RUSSIA IS BIGGEST GEOPOLITICAL FOE US – NATIONAL JOURNAL
13:51 ~U 08.05.13
By Michael Hirsh
As President Obama welcomed South Korea’s “Iron Lady,” recently elected
President Park Geun-hye, to the White House on Tuesday, his attention
may have been focused elsewhere. The daughter of former military
strongman Park Chung-hee, tough-talking Park is a living embodiment of
Seoul’s remarkable progress from Cold War dictatorship to ultra-modern
democracy-just as South Korea itself, along with the surrounding Asian
“tiger” nations, is the best evidence of why backward North Korea
remains largely irrelevant, if still noisy, in East Asian affairs.
But while full of glamor, Park’s visit had far less gravitas than one
taking place across the globe. The real diplomatic action on Tuesday
was not in Washington but in Moscow, where John Kerry held his first
meetings as secretary of State with President Vladimir Putin and
Kerry’s counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Kerry, predictably, sought to make the case that the United States and
Russia share common interests in Syria, in terms of stabilizing the
situation and preventing the spread of extremism, as well as in Iran,
North Korea, and elsewhere, including post-NATO Afghanistan. Kerry
hopes to move Putin and Lavrov marginally in the direction of backing,
perhaps, a stronger UN Security Council resolution against Syrian
dictator Bashar al-Assad.
You would think Kerry has a case: As the Boston Marathon bombing
incident demonstrated, Washington and Moscow do share intelligence and
high concern over Islamist radicalization. Neither nation particularly
wants Iran or North Korea (both of which sit just off of Russia’s
vast borders) to have a nuclear bomb.
So why is Putin so recalcitrant? Because to a degree that U.S.
policymakers have not really acknowledged publicly, Russia under Putin
has become the chief countervailing force to U.S. power and influence
around the world, even more so than China (which often follows Moscow’s
lead in the UN Security Council). Mulishness toward Washington is
not just an attitude; it is today Russia’s foreign policy. And this
goes well beyond recent tit-for-tat, including Putin’s suspension
of US adoptions and barring of nongovernmental organizations after
Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law named after a murdered
Russian lawyer under which the U.S. government can penalize Russian
human-rights abuses.
Washington, in fact, has been getting Putin’s real aims largely
wrong since George W. Bush infamously declared that he had “a sense
of his soul” after their first meeting in 2001, naively adding that
“the more I get to see his heart and soul … the more I know we can
work together in a positive way.” In truth, in Putin’s and Moscow’s
eyes, America has been screwing up the Middle East since the invasion
of Iraq, creating more extremism around the world, and has been an
especially poor steward of the international system in the aftermath
of the Wall Street-generated crash of 2008. That comes after an
era when Russians went from being friendly acolytes after the Cold
War to a people increasingly suspicious that America’s often errant
free-market advice in the 1990s was largely designed to turn Russia
into a second-rate power. Beyond that, Putin is clearly trying to
recreate some semblance of a sphere of influence in his region that
resembles that of imperial Russia and the USSR-much to the approval
of the Russian public.
This is especially true when it comes to the Middle East, which
will be foremost on Kerry’s list this week. As Peter Eltsov,
a Washington-based political analyst and a scholar of Russia,
the Caucasus, and Central Asia, wrote recently, Putin’s carefully
calibrated fence-sitting approach to Syria is not just a way of
maintaining one of Moscow’s few allies in the region (and his somewhat
imaginary sphere of influence). For Putin, who by many accounts has
become quasi-tsarist in his policies and views, it is also a statement
of political preference. “The Russian president is trying to convey
his conviction that monarchies and dictatorships are not necessarily
worse than democratic forms of government,” Eltsov wrote. “When asked
by a Danish journalist why he called the West’s involvement in Libya
‘a crusade,’ Putin answered didactically: ‘Look at the map of the
region. Are there democracies like the one in Denmark there? There
are monarchical states there all over the place. It reflects the
mentality of population and the customs that they have formed there.’ ”
Eltsov added: “Nostalgia for both the USSR and czarist Russia play
an increasingly important role in Russian politics.”
Kerry, during his visit, also planned to lay a wreath at the Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, just ahead of Victory Day in Russia,
which commemorates the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. U.S.
officials tend to see the shared experience of fighting Hitler
in a benign light as well, coming after the Cold War. Yet here
too the Americans have been naïve. Putin and other senior Russian
officials and state-sanctioned academics are recasting history in
ways that elide Stalin’s cynical giveaway of Poland to Hitler in
1939 (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) and emphasize Russia’s already
considerable role in defeating Nazism almost on its own. According
to some Russia scholars such as Eltsov, this is part of Putin’s
ongoing effort to remake Stalin’s historical image from that of a
murderous monster–reversing the official debunking that started with
Nikita Khrushchev and ended with Mikhail Gorbachev–into that of an
“effective manager.”
While China’s military is decades away from being able to project force
beyond East Asia, Russia is still in possession of thousands of nuclear
weapons and a still-active military and arms industry. While China and
the U.S. are still financially and economically interdependent, Putin’s
Russia is trying to become a “natural-resources superpower” that vies
with the U.S. and Europe for global influence. (In the mid-’90s, after
15 years in the KGB, Putin attended graduate school in St. Petersburg
and wrote a dissertation titled “Toward a Russian Transnational
Energy Company.” The topic: how to use energy resources for grand
strategic planning. This underlines how, to a remarkable degree,
Russia has failed to turn its scientific and technological advantages
into competitive global industrial might and still relies largely on
its natural resources.) And while China has proved rather ambivalent
about asserting its way–outside of East Asia–Putin has not been shy
about seeking to stymie, at nearly every turn, America’s influence
around the world. As John Arquilla of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate
School wrote last fall: “In classic geopolitical terms–that is,
by giving attention to territory, resources of all sorts, and their
influence on beliefs, behavior, and policy–it is quite clear that
Russia is the major counterweight to American power and influence.”
So Mitt Romney actually had things right in 2012, when he inartfully
labeled Russia “America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe.” The Obama
administration appeared to offer up a belated recognition of Moscow’s
importance before Kerry’s two-day visit, when a senior State Department
official described it as part of “more intensified dialogue with the
Russians at the highest levels.”
Armenian News – Tert.am
From: A. Papazian