[R-G] The "new Cold War" escalates

[Anthony Fenton]

Saturday, August 09, 2008
The "new Cold War" escalates.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-cold-war-escalates.html

There must have been widespread bemusement last night as newspapers  
dramatically announced that Russia had invaded Georgia. In fact, it's  
a little bit more complicated than that, since Russian troops were  
already in South Ossetia as part of a fragile 'peacekeeping'  
coalition. The Russian government is (dishonestly) arguing that its  
actions are merely the extension of its peacekeeping remit, even as it  
strikes beyond South Ossetia's borders. The headlines subtly changed,  
at any rate, to omit talk of an invasion. Even with that change, there  
seems to be an odd reluctance to acknowledge the weirdest fact about  
this: Georgia seems to have 'invaded' South Ossetia in a deliberate  
act of provocation, and - according to Reuters - are now attacking  
Ossetian separatists with jets and troops. One can only imagine that  
the pro-US Georgian leadership, which has ambitions to join NATO, had  
some sort of assent from Washington before acting in this way. After  
all, if it truly intends to withdraw 1,000 of its troops from Iraq to  
attack the South Ossetian independence movement, I would expect they  
had to ask Bush nicely first. (Incidentally, if successful, Georgia's  
accession to NATO would commit other NATO countries to defend  
Georgia's borders, even as independence movements in South Ossetia,  
Abkhazia - both of which have declared themselves separate from  
Georgia - and Ajaria take off). This doesn't mean that Russia aren't  
behaving aggressively themselves - they have been bolstering their  
power in South Ossetia for years, supporting the secessionists and so  
on - it just means that Georgia is the client of a bigger power than  
South Ossetia.

The big picture here is a battle between Washington and Moscow over  
political control of the oil and gas rich Central Asian territories.  
The Clinton-IMF reform process led to the creation of a bloc of pro- 
Western states across Central Asia, while the status of South Ossetia  
as an autonomous territory was defended by a joint Georgian-Russian  
peacekeeping force. Bush used the opportunity supplied by 9/11 to plot  
military bases across the region, thus encircling Russia's southern  
flank with a new iron curtain and giving the US crucial military  
leverage against potentially hostile (probably Islamist) popular  
movements. One of the embarrassments this strategy produced was Craig  
Murray's revelations about Washington-ally Islam Karimov's practises  
of torture and the fact that 'intelligence' gained from such methods  
were circulated and swallowed by Western intelligence agencies. This  
was compounded by the bigger embarrassment of Karimov kicking the  
Americans out of the country and cutting a deal with Putin. In respect  
of Georgia, the Bush administration has supported the "rose  
revolution" of the pro-US Mikhail Saakashvili against a decrepit and  
nepotistic Soviet era leader, Eduard Shevardnadze. The National  
Endowment for Democracy was heavily involved in the opposition  
campaign, and the State Department halved aid to the country before  
the elections in order to apply financial pressure to the leadership.

But like the other colour-coded 'revolutions', this one represented a  
superficial change in personnel with a new global orientation toward  
Washington, not a substantial change in the society. In fact, the  
spontaneous popular spread of the revolt deeply worried the  
Saakashvili team, which ordered its supporters to go home (see Neal  
Ascherson's account). Saakashvili's government was soon notorious for  
busting up peaceful demonstrations with the use of heavily armed  
security forces as the economic crisis deepened, the national debt  
soared, and the authoritarianism and corruption that characterised the  
old regime persisted. His popularity dropped from an astonishing 94%  
in the autumn of 2003 to 23% two years later. Washington has  
repeatedly bailed out the floundering "rose" leadership with aid  
grants, purportedly rewarding it for 'democratic' reforms. In 2006  
alone, the former Soviet states received $565 million in aid  
programmes courtesy of the US Senate, to protect them from  
"authoritarian Russia". The US is eager to stymy the pro-independence  
trends in Georgia, as these will redound to the benefit of the Putin- 
Medvedev government. It is, as Stephen Cohen has argued, part of a US- 
driven "new Cold War" against Russia.

