Russian Strategy Makes It Tough To 'Reset' Relations
By Khatuna Mshvidobadze
As U.S. President Barack Obama flips through his briefing book to prepare for his July 6-8 summit meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, he should tarry over Russia's May 12 "Security Strategy of the Russian Federation to the Year 2020." A good read will reveal that he is about to meet the president of a country like no other, one that blends insecurity, bluster and a sense of grievance into a drive to become "one of the world's major powers."
It is going to be tough to "reset" relations with Russia.
The new strategy approved by Medvedev replaces one written in 2000, at the dawn of the Vladimir Putin era. Much of it rehashes the earlier document or other Putin-era pronouncements. But its bristling style draws attention to a few new points.
The Canadian press, for example, quickly reported that Moscow appeared to be preparing for a fight over Arctic resources. The Arctic, the document points out, may contain more than 30 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and natural gas.
"Due to competition for resources," it says, "a military confrontation cannot be excluded." Consequently, Russia will deploy sea and land forces along the Arctic frontiers.
This is a stiff policy challenge to Ottawa, but also to Copenhagen, Oslo and Washington, combining with Russia's August 2007 submarine expedition to plant a Russian flag 4,000 meters below the North Pole.
Arctic Expedition
The motivation for Russia's Arctic adventure is that the Law of the Sea Convention allows countries to extend their exclusive economic zone beyond 200 nautical miles if they can prove that underwater geological formations are natural parts of the continental shelf. Moscow is building a case that the Lomonosov Ridge, which extends from the New Siberian Islands to Canada's Ellesmere Island, is part of its continental shelf.
Explorer and Russian State Duma member Artur Chilingarov led the expedition.
"We are happy that we placed a Russian flag on the ocean bed where not a single person has ever been, and I don't give a damn what some foreign individuals think about that. The Arctic was always Russia's and will always belong to Russia."
Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay retorted, "This isn't the 15th century; you can't go around the world and just plant a flag claiming the territory."
The strategy document continues, "Attention of long-term international policy perspectives will be concentrated on accessing energy resources in the Middle East, on the Barents Shelf, the Caspian Sea Basin and in Central Asia."
This apparent obsession with competition - perhaps military confrontation - over resources partially explains Moscow's attraction to countries such as Iran and Syria. Closer to home, it explains Moscow's efforts to buy up Central Asian and Caspian resources and to block a southern - that is, alternative to Russian - East-West corridor by which Eurasian energy resources could reach world markets. It also at least partially explains Russia's war against Georgia last August.
The remainder of the explanation, the document reveals, is that NATO enlargement to include Georgia and Ukraine remains a critical threat to Russian security.
However, even those neighbors that do not aspire to NATO membership apparently threaten Russia. The strategy document emphasizes the need for high-tech border monitoring devices stretching from Central Asia, through the Caucasus to Ukraine.
By the way, Russia is deploying such devices along the administrative lines of occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as if these Georgian territories were annexed by Russia.
All in all, the new Russian security strategy reflects the schizophrenia one observes in Moscow's day-to-day foreign policy conduct. On the one hand, it calls for cooperation; on the other, it calls for barricades against threats from every direction.
On the ground, Russia allows transit of supplies for the American-led NATO mission in Afghanistan. However, it also pressured Kyrgyzstan to close the U.S. air base in Manas, which was used for the same purpose. It seems the Kremlin flirts with abandoning zero-sum thinking - but only if it stacks the deck.
Russia's new strategy combines a deep sense of insecurity with, at times, an almost hysterical tone that leaves the reader with the sense that Russia remains fundamentally a revolutionary power.
"The distinguishing feature of a revolutionary power," writes Henry Kissinger in "A World Restored," "is not that it feels threatened ... but that nothing can reassure it, and thus the desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the others."
Obama will find it hard to reset relations with such a country.
---
Khatuna Mshvidobadze is a senior associate at the Georgian Security Analysis Center,Tbilisi, Georgia.
Defense News
- Moldova wants to gain NATO’s support
- Pro-Putin demonstration in Tiraspol
- STRATFOR: “Moldova's small size and strategic location is a main factor in the weakness of the state and its ability to balance between external powers”
- Leader of Transnistria changed his mind
- Moldova-Ukraine relations assessed as positive
- Putin to return to power with damaged credibility and legitimacy
- Moscow to use Shevchuk in Transnistria to politically dominate Moldova
- Moldova's Transnistria set for makeover from Smirnov to Shevchuk
- Russia might ban migrants who violate the immigration legislation
- Economic crisis behind ‘winds of change’ in post-Soviet states
- 10 most important world events of 2005
- The rise and fall of Saddam Hussein
- Iraq: Saddam Hussein and another ex-senior officials sentenced to death by hanging
- Analysis: Black Sea Rivalry
- Report: Saddam Hussein has been executed
- On 31 August Moldova celebrates the Language Day
- Sexual humiliation and torture of female protesters reported
- Saddam Hussein handed over to Iraqi authorities, say lawyers
- Saddam Hussein's execution could be within next 48-36 hours
- Deadly blast at checkpoint near Peshawar