As America retreats, By Uddin Ifeanyi

In truth, this grim picture is best painted on a canvas belonging to Russia. A country that has transmogrified from one half of the bipolar world that defined the 70 years following the last world war, to an Argentine-sized economy bristling with nuclear weapons. Russia, or better still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that it is heir to, was contained by a post-World War II global social, political, and economic arrangement (the United Nations and its many agencies, the World Bank, and the IMF, etc.) constructed by the US to promote the freedoms, grounded on the primacy of individual rights, necessary to contain the spread of socialist ideas.