1 post tagged “china”

At the Munich (Germany) transatlantic security conference, an alumni-style get together of NATO state representatives and guests, Western politicians bring in their harvest of all but failed security policies. Their last resort: mimick naive innocence.

On Saturday, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, had some harsh rethorics in store for the hosts of the annual Munich Transatlantic conference on security. The conference unites high ranking government members from NATO states with important personalities from the vanity fair of think tanks, both European and American.

When Russia's president delivered his address on Saturday to a different tune, these representatives uttered astonishment and saw the dawning of a new era of cold war. Top of the list of the media, choosing an unduly innocent pose was the online edition of German newsweekly DER SPIEGEL. The magazine, seeing itself in one league with TIME and Newsweek quoted one participant of the conference asking "why is he [Putin] doing it?"

Putin had criticized American unilatralism as seen by Russia in frank words, and left no doubt about the aims of his address right from the start:

"This conference’s structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms."

 

While the cold-war-rethorics have only slightly lost in impetus on Sunday and a number of the German media attributed Putin's posture as a reflex of Russia's indignation about losing its status as a superpower, none so far documented Putin's speech in full text, which was made available earlier on Sunday through the official homepage of the Kremlin.

Loking at the speech in more detail, it is fair to say that the Russian President's speech amounts to what can be considered a stern warning to the US-led NATO to stop short of unilateralist mesaures.

However, being emotional in tone, Putin's speech in no way fails to objectively outline Russia's new concerns:

Unwillingness to accept moral lessons about democracy from the Western alliance 

Mr. Putin made it clear that Russia was unwilling to accept what could be paraphrased as what its considers to be false good advice form the Western alliance about its pace on human rights issues. Mr. Putin compared state internal democracy to a "democratical" world order and tried to redefine the issue, concluding that: 

"It is [a] world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority.

Incidentally, Russia – we – are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves."

Indeed, with EU-investigations on US-sponsored secret service camps to detain suspects in the states of "New Europe" and with allegedly numerous CIA-sponsored prisoner flights, trying to claim moral authority can be perilous and would eventually have backfired on its originators, as demonstrated by Mr. Putin.

Reciprocity of investment activities

The Russian government has of late seen itself exposed to harsh criticism from the West and its corporate stakeholders about preventing foreign investment through repressive means. In his speech, Putin remarked that:

"We are open to cooperation. Foreign companies participate in all our major energy projects. According to different estimates, up to 26 percent of the oil extraction in Russia – and please think about this figure – up to 26 percent of the oil extraction in Russia is done by foreign capital. Try, try to find me a similar example where Russian business participates extensively in key economic sectors in western countries. Such examples do not exist! There are no such examples.

I would also recall the parity of foreign investments in Russia and those Russia makes abroad. The parity is about fifteen to one. And here you have an obvious example of the openness and stability of the Russian economy."

The debate had heated in late 2006, as Russian investors were rumored to try to buy themselves into German telco incumbent Deutsche Telekom, spurring fears about possible industrial espionage. Also, it is unclear, on which basis the cooperation between European aviation consortium EADS and Russia is to be intensified, as the wish to draw upon traditional Russian strengths in aviation engineering and the wish to stop the efflux of Russian engineering talent to undesirable sponsors is counter-balanced by a deep rooting fear about possible technology and knowledge transfer to Russia.

The sense of encirclement  

Given its sheer size, which is about double that of the United States (including Alaska) and its east-west stretch across eleven timezones (or about half of the Northern hemisphere), it is difficult for Russia not to feel encircled. During the early 1990s the problem had temporarily faded somewhat, as the West had not regrouped its interest after the fall of the Iron Curtain. However, with US-lead forces operating in its former backyard Afghanistan, an allegedly strong support by the US to centrifugal, anti Russian, political forces in Caucasus and the fact that NATO has advanced towards the Western Russian borders with little or no buffers (Ukraine's pro-Russian government fell in 2006, Georgia to the south is controlled by a pro Western government), Russia does nowadays struggle to keep the advance of US interests at bay. It seems to be impardonable naive to hear NATO's Secretary General, de Hoop Scheffer quoted as saying "I cannot conceal that I am disappointed (...)" if Russia was worried when "democracy and the rule of law moved closer (...)" to its borders. Given the United States' recent track record of moving democracy closer to third-party borders or beyond, a certain Russian concern could be unterstandable when Putin concludes:

"I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?"

In a more global perspective, Putin's remarks might very well be ushering in a new Russian posture in its security policies, which could ultimately result in the revival of closer strategic ties with China, signs of which are unmistakable according to a number of essays by former high ranking member of the Philippine military, Victor Corpus and published by the Asia Times in 2006.