The British strategist, Liddell Hart, stressed the need to understand rival views of grand strategy and military developments, or “the other side of the hill.” A range of Russian and Belorussian military and civil experts presented a very different view of global security and the forces behind it at the Russian Ministry of Defense’s third Moscow Conference on International Security on May 23, 2014.

The first session of the Conference presented an overview of the security situation, focusing on what Russian experts called the “Color Revolution.” Russian analysts have used this term since the Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2012, in discussing the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, and the “Tulip Revolution” that took place in Kyrgyzstan in 2005.

Russian military officers now tied the term “Color Revolution” to the crisis in the Ukraine and to what they saw as a new US and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing evolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties. It was seen as posing a potential threat to Russian in the near abroad, to China and Asia states not aligned with the US, and as a means of destabilizing states in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia.

The second session repeated these themes, focusing on the instability in the Middle East, and the final session addressed the war in Afghanistan and South Asia. Many of the speakers at the meeting from other countries touched on very different themes, but the Russian and Belorussian military speakers provided a consistent and carefully orchestrated picture of the “Color Revolution” — backed by detailed PowerPoint presentations, some of which came from the audience during what would normally have been the question period.

Read the article “What Russia’s Leaders Really Think the U.S. is up to: Global Destabilization” on csis.org.