RUSSIA’S AGRESSION AND A WORLD OF UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES

World Tribune
TARC/2008/s0462_8_25.asp
Aug 25 2008

A fortnight can be a century in international geopolitics – but only
after the fact.

The effects of the Russian aggression – and that was what it was,
apologists of all stripe notwithstanding – in the Caucuses will have
profound effects to Russia’s east. But they may be slower in becoming
apparent than in Moscow’s relations with the U.S. and the Europeans
in the West.

It is very unclear at this writing what are – or even if he knows –
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions. It seems unlikely
that the myriad conflicting statements by Russian spokesmen all
are "disnformatsi". So one has to be persuaded that strategy and
policy-making in the Kremlin is formulated in the haphazard way it
has been since the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Putin’s seemingly personalized decision-making builds on the old
Russian tradition of "if the Tsar only knew" reflected in the churlish
way in which statements and policies are spit out.

It is clear, however, that the attack on Georgia was anticipated
in Moscow. And in so far as the Russian military in the Caucuses
is capable of it, given its long record of disaster in Chechnya,
carefully planned for weeks if not months. [see Russia’s Preventitive
War Planning]

But does Putin really intend to begin a series of such adventures
in the half dozen or so territorial disputes Russia has with its
former satellites and subjugated territories around its borders? Is
there a long-term Russian strategy of "Finlandization"? [as it used
to be called] of Russia’s former satellites? That would be using a
combination of Soviet-style military aggression, subversion, and
"active measures" to intimidate bordering states into accepting
Soviet suzerainty.

It is clear that U.S. policy has sustained at least a temporary
strategic defeat. But for a minimum, with the outgoing Bush
Adminsitration and probably with either of the incoming presidential
candidates, the U.S. has little alternative than to try to restore
Georgia’s budding economic development. Destroying that along with
"the energy corridor" through Georgia to the Mediterranean and world
markets for Central Asian hydrocarbons which the U.S. was successful
building has been a major target of the Russian Occupation.

Whatever Moscow’s intentions – and if the U.S. and its faint-hearted
European allies cannot euchre the Russians out of the two separatist
enclaves, and perhaps even "peacekeeping" activities inside the
rest of Georgia – that would be a strategic minimum. Putin’s aim –
and various Russian spokesmen have said it – is for "regime change"
in the Georgian capital with the toppling of President Mikheil
Saakashvili. If Moscow is able to accomplish that, Putin would have
won an overwhelming strategic victory. It would send an important
signal to all the former Central and East European states and the
Central Asian republics Moscow once dominated that crippled as it is,
the Russian Empire was on the march again.

On a still broader plane it’s extremely unlikely that a clearcut
realignment of nation states – in other words, a new Cold War – is
developing. There will be no gaggle of Third World wannabees trailing
behind Moscow as they did during much of the late unpleasantness
between the U.S. and NATO on the one side and Russia on the other
from 1948 to 1990.

Globalization and the continued paramountcy of the U.S. as the only
superpower, however much Russian President Vladimir Putin may have
temporarily outmaneuvered Washington, dictate that.

The Soviet Union’s old friends, if they are still around, know full
well Putin has not rebuilt the Russian military back to its glory
days. Taking on a minor little country of five million struggling to
modernize was hardly a Napoleonic feat, especially since preparation
obviously took weeks if not months.

There are other issues, too, not known in the Cold War days.

The autarky of the Communist years is no more [as it is, of course,
even more so in its erstwhile Cold War ally, China]. Ironically,
that makes Russia more susceptible to economic pressures, even if a
reluctant Berlin and the Europeans fear sanctions might be cutting
off their noses to spite their face.

For example, Russia is breathing heavily now as it has had a run on
finances. Moscow has had to throw tens of billions of its reserves
into the currency black hole. There has been a flight of capital
to more secure havens in Europe and the U.S. That is because unlike
the Soviet Union of old, its very strength in hydrocarbon exports –
as well as its weakness in a heavy dependence on imported capital
tied to technology – makes it a different animal. And though the
Russians have the third largest hoard of foreign reserves in the
world, a few billions spent here, and a few billions spent there,
and you are dealing with real money.

Depending almost totally on its oil and gas exports at a time of a
faltering world economy and lowering energy demand could well puncture
the oil price bubble for Moscow. Russian oil production – which has
been falling – is not competitive with Mideast costs in a weakening
market and its gas production has seen insufficient reinvestment
in exploration, exploitation and in its decrepit pipelines. That
means European exports could come a cropper if there is a very cold
European winter.

