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4 US missiles hit Russia where it
hurts By M K Bhadrakumar
One does not need the clairvoyant gnome
Oskar Matzerath in Guenter Grass's allegorical
novel The Tin Drum to scream and tell us in
a voice that can break thick glass jars that
looking from Germany's Baltic resort of
Heiligendamm, where the annual Group of Eight
summit commenced on Wednesday, that the horizons
to the east of the Vistula are getting very dark,
heavy with storm clouds.
The G8 mandarins
will add caveats, insisting Heiligendamm has
important business to transact
- climate change, free trade, terrorism, energy
security, AIDS and, of course, Africa's
development.
Oskar has begun to hammer on
his drum to drown out the idiocies of the adult
world. Indeed, the fantastical reality of this
year's summit of the G8 is that it wears the look
of a drunken birthday party, taking place at a
time of great uncertainty when the world around is
once again threatening to become too much to bear.
A new cold war is building
up. The US Congress' House Committee on
International Affairs ominously titled its hearing
on May 17 as "Russia: Rebuilding the Iron
Curtain". The rhetoric of US-Russian relations has
become distinctly sharp and vicious. It
slipped by unobtrusively for
months, and took a sudden leap in the recent
weeks.
A determined effort is on by
Washington to eliminate Russia's strategic parity
with the US. Washington regards this as the first
essential step toward getting "unipolarity" and
the New American Century project going again. The
outcome is uncertain. Moscow is firmly resisting,
no matter what it takes. But it is also a complex
struggle. Despite Washington's attempts to portray
it as a morality play of democracy and freedom
versus authoritarianism, the heart of the matter
is that the struggle also enables the US to
consolidate its trans-Atlantic leadership over
Europe in the post-Soviet era.
Without the
Western alliance providing the anchor sheet of its
geostrategy, the US cannot establish viable global
dominance in the 21st century. That is to say,
there is no ideology as such involved in the new
cold war. In philosophical terms, it is about
"absolute security" - how absolute indeed security
can be, yet how futile it may still remain. It is,
on a different plane, about national sovereignty
in a globalized system. It is also about the
efficacy of "unilateralism". Least of all, it is
about "triumphalism". It certainly lifts
Washington's morale, sapped by the Iraq quagmire.
China shifts stance Its outcome
will determine the way the international system
works for the better part of the 21st century. No
major country can pretend to be unaffected by it.
This is most apparent in the pronounced shift in
China's standoffish stance lately.
A
Moscow statement highlighted that during the
meeting between Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and
his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi in Seoul on
Monday on the sidelines of the Asia Cooperation
Dialogue meeting, they "exchanged views on a broad
range of international themes of mutual
concern [emphasis added], including
cooperation within the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization and the United States' plans to
deploy a global missile-defense system".
Not surprisingly, the issue of
Washington's deployment of its
anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) system has figured in
a Russian-Chinese high-level political exchange as
a topic of "mutual concern" to the two countries.
In the past six weeks, in fact, the Chinese stance
on the escalating US-Russia confrontation over
that defense system has shifted significantly. A
series of Chinese commentaries has appeared
indicative of a high level of interest in Beijing
over the trajectory of the tensions in US-Russia
relations.
China previously viewed the
tensions more as "an exchange of rhetoric", and
seemed to have estimated that in the ultimate
analysis, Russia would resort to a "pragmatic
diplomatic strategy" guided essentially by two
core considerations. These are Russia's need of US
involvement with its developing economy in the
nature of US capital, technology, expertise and
market, and second, Russia's keenness to ensure
its World Trade Organization accession, for which
US support is vital.
In essence, China
doubted whether the existing post-Soviet pattern
of "contention and cooperation" in US-Russia ties
would substantially change in a setting where the
two countries could be only seeking "maximum
benefits" out of a conflict of interests. China
remained rooted in this belief, and justifiably
so, since it was apparent that the US and Russia
continued to cooperate on many issues, and even
had a "bilateral strategic interest" in doing so.
To be sure, China could see that
Washington was attempting to maintain its hegemony
in international affairs and was, therefore,
determined to prevent the resurgence of Russia,
which in turn led to the US stratagem to pressure
and weaken Russia. But China still couldn't quite
anticipate that US-Russia relations would
deteriorate almost to the point of the last
century's Cold War, or that the two powers would
come to view each other with such hostility, or
that they were likely to embark on an arms race.
However, China began reassessing the state
of play by the end of April. The People's Daily
took note on May 9 for the first time that by its
decision to deploy its missile-defense system in
Poland and the Czech Republic, Washington was "no
doubt targeting Russia". Commenting on Moscow's
warning that Russia might seek withdrawal from the
Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, the
People's Daily admitted the "likelihood of a new
arms race rising dramatically". The commentary
concluded, "If we look at US-Russian relations
closely, it is clear that we are standing at the
edge of a new cold war."
A series of
Chinese commentaries thereafter has swiftly built
up on that conclusion by frontally attacking the
US deployment of a missile-defense system in
Europe. Not only that, China stressed that
Washington's deployment plans in East Asia and
Europe are in actuality its "two wings".
Dismissing Washington's claim that the deployments
are directed against Iran and North Korea, the
People's Daily underlined on May 18 that "the
existing layout is targeted directly and entirely
at both Russia and China". This implied for the
first time China's commonality of interests with
Russia in regard of the latter's "strong
opposition" to the US deployments.
Chinese
criticism of the US deployment has since become
strident, underlining that the US action will
produce a "profound effect on the global strategic
layout at present"; that it undermines regional
security; that it will have a negative impact on
the "internal stability" of the affected
countries; and that it will make US foreign policy
even more belligerent.
China identifies
four factors guiding Washington's decision on the
deployment of the missile defense: a search for
"absolute security"; blind faith in technological
supremacy; US ambition of global hegemony; the
United States' keenness to retain leadership of
the Euro-Atlantic alliance.
Progressively,
the Chinese stance has come to put the blame
squarely on the US for ratcheting up tensions with
Russia. The causes of the present tensions, in the
Chinese view, are manifold. They lie in
Washington's strategy of pushing for the North
Atlantic
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