big chill

This is a long rant written last month about Putin and Russian foreign policy which was never published and is now slightly out of date. It is not a considered view and is certainly not a reflection of The Economist's stance. I post it here mainly because I would be interested in comments on how it could be improved



Putin goes ballistic

PINCH yourself. You are not dreaming of 1976, when Abba’s Mamma Mia was top of the charts, Prince Charles was a bearded bachelor and Noel Edmonds was presenting a daring new programme called the “Multi-coloured Swap Shop”.

You are not dreaming because the cold war, supposedly is over. The evil empire has collapsed. And the west and Russia are friends. Or are they? For one thing in recent days has been startlingly reminiscent of the nightmarish world of superpower confrontation in the 1970s—the intimidating, duplicitous rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin. This week General Nikolai Solovtsov, the commander of Russia’s strategic missile forces, warned Poland and the Czech Republic that if they dared to accept new American bases, they should reckon with becoming the targets of Russian nuclear missiles.

President Vladimir Putin said in a harshly worded speech in Munich earlier this month that America’s plans could upset the international balance of power. He also accused the United States of having “overstepped its national borders in every way”.

Another echo of the cold war is Russia’s return to the police-state habits rooted in its darkest history. Democracy, always flimsy, has become an outright sham, with hand-picked parties taking part in choreographed contests that recall the bogus multi-party systems of communist-run eastern Europe. The mass media is muzzled. Freedom House, an American think tank, in its newly published survey “Freedom in the World 2007” put Russia in its bottom, “not free” category. That is not just western scaremongering. The guest speaker at the launch was none other than Andrei Illarionov, the brilliant free-market economist who until 2005 was Mr Putin’s adviser.

“The outside world does not know what is going on,” he warned the assembled dignitaries in Washington DC, where he is now based. Too right. Many of those whose freedoms are being curtailed are too scared to speak up. Russians themselves have noone to turn to. Westerners prefer not to cause more trouble. When Britain’s ambassador, Anthony Brenton, was hounded for months by the thugs of “Nashi”, a pro-Putin youth movement, neither Downing St nor the Foreign Office saw fit to complain publicly. That, officials said privately, was because they did not want to jeopardise BP’s already imperilled investments in Russia.

Repression and corruption go hand in hand. As Anders Aslund, the top Swedish Russia-watcher, noted recently, it is astonishing that Russia’s communications minister Leonid Reiman, a close personal friend of Mr Putin’s, has been shown by a Swiss court to be the owner of telecommunications assets in Russia worth more than a billion dollars—yet this has not been reported by any significant media inside Russia, and Mr Reiman remains at his post without having offered any explanation or apology, beyond an implausible blanket denial.

Yet at first sight, Russia’s fight with America is an odd one. The planned Czech radar and Polish rocket base aim to counter not Russia’s nuclear deterrent, but attacks from Iran and North Korea—rogue states whose nuclear ambitions the Kremlin, supposedly, is helping us to check. This is not the “star wars” plan conceived by Ronald Reagan, which aimed to block a Soviet nuclear strike on the West. This is a far more modest scheme, originally launched under Bill Clinton, which aims to deter rogue states from even thinking of using nuclear weapons against the west.

A moment’s thought shows that this scheme cannot be used to block Russia’s arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads, launchable from anywhere on the planet by air and submarine, as well as from nuclear silos all over that country’s vast landmass. The planned rocket base in Poland will have just 10 interceptor rockets. But to deter a country such as Iran, likely to have even in a decade’s time only a handful of long-range missiles, America’s “son of Star Wars” is a sensible approach.

So why is Russia behaving so neurotically? First, because it loathes the pro-western orientation of the once-captive nations of eastern Europe. Whether it is Estonian soldiers fighting alongside British squaddies in Afghanistan, or Polish special forces training with the SAS, the new enthusiastic alliances in the cause of freedom are a constant and embarrassing contrast to the Kremlin’s current and former foreign policy—one based on black arts and brute force, not shared values and common interests. The Kremlin fails to see that its own bullying tactics and mischief-making have sent these countries queuing up to join NATO, just as its own supposed allies are wriggling frantically out of the Russian bear’s uncomfortable hug.

