Last Friday, Vladimir Putin delivered the single most important speech on foreign policy since he became President of Russia in 2000. Mikhail Gorbachev said he thought it was the best, and most significant speech Putin has ever made.

In it he charted a clear course for Russia, defining its place in international affairs and setting out the principles and objectives of its foreign policy.

The response of the western political and media elite has been pitifully inadequate. The speech has attracted surprisingly little attention. The emphasis has been not on what Putin said about Russia or international relations in general but on what he specifically said about the US.

Western commentary wrongly but overwhelmingly treats the speech as simply a critique of US foreign policy (a "diatribe") with Putin hypocritically condemning a US foreign policy he feels is targeted against him. Behind this is the assumption that the speech is Putin's defiant response to the US sanctions policy imposed on Russia since the start of the Ukrainian crisis even though the actual speech barely touches on this question.

Putin did have a lot to say about US foreign policy and what he said was very critical. However to focus purely on that part of the speech is to fail to do it justice and to ignore its very coherent intellectual framework.

Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it's indistinguishable from the purest paranoia.

~ Terrence Rafferty, New York Times

Fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

Nowhere is this epidemic of fear and paranoia more aptly mirrored than in the culture's fascination with zombies, exacerbated by the hit television series The Walking Dead, in which a small group of Americans attempt to survive in a zombie-ridden, post-apocalyptic world where they're not only fighting off flesh-eating ghouls but cannibalistic humans.

Zombies have experienced such a surge in popularity in recent years that you don't have to look very far anymore to find them lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc in movie blockbusters such as World War Z, running for their lives in 5K charity races, battling corsets in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even putting government agents through their paces in mock military drills arranged by the Dept. of Defense (DOD) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

Generally historical revision takes place long after events unfold and the victors attempt to bury humiliating or inconvenient truths. Today, in the age of information, these would-be victors are finding it increasingly necessary to revise history in real-time through a strategy of increasingly repetitive, but decreasingly effective propaganda.

Phase I: Justifying Chaos

It was only in 2007 that US foreign policy openly sought to pursue war against Iran, Syria, and Lebanon's Hezbollah, while undercutting pro-Iranian factions in Iraq which at the time the US was still occupying. Failing to accomplish this directly, the US planned a not-so-covert proxy war that would include funding, politically backing, and even arming groups ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to militants aligned with Al Qaeda itself.

This is perhaps best summarized by the prophetic 2007 report "The Redirection: Is the Administration's new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh and published in the New Yorker.

Vladimir Putin took part in the final plenary meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club's XI session. The meeting's theme is The World Order: New Rules or a Game without Rules.

This year, 108 experts, historians and political analysts from 25 countries, including 62 foreign participants, took part in the club's work.

The plenary meeting summed up the club's work over the previous three days, which concentrated on analysing the factors eroding the current system of institutions and norms of international law.

Vladimir Putin criticized the West for "sawing at branches" with sanctions against Russia and releasing a "genie in a bottle" with color revolutions. RT looks at the Russian President's best quotes from his speech in Sochi:

Russian President Vladimir Putin participates in Valdai International Club discussion "World Order: New Rules or No Rules?"

The modern global and regional security system is seriously fragmented and deformed, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday.

"Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the existing system of global and regional security can protect us from disruption. The system is seriously weakened, shattered and deformed. International and regional institutions of political, economic and cultural cooperation are going through a very difficult period," Putin said at the plenary session of the 11th meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

The winners in the Cold War seem to be bent on reshaping the world so that it could better accommodate their own needs, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday in a comment on US foreign policy.

"It looks like the so-called 'winners' of the Cold War are determined to have it all and reshape the world into a place that could better serve their interests alone," Vladimir Putin said at the 11th conference of the Valdai Discussion Forum in the Russian city of Sochi.

Three months after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was violently brought down from the skies over Ukraine, there are still no definitive answers to what caused the tragedy. Civil conflict in the area prevented international experts from conducting a full and thorough investigation. The wreckage should have been collected and scrupulously re-assembled to identify all the damage, but this standard investigative procedure was never carried out. Until that's done, evidence can only be gleaned from pictures of the debris, the flight recorders or black boxes and eye-witnesses' testimonies. This may be enough to help build a picture of what really happened to the aircraft, whether a rocket fired from the ground or gunfire from a military jet.

