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2 THE BEAR'S
LAIR Winning the next cold
war By Martin Hutchinson
It is now becoming clear that whether or
not he relinquishes the presidency nominally,
Vladimir Putin will remain in effective control of
Russia for many years after 2008. In that event,
his "spook" economic and political priorities,
honed during his decades with the KGB, will
doubtless rule Russian policy. Since Putin appears
most comfortable in a cold-war world, that is what
we
are likely to return to. It is not an attractive
prospect.
To have a cold war, you need
adversaries of approximately comparable strength.
The West cannot have a cold war with al-Qaeda,
which has neither the military nor economic
strength to challenge it by conventional means. At
the opposite extreme, the Soviet bloc was a worthy
cold-war opponent, not so much because of its
economy, which was always fairly feeble, but
because of its dedication to military might, which
allowed it to punch far above its demographic or
economic weight in world councils.
Putin
is now trying to re-create the Soviet position. He
has one major disadvantage: a population of only
141 million, which is tending to decline. He has,
on the other hand, an enormous advantage over the
Soviet Union. That is intelligent exploitation of
Russia's immense energy resources in a period of
high oil prices, not so much to confront the West
directly, but to attract allies into a bloc that
will be large enough and powerful enough to do so.
A second minor advantage is that he is not
ideologically compelled to defend an indefensible
economic and political system. Allies who stand
alongside Putin are not forced to adopt communism,
but can retain whatever bizarre political,
economic and religious beliefs they already have,
uniting only in hatred of the common adversary.
Had the West in general and the United
States in particular not made several serious
mistakes since 2000, Putin would not be in a
position even to dream of realizing his
disreputable ambitions. The September 11, 2001,
attacks differed only modestly in scale and not at
all in kind from myriad previous terrorist attacks
that had afflicted the Western world over the
previous 30 years, while by chance largely sparing
the United States. The Irish Republican Army
(which had considerable unofficial US backing) the
Basque ETA, the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, the Palestine Liberation
Organization, Black September, the Japanese Red
Army, Libya, the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberacion Nacional of Puerto Rico), the Armenian
Secret Army, the Soviet Union, the Medellin cartel
and Kosovo, to make a partial list, all undertook
terrorist incidents in Western countries, killing
more than 10 people in each over the 30 years
after 1970.
Terrorism is an unfortunate
and ineradicable danger of modern life. It is
becoming clear that nothing in the September 11
attacks justified selecting one particular group
of terrorists and reorienting US foreign policy
around it. By doing so, the United States tied its
military forces down in Iraq and Afghanistan,
allowed the various Islamic terrorist groups to
consolidate, and alienated potentially neutral
countries such as Iran and leftist political
groups throughout the West. Moreover, by focusing
foreign policy so completely on "Islamofascist"
terrorism, other challenges, notably those
presented by Putin's Russia and Hugo Chavez'
resource-controlling Venezuela, were neglected.
In 2001, a challenge by Putin's Russia to
the US would have been met by a united West and
laughed off the international stage. Had President
George W Bush pursued the "modest" foreign policy
on which he was elected in 2000 that would very
likely still be the case. Instead, there is today
a disgruntled element in the European Union and
elsewhere that regards Putin as less of a menace
than Bush, while anti-US feeling in the United
Nations and the EU has prevented effective
blocking action in the ex-Soviet "near abroad" of
Georgia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Beyond
those countries, Putin has quite rich and
potentially powerful allies in Iran and Venezuela.
China is at best neutral, and even in Japan
opposition groups have taken to denouncing US
policy. Even Putin's nuclear buildup, renunciation
of arms control, detonation of record-sized bombs,
and re-creation of a Russian Air Force that may
well be better in quality than the US Air Force
have been met with little response.
Higher
defense spending is a priority for the United
States and still more for the EU, which has
allowed its defenses to fall to pathetically low
levels. Both the US and the EU have permitted
defense procurement to become a vast sinkhole of
corruption, "industrial policy" and lobbying,
while Putin's Russia has spent resources in what
is for governments an efficient manner. During the
pacific 1990s, the Russian defense-equipment
sector fell far behind those of the West, but
there is no question that under Putin it has been
catching up fast.
To take one example, the
United States' F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft was
originally put out to tender in 1986, but the
first aircraft was not delivered until 2003. The
current estimate of its production cost is US$361
million per aircraft. The Eurofighter Typhoon, a
similar aircraft, was also five years late into
production and costs $440 million per aircraft.
The Russian PAK-FA, a derivative of the Su-47
Berkut, appears to be at least comparable or
better in capability and is expected to come into
service in 2010 and to cost $30 million per
aircraft. The US and the EU may have larger
economies than Russia, but at anything like that
cost differential, their economic advantage is
negated. Thus it is a
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