The current president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, is the billionaire  
former chair of Gazprom's board of directors. An oligarch made  
powerful in part by IMF policy, he is now, alongside Putin, leading a  
nationalist government determined to re-assert Russia's hegemony in  
the region. Gazprom is the Russian state gas monopoly which became a  
key protagonist in a battle with Ukraine which stimulated the "new  
Cold War" rhetoric in Western newspapers in 2005. Essentially, to  
punish Ukraine for it's 'Orange revolution' and for seeking  
integration with the EU, the Russian government threatened to jack up  
the prices unless the Ukrainian government sold part of their pipeline  
network to Gazprom. In 2006, Gazprom was once again at the centre of a  
geopolitical crisis as it threatened to double prices to Georgia, just  
as it was finishing a pipeline to carry gas directly to the break-away  
South Ossetia. Every time Gazprom has acted in this way, hypocritical  
reports in Europe and America have howled about Russian arrogance. But  
Russia is not doing anything astonishing here: its control of gas and  
oil is one of its few strengths, and it is using it just as the  
Pentagon relies on US military strength to make up for its  
shortcomings in other areas. Russia's other strength has been its  
nuclear arsenal. As Chomsky has pointed out, the Bush administration's  
sabotage of efforts to reduce and dispose of Russia's arsenal as part  
of multilateral efforts has been extremely dangerous:

     In February 2004, Russia carried out its largest military  
exercises in two decades, prominently exhibiting advanced WMD. Russian  
generals and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that they were  
responding to Washington's plans "to make nuclear weapons an  
instrument of solving military tasks," including its development of  
new low-yield nuclear weapons, "an extremely dangerous tendency that  
is undermining global and regional stability,... lowering the  
threshold for actual use." Strategic analyst Bruce Blair writes that  
Russia is well aware that the new "bunker busters" are designed to  
target the "high-level nuclear command bunkers" that control its  
nuclear arsenal. Ivanov and Russian generals report that in response  
to US escalation they are deploying "the most advanced state-of-the- 
art missile in the world," perhaps next to impossible to destroy,  
something that "would be very alarming to the Pentagon," says former  
Assistant Defense Secretary Phil Coyle. US analysts suspect that  
Russia may also be duplicating US development of a hypersonic cruise  
vehicle that can re-enter the atmosphere from space and launch  
devastating attacks without warning, part of US plans to reduce  
reliance on overseas bases or negotiated access to air routes.

     US analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have  
tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted  
reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness.  
Putin and Ivanov cited the Bush doctrine of "preemptive strike"-- the  
"revolutionary" new doctrine of the National Security Strategy -- but  
also "added a key detail, saying that military force can be used if  
there is an attempt to limit Russia's access to regions that are  
essential to its survival," thus adapting for Russia the Clinton  
doctrine that the US is entitled to resort to "unilateral use of  
military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy  
supplies, and strategic resources." The world "is a much more insecure  
place" now that Russia has decided to follow the US lead, said Fiona  
Hill of the Brookings Institution, adding that other countries  
presumably "will follow suit."



Since the US government has preferred to 'neutralise' Russia's nuclear  
advantage in the region by building up a 'missile defense' system  
around the latter's perimeter, Russia is working aggressively to  
escalate its weapons systems (which are dwarved by the American  
equivalents), intimidate rivals, and build up local support - forging  
new relations with Turkmenistan, for example, with a new pipeline to  
import gas from the country, thus increasing its hold on supplies of  
the substance to Europe.

This particular conflagration may not last long - Russian investors  
are unhappy about it, and the state-owned oil and gas companies are  
losing value rapidly. However, that depends on how much the Russian  
ruling class feels is at stake in this battle. Washington could easily  
escalate the situation, and a new Brzezinski-advised Obama  
administration would certainly focus far more intently on shoring up  
US power in Central Asia than continuing to fight the lost battle in  
Iraq. And the US ruling class, in pursuing its "new Cold War", has  
introduced an infernal logic of mutual escalation, so that even if  
this crisis simmers down, a new one is bound to emerge soon. The much- 
vaunted new world order is increasingly resembling the old one, but  
with more nuclear weapons and less stability.