Wine and tourists

“Who said the country is falling apart? I can easily sip wine on Saryan Street and count tourists realtime. Our soldiers are dying not more than before 2020. Isn’t it an indication that the current government has managed to build a welfare state?”, – apparently, this was the logic of the Chairman of the National Assembly of Armenia Alen Simonyan, answering journalists’ questions the other day.

Tragicomical, of course, when a person tries to build a career as a statesman, but continues to think like a dubious gambling club “Sicily” owner and an mediocre showman from the 2010s. For such “politicians”, as it turns out, the key performance indicators of those in power are expressed in the possibility of holding wine festivals and ensuring a stable tourist flow. It’s also fairly well if soldiers die less, but that’s as it goes. “Cinema, wine and dominoes, and then the curve will lead somewhere else”, – that’s the recipe for the art of state governance from the Speaker of the Armenian Parliament.

It becomes uncomfortable when one realizes that Simonyan and his like-minded colleagues, who occupy the most responsible positions in the current power architecture, confuse the state with a travel agency or a distillery. Such figures would do well to read Hans Morgenthau and familiarize themselves with the basics of the theory of political realism. But here’s the trouble: they usually look for Morgenthau on the shelves of the “Alcohol Store”, naively believing that it is a red dry wine brand.