In what has been a banner week for the new Cold War or Cold War lite, Russia has wasted not a single day showing the West and the US in particular just how costly will be any policy of confrontation against it or even the slightest hint that they still entertain fantasies of regime change in the Kremlin.
With the announcement that its aerial campaign in Syria is now open-ended, on top of a new deployment of the advanced S-300V anti-missile system to its naval base there, Russia has moved to decisively secure its long-term interests in the Levant and eastern Mediterranean with a permanent physical security presence.
At virtually the same time, Moscow has ramped up the threat of a new nuclear arms race by withdrawing from an important plutonium disposal accord from the early 2000s that would have seen it and Washington each destroy weapons-grade material for 8,500 new nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, a weeklong drill for thermonuclear warfare involving much of the Russian military and reportedly up to 40 million civilians has also been taking place, and yesterday it was reported that short-range Iskander-M nuclear-capable missiles were deployed to the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, from where they can threaten the new NATO deployments in the Baltic republics and Poland with instant annihilation.
And so, Vladimir Putin - who celebrated his 64th birthday yesterday - has sent quite a strong message to lame-duck Barack Obama: This will be your great legacy - a dramatically deteriorated security posture for both the US and NATO in the face of a resurgent Russian military - unless you finally use what little time you have left to rebuild our broken relationship.
With no plausible response in the realm of hard power geopolitics, Washington is reduced to clawing for abstract moral victories. Secretary of State John Kerry has floated pushing for a UN war crimes investigation against Russia and the Syrian regime over their recent actions around the besieged Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo; and yesterday for the first time, Washington formally acknowledged that it was in fact the Russian government which was behind the hacking of the Democratic party's servers over the summer.
American and more general Western weakness in the face of Russian assertiveness has become striking. Not only have NATO and the US-led coalition in the Middle East been militarily pigeonholed from free strategic action to salvage Western dominance, but it's increasingly obvious that this apparent shift in the balance of power has deep economic underpinnings.
Russia has proved utterly impossible to isolate or seal off as a means of forcing it - through impoverishment - to behave more in line with Western preferences and prejudices. Because Russian trade with North America is negligible, the success of sanctions against it always depended on the EU, but now it's quite obvious that the EU actually needs Russia as much as vice versa and probably more.
Russia has emerged one of the relative winners of the withering oil price war since 2014. The current level of $40 to $50 a barrel is not far from what it needs to stabilize the economy and budget, and its production has continued to set new records in defiance of OPEC and US shale. Anything significantly below this, and it's actually the large Western European banks - notably Germany's flagship Deutsche Bank, the poster child of the West's latest financial volatility - that stand to fail before any significant Russian entity.
The burgeoning strategic alliance with China, which sees Russia as one of the key elements of its new "Silk and Road" Eurasian economic initiative, gives Moscow a potentially pivotal role in the ongoing shift of economic power from West to East. And not least because Moscow has prudently cultivated good relations with every other key Eurasian player as well - Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and so on. Its pragmatic and winning attitude is clearly making headway even with US allies like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.
Overall, it's still too early to tell what if anything of consequence will ultimately come of the Sino-Russian partnership to reshape the economic and thus the geopolitical alignment of the Eurasian supercontinent, but despite the underwhelming progress to date, even this has already been enough to dispel the sheer doom and gloom that Western punditry and Russian liberals so dismissively assumed would be the fate of a revanchist-militarist Moscow with ambitions far exceeding its capacities; though admittedly, this is more indicative of just how deeply systemic and chronic a funk the West (especially Europe) has itself fallen into.
That being said, the West still doesn't realize this - its elites are not much less likely than the sport-hooligan masses to be distracted by the latest exploits or sexploits of the Kardashians - and in all likelihood won't realize it except in fits and starts for a while yet. Of all the factors that help Putin's quest to make Russia great again, this is probably the biggest one: with such an egregious combination of complacency, apathy, negligence, and puerile preoccupation with the petty vanities of social media-driven mass consumerist-voyeurism, the "free world" is literally begging to cede its leadership - both moral and physical - of the international community to more serious stakeholders.
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