GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED
ALLY Part 2: Everything is
broken By Axel Brot
problem, however, is the
destabilizing consequences of the effort in
getting there. The Chinese cannot but react to
what they surely appreciate as the tailoring of a
strategic straitjacket to immobilize them for
vivisection, ie, "soft" regime change.
Similar considerations hold with regard to
Russia. The expansion of NATO to members of the
former Warsaw Pact and to the Baltic countries, as
well as the anticipated one to the Ukraine and
Georgia, are equally sold as a joist of Eurasia's security
architecture. Ironically
enough, the same rationale is given for the
German-led efforts to draw the Central Asian and
Caucasian republics - and, in particular, the
Caspian resources - out of the Russian into the
Western orbit. In this, Russia's "true, legitimate
interests" are being served because this process
encourages democracy, accountable government,
respect for human rights, and the non-violent
resolution of territorial conflicts.
The
tongue-in-cheek character of the "stability"
rhetoric reveals itself most clearly in the
hasbara about the "missile shield" installations
in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly
directed against incipient threats from North
Korea (which is in the process of denuclearizing
itself) and Iran (whose threat potential against
the US is as phantasmagorical as its supposed
intentions are fictional). They are sold to mass
media consumers as insurance against the familiar
"madmen"; to the more discerning audience as not
directed against Russia (and Russian complaints
are sold as Russian mischief-making), and to the
more worried western European insiders, in
classified briefings, as a "hedge" with growth
potential to dissuade the evolution of a greater
than expected Russian or Chinese threat.
In reality, as even the more godfearing
observers of US policies cannot help but notice,
it is a provocative move designed to trap the
Russians into easily denouncable, but helpless
gestures of protest and to put the onus on them
for burdening further the EU-Russian relationship.
And Russia has no way to evade the trap: retch or
spit, down it will go.
At the same time,
it increases the political weight of America's
main allies in Eastern Europe. It provides the
substance for aligning Poland and the Czech
Republic (plus their Baltic retinue) ever closer
with US policies - a US-dependent sub-NATO within
a sub-EU. In the short term, this issue cannot but
further weaken the already fragmenting will of the
western European part of the EU to negotiate (in
good faith) a successor to the partnership and
cooperation agreement between the EU and Russia.
In the longer run, the substantial
American military presence these two installations
require, will tighten the strategic noose around
Russia's throat. In addition, if the US should
really place an additional installation in
Georgia, this move would deliberately put the
detonator for a US-Russian confrontation into the
hands of the reckless and irresponsible Georgian
leadership. In this context, US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's slip of the tongue in terming
Russia "the Soviet Union" is not only Freudian but
a declaration of intent.
The Kaczynski
twins, President Lech and Prime Minister Jaroslaw
of Poland respectively, also let everyone have a
peek at the cat in the bag. In high dudgeon that
its partners in NATO and the EU as well as the
Russians might want to have a say in such a
momentous decision, they maintained that the
missile shield should not worry any "normal
country".
But Russia, obviously, is
nothing if not an "abnormal" country for the
right-wing majority of the Polish political class:
still indignant that Russia spoilt the imperial
dreams (Poland from the Baltic to the Black Sea)
that led General Josef Pilsudski to attack Russia
in 1920, only to be defeated by the treacherous
Reds; still resentful that World War II did not
begin and end differently than it did; resenting
that it has not yet managed a place at the Western
high table, they expect the United States to
procure them, at least, a special role within NATO
(it recently blackmailed for itself a special
position in the EU), and further down the line, a
zone of Polish influence - from the Baltic to the
Black Sea - and the right of first look for any
territorial bits that may be on offer if or when
Russia dissolves further (eg, the region of
Kaliningrad).
Viewing these efforts in
their full scope while keeping in mind the
incessant din of media hostility against Russia
(not forgetting the provocative mixture of subtle
and crass intelligence operations), all of this is
looking less like a hedge than moving the pieces
for the endgame. One recent report of the well
connected, US-based, private intelligence agency,
Strategic Forecasting, Inc or Stratfor, on "The
New Logic for Ballistic Missile Defense", spells
it out rather bluntly: "… [T]he US is not yet
finished with Moscow from a strategic perspective.
Washington wants to pressure Russia until its
will, as well as its ability, to pose a viable
threat completely disintegrates." And the Russians
are quite aware of the vector of US policies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech at the
security conference in Munich, even Mikal
Gorbachev´s recent interventions as well as
Valentin Falin's widely discussed somber analysis
last year, tell the same story.
They are
up against the wall and have neither time nor good
options. As Germany's Peter Struck, the Social
Democratic former secretary of defense and current
parliamentary whip, rather smugly, maintained:
"The Russians would lose another Cold War". This
in response to the "gobbledygook" of Putin's list
of grievances at the Munich conference in
February. A flash-poll, by the way, did show that
a majority of Germans seems to have grasped its
import and a majority even supported Putin's
sentiments, in spite of the exceedingly derogatory
chorus of the German media.
