|
|
|
Jewish World Review March 3, 2005 / 22 Adar I, 5765 U.S. overconfidence jeopardizes our ties to Russia By George Friedman
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As the world focuses on events in the Middle East — where the fall of Lebanon's government and other events are giving the United States a growing sense of strength and confidence — there is a deeper issue developing half a globe away, in Russia.
Despite longstanding problems in Iraq, the United States appears to have stabilized, if not solved, the situation in the four Sunni provinces. And as the Iraqi situation moves from worse to bad to not that bad, it is sparking political re-evaluations in capital cities throughout the region — from Beirut and Damascus to Riyadh and Teheran. Certainly Syria's cooperation in delivering Saddam Hussein's half-brother to the Americans was not based on a belief that the United States was on the run.
These events have also had a vast impact back home. In its usual manic-depressive way, Washington has swung from depression about Iraq to near-exuberance — the Democrats, of course, excluded from the festivities. There is a great deal of reason to be optimistic since the elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, but the mood swing is still a bit extreme.
This exuberance, in fact, has had its most intense — and perhaps most unsettling — effect not in the Middle East but in Russia.
The Bush-Putin summit went badly, if not disastrously. The Bush administration's sense that it is getting a grip on the situation in the Middle East propelled the president to Bratislava intending to lecture Vladimir Putin on democracy, free markets and so on. In the past, the Russians have taken such beatings stoically, hoping to please the West and keep the economic pipeline flowing. This time, Bush got the back of Putin's hand.
Two things have happened to transform Putin's view. The first was Ukraine: Officials in Moscow were hoping that their allies in Ukraine would steal the election there last year. They didn't. But fair election or not, Moscow sees what happened in Ukraine as a direct threat to the survival of Russia as a united country.
Ukraine is the southern border of Belarus and Russia. It creates a narrow, 300-mile border between Russia and the Caucasus. To cast that as an American analogy, Ukraine is both Mexico and Canada combined. Russia becomes indefensible without Ukraine.
The Russians believe that the United States initially promised that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Empire — or if it did, never into the former Soviet states and certainly never into Ukraine. The election of a pro-Western government there raises the very real specter of NATO crouching beneath Russia's soft underbelly. The Russians fear that NATO, or at least some Western forces, will eventually invade their territory if this happens.
The second thing that shifted Putin's viewpoint was the Russian version of Social Security reform. The Kremlin's strategy was to monetize Russian pensions: Instead of getting apartments, for example, retirees would receive money with which to rent apartments. Unfortunately, the payouts would cover only a fraction of actual rental costs.
The domestic situation blew up, and mass demonstrations forced Putin to back down. But the situation really represented a clash between the new Russia of great wealth, concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs living in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the old Russia (literally) of impoverished elderly and rural dwellers, who were being backed into a corner.
From the standpoint of many Russians, if political and economic reform means abandoning basic national security interests and creating social chaos, they can do without it. Putin, who straddles the various camps, cannot afford to appear to be pushed around by Bush. The more Bush pushes, the more vigorously Putin must hit back.
And he has. Within 48 hours of the Bratislava summit's close, Russia announced the sale of nuclear technology to Iran — the last thing Washington wanted to see. Putin also has toyed with the idea of selling anti-missile systems to Iran and maritime bombers to China.
Putin is trying to show the Americans that he has very real options. The Russian defense industry is still outstanding; rumors of the collapse of the state's research complex are very much overstated. By offering weapons to Iran, Syria and China, Putin was showing that he can hurt the United States quite badly — and that he will.
Russia is certainly not developing internally as the United States would hope. But Washington does not have much leverage in the situation: U.S. economic assistance is trivial, and most of it has benefited a very small slice of Russian society. The Russians, Putin included, believe that Washington wants to finish off Russia as a nation-state, and that all the talk about democracy is simply a cover for strangulation.
I'm not sure that the Russians are wrong, but I am pretty sure they won't go quietly into that good night. The manic side of Washington's foreign policy is not what U.S.-Russian relations need right now — especially considering that, like it or not, the United States needs Russian cooperation.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and the media consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
George Friedman is chairman of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., dubbed by Barron's as "The Shadow CIA," it's one of the world's leading global intelligence firms, providing clients with geopolitical analysis and industry and country forecasts to mitigate risk and identify opportunities. Stratfor's clients include Fortune 500 companies and major governments.
© 2005 TMS
| |||||||||||
