott Russia 2018?

they are both engaged in arms build-ups.

Good for weapons sales!

Theyre are plenty of Russians who dont like Putin. Every election he holds has some sort of voting scandal which mames sure he wins.

Actually, if you look at the numbers, the US is reducing the Pentagon's budget, manpower and equipment at a greater rate than we are. This is partly masked by the fact that their budget is so much bigger than everyone else's in the first place, and partly masked by the fact that the US doesn't want to appear weak so doesn't really publicise these numbers. But it is fact.

Of the two countries you mention, only one is actively building up forces, only one is talking about building up strategic weapons. It's not the US.

The US is no saint, and they are doing plenty of questionable things, but they can't be accused of a military build up.



Aaaaanyway, such points have wandered a very long way away from football.

It must be hard to get truly accurate trends on such massive expenditures, especially given that considerable slices of US military and security expenditure are effectively secret or disguised as something else.

However, I was really talking about the expansion of NATO into E. Europe after the Soviet collapse, which there was no justification for at the time and which has played such a useful part in the rise of the particular flavour of revised Tsarist-nationalism that Putin engages in. One way of looking at it is that NATO was far-sighted and realised that Russia was not going to change and that the peoples of E. Europe needed security guarantees. That's a stretch, given the depth of the collapse when all this was going on. A more plausible scenario is that NATO needed to exist because the arms manufacturers need it to exist. So it needed a reason and so it needed to reinvent the cold war. Cold wars need an opponent, so Putin or someone like Putin was needed.

It must be hard to get truly accurate trends on such massive expenditures, especially given that considerable slices of US military and security expenditure are effectively secret or disguised as something else.

Money, yes, perfectly fair point.

But hardware and people are impossible to hide. Any real military build up requires equipment and people. We can see for a fact that both have been reducing.

It's about expansion, both territoriality, militarily and economically. It always was, still is (Ukraine was triggered by both the EU and Russia wanting them in their customs union) and probably always will be.

You don't win a cold war and then just leave the prize alone as a buffer, you claim the prize.

The 'win' was a strange one. Gorbachev withdrew from the battle, but there was no 'victory' as such, just a huge loss of national well being and citizen well being in what was the Soviet Union, which was hardly good for the rest of us and has had a dire outcome, the promotion of a subtle form of totalitarianism in Russia to replace the previous one.

Bit like how I expect FIFA will progress really.

Russia was like a failing large business. It chose to sell of it's subsidiaries which were then bought a few years later in order to keep the main business alive

I'd say it was great for the rest of us.

I don't think that's right. We would all have been very much better off, both economically and in terms of global peace and security, with a democratic and pluralist Russia. The outcome was predictable after such a rapid collapse and far more should have been done to help them recover - instead, the western hawks were too busy playing the sort of strategy combat games they love, imagining Russia as a continued enemy, which it really wasn't or needn't have been and placing NATO in Warsaw and Latvia and the like.

I was talking about what happened in Eastern Europe, obviously things in Russia itself could be better. I certainly don't think not having eastern Europe tie itself to the EU would have been better.

To be fair, Russia has proven itself to be 'not one of us'.

That is so far from the truth of how it could have been though. There was a staggering opportunity in the late 80s and early 90s to change things for the better. The Right in the west blew it, with their twin obsessions of wargaming and extremist laissez-faire capitalist experiments they would not have dared run in their own countries. Putin and the current 'them and us' situation is the result.

Possibly but that is a best case scenario to be fair. I take the view that you can neuter a bear for some time, but underneath it will always still be a vicious bear.

It's been wonderful hearing about the FIFA arrests and corruption probe - how totally overdue and how welcome.

Of course, a cynic might wonder if US policies toward Russia lie behind the recent moves - it seems awfully late in the day to suddenly wake up and realise that one of the most notoriously corrupt international organisations is, er, rotten to the core.

Russia has predictably gone to their defence. Today Putin has attacked US involvement.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/fifa/11634953/fifa-crisis-arrests-sepp-blatter-live.html

It does seem that US-Russian politics is playing a part, which is a shame, because Qatar is the real scandal, not least the fact that hundreds of poor migrant workers are dying there constructing the stadium and facilities. The Qatari government cares not a jot.

Should we boycott 2018 as a protest?

If Blatter doesn't go, should we get out of FIFA altogether? Surely there is scope to create a new world body of football, starting, say, in Europe?

That is utter *******s when to comes to Germany.