Russians Playing According to American Scenario
Igor Muradyan, Political Analyst
Comments – Wednesday, 28 May 2014, 12:27
The Russian propaganda is choking from pleasure and at the same time
demonstrates its stupidity and limited arguments on the
Russian-Chinese “gas” deal which is a life buoy for V. Putin and his
team (which, apparently, does not belong to him any more). However,
ask a question to a more or less sane Russian commentator, and he will
tell you that the deal is not just written on water with a fork but
also may mislead and create illusory hope for perspective.
Most probably, a traditional “pipeline game” is underway without a
clear start and a comprehensible result. Apparently, the perspective
is clear to all the stakeholders except Russia. Such a large-scale
pipeline, irrespective of what is going to flow via it, belongs to
consumers rather than to suppliers. A classic example is the Blue
Stream through which Russia supplies gas to Turkey: the consumer
dictated the prices and conditions when the pipeline had already been
laid out.
The failures of South Stream, as well as the Burgas-Alexandropoulos
oil pipeline also illustrate vulnerability of such projects due to the
position of consumers. The dark side of this situation may be
transportation of the Russian oil via Baku-Tbilisi-Geihan which Russia
fought so ardently and which was an important element of Israel’s
national security.
Russia is trying to demonstrate the results of agreement with China as
a factor of counterbalance in the relations with the United States and
the entire Western world. At the same time, the Chinese leaders were
reserved and did not try to overtake the events, in other words, it
would be funny to detect formation of a Russian-Chinese alliance
against the United States and the West. China is trying to squeeze all
use from its relations with Russia but is not going to set up an
alliance with Russia, especially in counterbalance to the United
States.
Over the past few years China has diversified its foreign trade,
developed technology and is able to produce anything without any
“special favors” from Russia. China is only interested in raw
materials and carbohydrates and unlike its northern neighbor it makes
real plans rather than propagandistic and demagogic turns. However
strong the Chinese-American controversies are, both great powers play
the same pre-arranged games which will never be accessible to other
great powers. Now the United States and China understand each other so
well that they do not need the odd man out, only some add-ins to their
positions.
Washington has never considered a Chinese-Russian alliance as
realistic. It considers relations between these two powers in the
light of historical practice and the real balance of forces. The
United States has attentively followed Shanghai Cooperation
Organization and even tried to co-opt Pakistan into this organization,
apparently in order to disorganize it. However, neither SCO, nor
relations between China and Russia were ever viewed by Washington as a
threat to its interests. Too deep are controversies among them,
especially in a medium-term perspective.
The Russians understand that it is better than the Americans and
always reserve factors for counteraction. In any case, the Russians
believe that they have such levers of counteraction.
However, in this case the point is to what extent the “gas deal”
contradicts or is in line with the interests of the United States and
Europe, i.e. to what extent it fits into the global energy policy and
to what extent it will influence the global situation of
carbohydrates. Therefore, it is important to understand that China and
the United States have been trying to agree division of zones of
influence based on the mutually favorable principle.
Now it is evident that the United States has conceded Central Asia to
China not because the Americans were weaker there. The United States
mostly controls Central Asia having considerable military contingent
in Afghanistan and technical and political capacity to limit Russian
and Chinese presence in the region. However, they preferred conceding
the region to China because it was meaningless to agree with Russia on
anything, especially that China does not pretend to involvement of
regional states in its empire while Russia is speaking too much about
it.
Central Asia is the arena where observation of processes helps figure
out most rules of development of regional and global geopolitical and
geoeconomic situations. By analogy the United States and the West
“conceded” all or part of Russia’s resources to China because the West
does not need those resources. It would be logical to think in the
following way: if the European Union implements a policy of reduction
of dependence on Russian carbohydrates, it is better to concede
Russian gas to China than force China to participate in development of
carbohydrates in other regions, such as Africa or Latin America.
It should be noted that Chinese economic and political expansion in
Southeast Asia has changed in nature. In other words, if it is not
limited, it mostly takes into account the interests of the United
States and its partners. Some experts tend to explain this by concerns
of the countries of this region about Chinese expansion but this
dissatisfaction had occurred earlier whereas recently the Chinese
policy has been limited a little more.
In other words, in the U.S.-Chinese relations Eurasia is a priority
zone of Chinese influence, especially that the United States is not
interested in the resources of this region. This has been highlighted
for multiple times and it is found in the U.S. government’s documents.
The Eurasian direction of Chinese expansion is an important trick for
distracting Chine from other directions. Of course, in a long-term
perspective every scenario will be revised for more than once but now
the Russians have been offered this scenario, and it has to accept it.
Hence, ostensibly, there is a U.S.-Chinese agreement on the Russian
“gas deal”, in other words, the American scenario is followed. This is
not bad if everyone is happy and benefits. However, the notion of
benefit is highly relative in geopolitical arrangements, and this
category should be studied in its dynamics. Europe will not suffer,
because such immense investments in a “gas project” are impossible
without the participation of European banks, possibly also
transnational companies.
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From: Baghdasarian