Russian media reacted with hysteria to Vice President Dick Cheney's Vilnius speech at the Community of Democratic Choice congress, comparing it to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" oration delivered in Fulton, Ohio in 1946. The comparison is misplaced.
After World War II, the West was confronting Joseph Stalin's victorious Red Army deployed in the heart of Central and Western Europe. The symbolic heart of MittelEuropa: Warsaw, Prague, Vienna and West Berlin, were occupied. In China, the USSR was laying the foundations of Mao's future victory. The global balance of power was at stake, and the forty year long "cold" conflict had ensued.
Today, the return of Russia to the world scene has different roots, primarily economic, but cultural and geopolitical as well.
First, Russia is flush with cash. Oil in excess of $50 à barrel is a bonanza to the oligarchy of Chekists and tycoons who currently run Russia. Great revenues trigger "great deeds" – velikiye dela in Russian – including in foreign and domestic policy. They can pay for nuclear submarines, separatist militias in Transnistria or Abkhazia, or doubling of salaries to key electoral groups, such as doctors and teachers. Oil wealth can also pay for schemes to increase population. President Vladimir Putin suggested in his recent State of the Federation address that the state pay subsidies to moms with newborn babies to reverse Russia's demographic decline. It just so happens that a lot of Russian babies are Muslim.
Secondly, the political culture of the current elites stems primarily from 1970s KGB ethos, mixed with some 1990s "wild East" Moscow capitalism. Watching Russian TV for a couple of days is sufficient to realize that all the Chekists, bandits and tired, but manly, police officers are the real heroes of today's Russia (or at least those who call the shots want people to believe so). Chekists and Russian cops usually don't like "democrats" and Yankees. Especially when they demand access to oil and gas patches – the "patrimony of the people" – which Russia's masters today control.
Finally, a factor that is often ignored, is a massive substitution of the dead communist ideology of world domination with a revived Russian Orthodox world view. This is a quasi-religious geopolitical system of beliefs espoused by the post-communist political class in an essentially atheist and multi-confessional country. According to this often-confused outlook, Russia is the heir of Byzantium, the Third Rome apart from that of Europe and America.
The way Russian Orthodoxy looks at the world, Russia is closer to China and the Muslim world than to the materialistic post-modern "West," which lacks soul and spirit. This is the thesis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Putin, and the current Patriarch. In this spirit, the late Polish Pope, who yearned for reconciliation with his Orthodox brothers, was shunned, but the Ayatollahs, Hamas and even Chinese Godless communists are embraced.
Catholicism and Protestantism are declared alien, while Islam is hailed as an "authentic" religion of Russia, which recently has become an observer in the Organization of Islamic Conference and the Arab League. Moscow's embrace of Hamas and statements of rapprochement with the Muslim world articulated on the highest level drive a wedge in the Washington-led War on Terror.
Cheney's speech was an outcry of frustration with policies which are viewed in Washington as betrayal of the great hopes that post-communist Russia generated. The political capital given to Boris Yeltsin, when President Bill Clinton invited him to join the G-7 in 1997, has been all but wasted. The subject of congressional and government discussions and salon tea parties now is whether President Bush should go to St. Petersburg in July and whether Russia should remain in the G-8.
Several Russian policies have cumulatively contributed to this nadir in U.S.-Russian relations. First, Russia's implacable opposition of the Iraq war. Russian assessment of the post-war difficulties was lucid, and its predictions about the ensuing ethnic fissures turned out to be more realistic than anything the Pentagon or the U.S. intelligence community ever produced.
The YUKOS affair sent chills down the spines of serious energy investors in the U.S. and elsewhere. While in the West there was plenty of frustration with the shenanigans and greed of Russian oligarchs, the sheer brutality with which Russia targeted the most efficient Russian energy company backfired.
Orchestrating the eviction of the U.S. military base in Uzbekistan, conducted in cooperation with Beijing marked the flowering of a "beautiful friendship" between Moscow and Beijing aimed at Washington's interests – a move that could not escape even the dullest minds on the Potomac.
Russia's truculent treatment of Georgia and Ukraine, and obsession about "orange revolutions" as tools of U.S. power projection aimed at destroying the Putin regime further undermined bear huggers in Washington. Conspiracy theories spun by highly paid Moscow political consultants, played right into the warped minds of foreign intelligence veterans who call the shots in the Kremlin and far beyond it.
Russia's de-facto support of the murderous madman in Iran who craves nuclear weapons, was the last straw that broke the back of the White House's patience. Together with Beijing, the Kremlin is willing to provide President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the same political cover Saddam Hussein purchased by spreading the wealth of oil for food contracts. Only this time, at stake are multi-billion dollar nuclear reactor contracts; air defense missiles and submarine sales; and fat bribes into numbered Swiss bank accounts.
There is also the old Russian-Iranian design to squeeze the U.S. military out of the world's richest oil patch – the Persian Gulf. This is something not only Americans, but even Arabs and the Chinese should be scared of. Such a move would radically change the energy control of the planet, leaving Europe at the mercy of nuclear armed Shi'a radicals in Teheran.
While all of the above sounds sinister, it does not qualify as reasons to start a fully fledged Cold War – if leaderships on both sides remain sane.
The Russian leaders are primarily interested in domestic stability and survival during the 2007-2008 managed transition to Putin's heir, also known as "the election cycle." Some anti-Russian rhetoric from Dick Cheney is the spice which adds patriotic flavor to the current regime.
The U.S. is still interested in working things out with Russia on Iran, oil and gas investment, counter-terrorism and non-proliferation, just to mention a few priorities. U.S. leaders should understand that taking on global terrorism, Iran, Russia and China simultaneously may cause a dangerous overstretch.
Finally, Russian leaders invest, save and play in the West. They ski in the tony French Alps resourt of Courchevel and relax on French Riviera. Their prime real estate is in London, and their kids go to Harvard. They would hate losing the privileges. One would hope that this "enlightened" self-interest will defeat the self-induced paranoia. Otherwise, our generation will live through a Cold War. Again.
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Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security at The Heritage Foundation. He is the author of Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis (Praeger, 1996) and Eurasia in Balance (Ashgate, 2005). Dr. Cohen is a member of Benador Associates.
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