Russia straddles the world's geopolitical heartland and is heir to a remorseless imperial tradition. Encouraging economic and political reform -- the West's preferred means of engaging Russia since communism's end -- is of course an important foreign policy tool. But it cannot substitute for a serious effort to counter Russia's long-standing expansionism and its present desire to recapture its great-power status at the expense of its neighbors.
Ukrainian opposition leader (and former prime minister) Yuliya Tymoshenko in the current edition of Foreign Affairs.
More: Throughout the 1990s, it was fashionable to liken Russia to Weimar Germany -- a nation humiliated and shaken to its core by depression and hyperinflation that might fall under the spell of some reckless nationalist. But the defeated Germany of the 1920s was already a modern industrialized state, and the Nazi regime was only possible because it could seize the levers of such a state. These conditions did not exist in Yeltsin's Russia...But today's oil-fueled revival and the more disciplined government Putin has imposed may allow Russia to mount just such a challenge, particularly where world energy supplies are concerned...
More from Yuliya Tymoshenko's essay, Containing Russia:
Ordinary Russians are grateful to Putin for the country's stability and economic growth, and they are proud that Russia appears to matter when great global issues are debated. No wonder, then, that Putin's popularity rating is around 70 percent...
Yet, for every step forward that Russia has taken over the course of Putin's second term, it has taken a step backward. Greater state control of the economy -- especially in the energy industry...has bred corruption and inefficiency. Serious political opposition has been muzzled. Newspapers and television and radio stations have been shut down or taken over by the government and its allies. Kremlin cronies have replaced elected regional governors, and Russia's parliament, the Duma, has been emasculated as part of the Kremlin's drive to monopolize all state power.
Russia's foreign policy has been equally troubling. Moscow has given Iran diplomatic protection for its nuclear ambitions, and Russian arms sales are promiscuous. The Kremlin has consistently harassed neighboring countries; former Soviet nations, such as Georgia, have faced near economic strangulation. In February, Putin spoke favorably about creating a "gas OPEC."
None of this should be surprising, for Putin's aim has been unvarying from the start of his presidency: restore Russian greatness...
...Russia's domestic problems are awesome. In the long run, the country's systemic weaknesses may prove more disruptive to the world than its revived strength. Alcoholism and a collapsing health system are fueling a demographic catastrophe: the population has been shrinking by 700,000 annually for the past eight years despite the fact that the country's HIV/AIDS epidemic has not yet peaked. Male life expectancy is among the lowest in the world. Most demographers expect that Russia's population will shrink even more dramatically, perhaps to below 100 million people by the middle of the twenty-first century.Russia's robust growth, moreover, is precarious, because it is based on high oil prices that seem unlikely to last and rising production that clearly cannot be sustained...
...Social inequality is vast and growing...the insurgency in Chechnya has been met by the Kremlin's local strongman, whose minions openly terrorize, kidnap, and kill opponents. The North Caucasus is a tinderbox. The Russian army is riddled with graft, with officers selling conscripts into virtual slavery. And dangerous new forms of tuberculosis -- as well as of Islamist extremism among the 17 percent of the Russian population that is Muslim -- are being incubated through neglect...
...Russia should be welcomed in institutions and agreements that foster cooperation -- most important, Europe's Energy Charter and the Transit Protocol, with their reciprocal rights and responsibilities. But Russia's reform will be impeded, not helped, if the West turns a blind eye to its imperial pretensions. The independence of the republics that broke away from the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, must not be tacitly downgraded by the West's acquiescence to Russia's desire for hegemony.
Here's something about how falling oil prices were a major factor in the fall of communist Russia The Soviet Collapse, Grain and Oil
Posted by: Jim Caserta | Jun 14, 2007 at 07:17 AM
From the same edition of Foreign Affairs above:
"The world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars, euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn."
Maybe the "former" head of the KGB is just not up to abandoning the Ruble that can be backed by native Russian oil for the USD which is only backed by the US military in the Middle East.
Note to NAU denier Britt Whitmire: "currencies yet unborn" like the Amero.
Posted by: Jim Capo | Jun 15, 2007 at 10:53 AM