There is some
worry that all of this might push the Russians
into the arms of the Chinese. It touches, though,
the outer limits of what is considered a
legitimate worry. But there is the comforting
notion that for such a rather fundamental revision
of its foreign policy, Russia is neither strong
and reliable enough to perform it, nor are the
Russian elites ready to support it. Working toward
a closer Russian-Chinese relationship - and
knowing that China will turn out to be the
stronger partner (however carefully the Chinese
may defer to Russian sensitivities) - for a
measure of security and independence, would
require not only despair, but a sea-change in
attitudes of the loot-corroded, fantasist and
cynical majority of the new Russian elites. As the
wag says in Influence 101: "You can always get to
the elite Russians; half of them hate Mother
Russia because Petersburg and Moscow aren't Paris
or London; the other half hate her because she
spawned the first half."
It helps, of
course, that Western intelligence and quasi-NGOs
are keeping the Russian leadership worried about
domestic stability. To enrich its options, the
West maintains influence also with the xenophobic
right, anti-Chinese liberals, with the fighters
for Chechen independence and others interested in
ethnic strife games. Meanwhile the "new Russians"
hope, against all odds, that Europe might still
come around to provide the kind of safe anchorage
against hostile policies Germany and France seemed
able to offer in 2002/2003 and thus rescue their
rent-funded, cosmopolitan dreams.
All of
this is close enough to reality to foster the
illusion the Russians can be managed; it just
needs a little less obvious contempt and hectoring
and a little bit more cooperative rhetoric to
satisfy their craving for respect. This is more
hope than reality, though - hope that will be
disappointed, especially since Western politics
and the venomously Russophobe media will make sure
that the Russians are always aware of the stake
which is to be driven through their collective
heart.
There is, of course, also the
Chinese perspective. Those Western China analysts
from which its German section takes its cue seem
to draw some satisfaction from observing China and
Russia hands wondering whether the Russian
leadership is still in thrall to its Western hopes
and whether it is not continuing to commit slow
suicide. These questions are not unreasonable.
Russia is investing everywhere while it has not
yet even restored its economy to the levels of
1989. Its industries, infrastructure, research,
education, and health are still suffering from
catastrophic underinvestment.
Since the
West organized and oversaw the liquefaction of
Soviet assets and their hemorrhaging out of Russia
to the tune of about US$800 billion worth of cash,
goods, and patents (including Boris Yelzin's gift
to the US of the crown jewels of Soviet military
and space technologies), as well as tens of
thousands of its best engineers and scientists,
one might think it would do all to recover from a
disaster at least as bad as what Germany did to
the Soviet Union in World War II, and form a peace
worse than the one of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of
1918.
But even here, Western policies make
sure that Russians and Chinese cannot but perceive
the beginnings of the mobilization for economic
warfare against both of them. All of a sudden
investment barriers against Chinese and Russian
capital appear in the US and in western Europe.
There are substantial efforts devoted to
coordinate the rolling-back of Chinese
encroachment on the Western right to African raw
materials - in the name of human rights and good
governance (which is like Bluebeard, still gnawing
on his latest virgin's femur, complaining about a
peasant who sullies his next lunch with exploitive
marriage proposals). And there is the hue and cry
raised about the Russian and Chinese doing what
the US is doing excessively: marking certain
industrial sectors as "strategic".
The
Chinese Western analysts are quite astute
observers of where their Western counterparts are
coming from. But educated under the
all-encompassing need to gain time and strength to
be able to survive gloomy geopolitical weather,
the Chinese debate about Russia and the West just
echoes the more salient debate: whether they are
able to influence American (Western) perceptions
and reactions to China's rise, at what price, and
for how long. There are still those, frequently
highlighted in Western workshops, quoting Russian
voices about the impossibility of Russian-Chinese
strategic cooperation, referring obliquely and
with the due amount of nostalgia, to the golden
age of Chinese-American strategic cooperation
against the Soviets, and wondering audibly whether
its resurrection might not promise another dawn in
Chinese relations with the West.
But one
does not need to carefully examine these debates.
Though there is no audience for bad messages, it
has not escaped the attention of the professional
worriers that Russian and Chinese decision-makers
seem to have concluded that they face a similar
and geopolitically connected future. They may
expect to be able to delay or blunt it but cannot
evade it. The continuous Western efforts to
leverage elite dissent as well as to force-grow
and groom alternative elites (with their typical
mixture of venality and blind idealism) in an
increasingly worsening security environment, have
hardened the conviction that they are up against a
strategy to enable repeats of the Soviet collapse.
Indicators for the expectations of Russian
and Chinese decision-makers are percolating
through their foreign policy and military
bureaucracies and are being picked up: the
elimination, defeat, or terminal neutralization of
the one will be the beginning of the same fate for
the other. And they seem to feel that this is
being imposed on them; it has not much to do with
their choice of policies. The beginnings of a
co-evolution of their strategic doctrines,
therefore, has to be taken seriously. They don't
care about facing the full range of American
military power but think about how to stymie and
defeat its deployment in the incipient stages of
operations.
How to develop a posture
capable of inflicting massive losses on US air
power and carrier groups without requiring a
hair-trigger posture seems to draw a lot of
attention. There appears to be even a debate about
preemption. With regard to nuclear deterrence, it
appears to be moving toward a marriage between
massive retaliation and different options of
"technological
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