All this is something that must be keeping Putin’s more learned
money managers awake nights. They had just stopped worrying about the
falling value of the dollar, about half their reserves, as it turned
around against the other half in Euros and gold they had swung into
two years ago.

Those who know Russia best, former members of the Soviet empire, have
been restrained in their comments on the situation – even Moscow’s
look alike tyranny in Belorus. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president
of Kazakhstan, expressed sympathy for the victims but stopped short
of endorsing Moscow’s view that pro-Russian separatist territories
should never return to Georgian control. [Half his population are
ethnic Slavs and Russia has claims there too.] Armenia, Russia’s
most slavish ally in the Caucasus, has said little publicly – not
mysteriously since Yerevan’s impoverished trade travels through
Georgian ports now bombed and blocked by the Russians.

However, a read of an only slightly disguised racist screed by
Singapore’s self-appointed leading intellectual, Kishore Mahbubani [
The west is strategically wrong on Georgia] is a reminder. Mahbubani,
whose most recent thrust into the limelight was as a defender of his
master, Lee Kwan Yew’s rationale for autocracy, ‘Asian values", takes
the jackal’s view that the Georgians brought it all on themselves,
aided and abetted, of course, by the Americans. He forgets that it
is U.S. power which assures his little city-state, living off the
ill-begotten gains of corruption among its neighbors, that its very
existence, too, depends on the U.S. Navy shield. The long history
of hypocritical fellow-traveling with Communist power in the Soviet
Union will always find an echo among such spokesmen.

The truth is that much of Asia is as much more preoccupied with
domestic crises as the U.S. is at this moment with its annual four-ring
circus of presidential campaigns.

China is concluding an expensive Olympics. It remains to be seen
whether the enormous political commitment Beijing made for the games
was worth the risks. The Games have not demonstrated to the rest of
the world an unvarnished image of "a rising China" ready to become
a member of the great powers. The atmospherics – from environmental
pollution to niggardly cheating around the edges – have soured the
product. Security concerns limited the actual access for Chinese
as well as foreigners. And not all the carefully contrived digital
makeovers would have obscured it. Beijing policymakers, after all the
medals are polished and hung away for 2012 in London, will have to
return to a series of growing economic and political problems. Moscow’s
[at least temporary] dynamiting of the energy corridor Washington
was trying to construct through Georgia to world markets for Central
Asian hydrocarbons has raised China’s costs just as the world economy
has turned down with an almost immediate effect on its export-driven
economy. Moscow’s purposeful aggravation of the energy price bubble
finds China as a growing importer at the wrong end of the transaction
– and the continuing argument about pricing Siberian fuel from Moscow
to China is likely to get even more bitter.

India’s domestic scene is increasingly dominated by the coming
elections. The Communist parties and other assorted fellow-travelers
[only in India could there still be large and influential Communist
parties!] have withdrawn their backing for Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh’s coalition over the issue of the U.S. nuclear agreement. And
that agreement is meeting opposition in the U.S. and from of the
other "nuclear club" states, with China still not heard from. The
Indian left will now try to prove that their instinctive [can it
be called that?] anti-Americanism was correct going into elections
next year. For after all, hasn’t their old sponsor, the Russians,
just given the U.S.. a black eye in the Caucuses? In a sop to the
left and the old Soviet lobby in the Indian foreign ministry, New
Delhi has just placed a multi-billion dollar order for new weapons
with the Russians. But that doesn’t obscure the continued failure of
delivery and pricing on earlier purchases or a sad tale without end
of a reconstructed aircraft carrier.

Nor can New Delhi ignore the political vaccum created next door in
its Siamese-twin of Pakistan. Increasing penetration of India’s huge
Muslim minority by Islamic fundamentalists has created new problems
of terrorism. Growing turmoil in Kashmir could at any moment spill
over into Indo-Pakistan relations, with the ghosts of 3 and a half
wars between the two, in part over that issue, hanging over them. The
coalition of so-called democratic parties which have pushed President
Gen. Pervez Musharraf out of office are hanging together by a thread,
over issues that go back to the corruption and incompetence that marked
their terms in power before the military coup. Meanwhile, the running
sore of Muslim militancy and terrorism on the Afghanistan-Pakitan
border is turning in a cancer that threats civil life in Pakistan as
well as defeating the U.S.-NATO effort to stabilize Afghanistan itself.

Now, we must sit back and wait for the unforeseen consequences. There
is no law of nature that says some of them, repeat some of them,
might not be helpful.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more
than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business
Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He
writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.