As Russian power continues to rise dramatically at America's expense, there is good reason to suspect that Moscow's next prize will be even bigger than the newfound ascendancy it has gained in the Middle East via its successful intervention in the Syrian conflict: it may well be Berlin and Paris.
The cold hard fact is that Russia is far too large and attractive an economic market for the major industrial states of Western Europe to ignore indefinitely; the fact that over three years of confrontation between the EU and the Kremlin over Ukraine have failed to produce broad sector-wide sanctions against the latter by the former has been a conclusive proof that the entire policy of mercantile isolation was never a realistic one against the world's largest and naturally wealthiest country. It was only a matter of time, in hindsight, that the pendulum would swing back decisively in Moscow's favor: what with various European firms of systemic consequence across the entire range of industries beginning to lobby for increased Russian market access at just the moment when they're also flirting with near-open hostility with the newly protectionist and nativist US under Donald Trump.
In this sense, the Eurozone periphery has been something of a harbinger for the core: perceiving themselves as having been unfairly shafted under the German-dominated common currency, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece have remained on relatively or even warmly friendly terms with the Kremlin throughout the period of the present East-West standoff dating to the seizure of Crimea in early 2014. So long as the US was seen as the bedrock of European security and stability, however, the dominant duo of the EU core - Germany and France - would not have taken much note of this lack of compliance by their effective subordinates.
All this changed, of course, with the onset of the Trump era and the continued slow-roll catastrophe of its early-warning European tremor, Brexit: with Western unity now in shambles - the EU effectively pitted as a rival against both the US and UK, even as the US and UK struggle to re-coordinate the Anglophone order with one another - the new atmosphere of a free-for-all between individual nation-states has suddenly made even the European heavyweight capitals of London, Paris, and Berlin feel relatively less bulky in comparison to Rome or even Madrid, let alone Moscow.
This gives Putin's resurgent Russia every economic and thus geopolitical advantage. French and German firms now chafe at the prospect that lesser Italian or even Spanish counterparts may get lucrative Russian business contracts at their expense simply because nobody really takes the US-led campaign to isolate Moscow as anything other than hot air anymore; at the same time the new Trump administration's efforts to rebuild and recalibrate relations with Europe have become increasingly atomized to a more or less bilateral basis, giving even Germany and France far less leverage in dealing with Russia than had Washington continued to work through the traditional multilateral channels of NATO and the EU.
In this new Trumpian environment of Western factionalism, Russia wins hands-down in Europe. Its combination of proximity, sheer size, and most important of all centralized unity - something that is increasingly slipping away from the US itself - ensures that it can play off even the biggest European powers besides itself against one another more effectively than Washington can.
To conclude, although the East-West standoff's focal point remains Ukraine - a crisis that could yet again threaten to spiral out of control - it's safe to think that Putin and his henchmen at the Kremlin already have their eyes set on a more ultimate prize, namely Europe itself. After all, even the peskiest nuisance in next-door Ukraine is more than compensated for by a Germany or a France - or both - which no longer toe America's anti-Russian line and (whether consciously or subconsciously) begin taking steps to admit Moscow fully back into the European fold, where its sheer heft ensures it a pivotal and even potentially dominant seat.
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