Eric Draitser of StopImperialism.org appears on RT to discuss the Ottawa shooting and the political context in which it should be understood. Draitser explains that an investigation into the role of intelligence agencies in the event is critical to an understanding of how this event really happened. He also notes the convenient timing of the incident and how it will be capitalized on politically by the Harper government. Finally, Draitser outlines how this incident will harden the policies of the government as it relates to the US-led coalition in the Middle East, rather than forcing it to rethink them.

As warned, after multiple staged incidents used to ratchet up fear and paranoia in the build-up to US and its allies' military intervention in Syria and Iraq, at least two live attacks have now been carried out in Canada - precisely as they were predicted.

The first attack involved a deadly hit-and-run that left one Canadian soldier dead. AP would report in its article, "Terrorist ideology blamed in Canada car attack," that:

A young convert to Islam who killed a Canadian soldier in a hit-and-run had been on the radar of federal investigators, who feared he had jihadist ambitions and seized his passport when he tried to travel to Turkey, authorities said Tuesday.

The second, most recent attack, involved a shooting in Ottawa injuring several and killing another Canadian soldier. RT in its article, "Ottawa gunman 'identified' as recent Muslim convert, high-risk traveler," would report that:

While the name of the Ottawa gunman is yet to be announced, a number of officials told numerous media that the shooter is believed to be Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a recent Muslim convert, allegedly designated as a high-risk traveler.

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was born in Quebec as Michael Joseph Hall north of Montreal, two US officials told Reuters, claiming that American law enforcement agencies have been advised that the attacker recently converted to Islam.

AP sources also identified the man to be Zehaf-Bibeau. A Twitter account associated with Islamic State militants tweeted a photo they identified as the Ottawa shooter. The Globe and Mail reports that the shooter was designated a "high-risk traveler" by the Canadian authorities with his passport seized.

Clearly, both suspects were under the watch of not only Canadian authorities, but also US investigators, before the attacks.

A year and a half I wrote an essay on how the US chooses to view Russia, titled The Image of the Enemy. I was living in Russia at the time, and, after observing the American anti-Russian rhetoric and the Russian reaction to it, I made some observations that seemed important at the time. It turns out that I managed to spot an important trend, but given the quick pace of developments since then, these observations are now woefully out of date, and so here is an update.

At that time the stakes weren't very high yet. There was much noise around a fellow named Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer-crook who got caught and died in pretrial custody. He had been holding items for some bigger Western crooks, who were, of course, never apprehended. The Americans chose to treat this as a human rights violation and responded with the so-called "Magnitsky Act" which sanctioned certain Russian individuals who were labeled as human rights violators. Russian legislators responded with the "Dima Yakovlev Bill," named after a Russian orphan adopted by Americans who killed him by leaving him in a locked car for nine hours. This bill banned American orphan-killing fiends from adopting any more Russian orphans. It all amounted to a silly bit of melodrama.

But what a difference a year and a half has made! Ukraine, which was at that time collapsing at about the same steady pace as it had been ever since its independence two decades ago, is now truly a defunct state, with its economy in free-fall, one region gone and two more in open rebellion, much of the country terrorized by oligarch-funded death squads, and some American-anointed puppets nominally in charge but quaking in their boots about what's coming next. Syria and Iraq, which were then at a low simmer, have since erupted into full-blown war, with large parts of both now under the control of the Islamic Caliphate, which was formed with help from the US, was armed with US-made weapons via the Iraqis. Post-Qaddafi Libya seems to be working on establishing an Islamic Caliphate of its own. Against this backdrop of profound foreign US foreign policy failure, the US recently saw it fit to accuse Russia of having troops "on NATO's doorstep," as if this had nothing to do with the fact that NATO has expanded east, all the way to Russia's borders. Unsurprisingly, US - Russia relations have now reached a point where the Russians saw it fit to issue a stern warning: further Western attempts at blackmailing them may result in a nuclear confrontation.

China is facing increasing pressure along two fronts. In its western province of Xinjiang, terrorists have been stepping up destabilization and separatist activities.

In China's southeast Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, protests have disrupted normality in the dense urban streets, with protest leaders seeking to directly confront Beijing while dividing and destabilizing both Hong Kong society and attempting to "infect" the mainland.

What is more troubling is the greater geopolitical agenda driving both of these seemingly "internal" conflicts - and that they both lead back to a single source beyond China's borders. With the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS) now implicated in receiving, training, and employing terrorists from China's Xinjiang province, and considering the fact that ISIS is the result of an intentional, engineered proxy war the US and its allies are waging in the Middle East, along with the fact that the unrest in Hong Kong is also traced back to Washington and London, presents a narrative of an ongoing confrontation between East and West being fought on the battlefield of fourth generation warfare.