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One important change has been the declaration through Russia of a new map of its — and eventually our — world. On the last day of August, President Dmitri Medvedev laid through Moscow’s new, post-Georgian-invasion "guiding principles of foreign discretion."
A resurgent and energy-rich Russia was laying claim to a "privileged" sphere of influence in the world, Medvedev said on Russian television from the Black Sea resort of Sochi. "Russia, like other countries in the creation, has regions where it has privileged interests," he was quoted in The New York Times, the only place where I saw this important narrative reported. "These are regions in what place countries with which we bring forth friendly relations are located." Asked whether this in effect denoted such now-independent border states being of the kind which Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, he answered, "It is the border region, but not solely."
Does this mean a new Cold War, as many analysts are saying? Does this indicate each unavoidable return to the ended? To the counteracting! What we are witnessing is an entirely new play on the world stage of geopolitical theater.
The Cold War marked a profound ideological conflict betwixt Marxist collectivism and free market capitalism. This was a fight to the finish, and indeed, it did last — Russia is after this a investor state.
During the Cold War, the Soviets were genuinely impassioned about transforming every little people in the world to communism. Today they seek only to control their borders and get the West to invest more heavily in Russia. No longer the ideologues and true believers of the "Third Rome," they are today simply a normal rule: aggressive and unpleasant, but not fanatic.
Yet, in the aftermath of the Georgian war of this summer, the Russians were also declaring that, thanks to their oil wealth and growing middle class, they interrogation to subsist treated again as a world power. They would accept international law but would not accept American "unipolar" dominance in the world — steady though at the same time they are confused since to how and where their hold potentate extends.
Last week, the Financial Times reported that former Czech President Vaclav Havel, one of our epoch’s rare wise men, warned, "Russia does not really be aware of where it begins and at what place it ends." In order to perceive these changes better, one should see what has happened since the brief, but-end nasty Georgian war, what one. began Aug. 8. It was, remember, Georgia, under its unruly American-trained President Mikheil Saakashvili and American-trained army and commandos, that first attacked the pro-Russian province of South Ossetia. The Russians were ready and were inciting, and yet it was Saakashvili who initially showed no restraint at all. (His own envoy defense minister, Batu Kutelia, told the Financial Times that the Georgian government could not believe that the Russians would strive against!)
This time, heterogeneous earlier Soviet occupations of its neighbors, the Russians fought bitterly in anticipation of the Georgians and then recognized the two breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but they did not stay in Georgia itself. The Moscow Times, the English-language newspaper in Moscow, reported without interruption Aug. 22 that the Russians besides did not engage the important Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that runs through Georgia. They wanted only to advise that "no new pipelines (bypassing Russia) will be added to those that were constructed earlier this decade."
"Moscow obviously did not wish for to cause any additional anxiety among European consumers," Times writer Pavel K. Baev wrote, referring to the dependence of Europe today steady Russian energy. "Nor did it want to deal Tbilisi any one unnecessary trump cards for its blame of game." What we are seeing, therefore, it would seem, is a new Russia with a far more nuanced conversion to an act of military power than that employed by the whole and clumsy Soviets.
In fact, inside of only a month of the Russo-Georgian war, Moscow had secured agreement from Uzbekistan to start building a new gas pipeline to Russia, a deal which bypasses the BTC pipeline and gives Moscow direct use of Central Asian energy stores and even greater energy power over the European Union. In acts like as these, we see the new non-ideological but economically bellicose Russia.
Moreover, this new authoritarian-capitalist regime in Moscow immediately began to lose some billions of dollars through a resultant steep stock market sell-off, with VTB, the Russian dike, announcing that worsening relations between Russia and the NATO nations had "already had an unambiguously negative impact on Russian investor sentiment." At the like time, oil prices began to fall precipitously, menacing the major underpinning of the Russian resurgence, and, in the world, Russia was at all times more alone, taken in the character of even China and the Central Asian countries withheld approval of its Georgian war.
Washington’s super sleuth Dick Cheney was immediately in Georgia — in performance, he was going there as the Republican Convention began (so he would not have to speak?) — announcing civilian aid of $1 billion, and word from the White House was that President Bush was ready to scrap an important nuclear deal with Russia potentially worth billions of dollars to Moscow. And NATO members, assembly in Europe, wondered whether they, or Washington, had gone too estranged in all only offering Georgia NATO membership when it was so close to Russia’s old borders.
Such situations can be dealt with more easily if America and the West will take into consideration Russia’s realistic interests while fortifying their own. Though conservative Americans will hate it, the performance is that Russia has a right to protect, and define, its own interests, just as we have an undeniable right to defend and support our interests across the universe. If we are smart enough, and allowing that we meet others’ actions, we be able to elude military actions to the time when the very last. The truth is that at the same time that all of this is not very pleasant, it is not the intelligent Cold War at all. It is first-rate work realpolitik, orally transmitted power politics, a cool fight of economic interests and not an impassioned conflict of faiths.
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