[A-List] Russia: a UK Tory view on US imperialism

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This Russian risk could yet dwarf our blunder on Iraq

Putin's belligerence is the upshot of inept western diplomacy. Following
cold war with cold peace may prove a historic error 

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday June 6, 2007
The Guardian 

Will history tell us we were fools? We worried about the wrong war and
made the wrong enemies. In the first decade of the 21st century the
leaders of America and Britain allowed themselves to be distracted by a
few Islamist bombers and took easy refuge in the politics of fear. They
concocted a "war on terror" and went off to fight little nations that
offered quick wins.

Meanwhile these leaders neglected the great strategic challenge of the
aftermath of cold war: the fate of Russia and its mighty arsenals, its
soul tormented by military and political collapse, its pride undimmed.
They danced on Moscow's grave and hurled abuse at its shortcomings. They
drove its leaders to assert a new energy-based hegemony and find new
allies to the south and east. The result was a new arms race and, after
a Kremlin coup, a new war. Is that the path we are treading?

When Keynes returned from Versailles in 1919 he wrote an attack on the
treaty that ended the first world war. In The Economic Consequences of
the Peace he warned that punishing Germany and demanding crippling
reparations would jeopardise Europe's stability and the building of
German democracy. He confronted politicians, on both sides of the
Atlantic, puffed up with the vanity of victory and convinced that the
German menace had been laid to rest. He was right and they were wrong.

For the past six years Washington's whirling dervishes have reduced
Anglo-American foreign policy to a frenzy of bullying hatred of anyone
to whom they take a dislike. One half of this neoconservative agenda is
heading for the rocks, American dominance in the Middle East following a
stunning victory over a Muslim state. But the other half is alive and
well, pushing ahead with the missile defence system bequeathed by the
Reagan administration.

This so-called star wars is militarily unproven and, with the end of the
cold war, of no apparent urgency. But it is astronomically expensive
and, as such, has powerful support within America's industry-led defence
community. When Dick Cheney was finding George Bush a defence secretary
in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld's chief qualification was his enthusiasm for
space-based defence. Hence America's 2002 renunciation of the
anti-ballistic missile treaty. Hence the installation of defence systems
in Poland and the Czech Republic, in defiance of what was promised to
Russia at the end of the cold war. Hence Rumsfeld's frequent jibes
against old Europe in favour of "new".

Vladimir Putin's reactive threat this week to retarget his missiles at
west Europe was reckless and stupid. Just when nuclear disarmament is
again a live issue and his old enemy, Nato, faces defeat in Afghanistan,
he tossed red meat to the Pentagon (and Whitehall) hawks. He
strengthened the case for a new British Trident and encouraged an arms
race that he knows his own country can ill afford, just as it can ill
afford to send Europe frantically seeking alternative energy supplies.

Yet nations do not always act rationally, especially those with
authoritarian rulers. Putin's belligerence was the predictable outcome
of a western diplomacy towards Russia whose ineptitude would amaze even
Keynes. Nato's dismissal of Moscow's approach for membership, like the
EU's similar cold shoulder, wholly misunderstood Russian psychology. The
loss of its east European satellites was not just a loss of empire but
revived age-old border insecurity. The pretence that Rumsfeld's
installations, which could be placed anywhere, were aimed at "rogue
states such as North Korea" was so ludicrous that only Tony Blair
believed it.

There was a moment after 1990 when Russia was weak, immature and
unstable, and longed for the embrace of friendship. Mikhail Gorbachev,
Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, even Blair in his
pre-poodle phase, understood this. Neither side had an interest in
reviving the cold war. Under Bush this has been replaced by an
assumption that he should somehow dictate the terms of Russia's
conversion to capitalism and democracy, even as western leaders
cringingly paid court to the dictators of Beijing. This undermined
Moscow's internationalists and played into the hands of Putin's
hard-liners. It was repeated in Bush's speech in Germany yesterday.

Putin is throwing down a gauntlet not to the west so much as to his own
Kremlin successors. He is warning them never to trust the west. To him
it remains incorrigibly imperialist, hypocritical in its global morality
and unreliable in its treaties. So he is telling them to cause mischief
with oil and gas. Deny help over Iran and Kosovo. Stay armed and on
guard.

A new study by Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed
the World, examines the options facing world leaders in 1940-41: should
Hitler attack Russia; should Japan expand west or south; should America
enter the war? The answers now seem embedded in the concrete of history
but at the time they might have gone otherwise. Like the 1914 shooting
of the Archduke in Sarajevo, the events that trigger conflict are easy
to see with hindsight. At the time they might have turned on a penny.

The task of statecraft is to detect the pennies. Were Nato and Europe
wise to snub Russia and thus, de facto, dig a new political ravine
across Europe? Was America wise to provoke Russia's generals by moving
its military presence close to their borders? While defending the west's
commercial interests required a firm line, was it wise to visit on
Moscow a stream of criticism of its internal regime? Now the west wants
to stir Russia's historic ally, Serbia, into nationalist fury by
"granting" independence to Kosovo. Why should Russia tell Belgrade to
acquiesce and demand from Europe some economic quid pro quo? Why not sit
back and laugh as America and Britain find themselves policing yet
another Balkan civil war?

We may be witnessing only the paranoid exchanges of three world leaders
on their way out. For all its ailments the world is incomparably more
stable than it was in 1940. But a strategic risk is being taken with
Moscow, and therefore by Moscow in return. Who knows that the Iraq war
may seem a footling incompetence alongside the west's misjudgment of
Russia over the past decade? Following cold war with cold peace may yet
prove a historic error. And it was gratuitously unnecessary.


-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - One of many happy users:
  http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/quotes.html