Just across the Polish border in Belarus, the country that was once Russia’s closest ally, the government is questioning the continued presence of Russia’s main missile-tracking radar at Baranavichy. Yet in Poland, once Russia’s satellite, the government is glad to host an American one. I recently asked Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s official spokesman, if he could name one neighbouring country which was a friendly and grateful Russian ally. He struggled for some seconds, and then mentioned Uzbekistan, a loathsome and backward Central Asian dictatorship. Had I asked the same question at the White House, I would have been answered with a list of more than 20 ex-communist countries that cherish their friendship with America, and want to deepen it further.

Secondly, America’s new bases underline Russia’s own technological backwardness. Russia’s anti-missile protection system is a crude cold-war affair that protects only Moscow—and with interceptors so clumsy that even if they worked, they would leave the Russian capital devastated. America’s programme is hugely ambitious and expensive. Like Reagan’s original star wars, it is a project that the clapped-out Russian economy cannot hope to match.

America, and its allies in “new Europe” have dealt crisply with the bullying Russian rhetoric of past weeks. Robert Gates, a veteran cold warrior who is now America’s Defence Secretary, responded to Mr Putin with a humorous put-down—by far the best way of dealing with Russian bluster. Karl Schwarzenberg, the doughty Hapsburg prince who is now the Czech Foreign Minister, responded with a silky and elegant disdain straight from the salons of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to which his country once belonged. If Russia was trying to show that it was a peace-loving country, he noted, trying to “blackmail” its neighbours was hardly the way to go about it.

The row over the rocket base and radar, though, is just a skirmish in the struggle that will determine the future of a European continent coming to terms with a resurgent Russia. The east-west relationship is antagonistic, touchy and mistrustful; it is not—yet at least—a reprise of the Cold War. But the Russian regime—in the throes of a power struggle as the end of Mr Putin’s constitutional term approaches in 2008—needs foreign enemies, and if it does not have them, it invents them. By bashing the west, Russian officials can show their patriotism, and stoke their compatriots’ sense of paranoia—and turn a handsome penny into the bargain.

Mr Illarionov—a man with intimate knowledge of the Kremlin’s inner workings—says: “Russia is engaged in the export of non-freedom. That is not stated publicly, but that is the reality”.

From a military stand-point, Russia has long seemed more like an impostor than a true superpower. Its army is a shambles, plagued by bullying and corruption; its navy and air force are crippled by cash-starvation that for more than a decade left the ships mostly at anchor, and the warplanes on the ground.

Now Mr Putin is trying to restore the armed forces’ former might. His war-chest is fuelled with billions of dollars of oil and gas revenues from Russia’s booming economy, which has grown from $200 billion in 1999 to $1 trillion (around half the size of Britain’s) last year. Three days before his speech, the government unveiled a £90 billion rearmament plan that should replace 45% of Russia’s weaponry by 2015. It includes new early-warning radars, new intercontinental ballistic missiles, a fleet of supersonic nuclear bombers, and 31 new warships including nuclear submarines, and aircraft carriers. Other plans include rearming 45 tank battalions and five air defence brigades with modern missiles.

It sounds scary. But even Russia’s trillions of petro-roubles are not enough to restore a superpower arsenal. Russia’s armed forces are too clapped out, the technology too backward. Those new weapons that Russia has tried to develop in recent years have largely been hopeless failure. The new seaborne Bulava missile regularly fails during tests. Without missiles, the new submarines are useless. Pavel Felgenhauer, Russia’s top independent defence analyst, says: the “rearmament plan only pretends to be a replica of a Cold War build up, while in fact it is a modest attempt to keep even a fraction of Russia’s present Soviet-made strategic defence operational until 2015”.

What Russia really wants is something different: to scrap the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in 1987 by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. That scrapped thousands of American and Russian ballistic missiles with ranges from 500 to 5500 kilometres. For years, that has been seen as the crowning arms-control achievement of the 1980s. But now Russia says the INF treaty was a terrible mistake as it prevents development of the Iskander-M missile, which has a potential range of 500km. As Mr Felgenhauer puts it “Moscow wants to deploy new missiles that cannot reach the United States, but are designed for neighbours.” That, he says, will underline the Kremlin’s new foreign policy doctrine, which he characterises as: “Keep out! Stop poking into our neighbourhood—or we may go ballistic.”

It will be years before Russia’s military build-up bears fruit. But right now, with America distracted and the European Union divided, the pickings look rich and easy for the ruthless and power-hungry spooks and crooks who run the Kremlin. One of Mr Putin’s top allies confided to a western visitor earlier this year “We have realised that there is a limit to what we can do with overt politics. From now on, we are going to use brute economic force to get what we want.”

And it is there—not in warheads or tanks—that the terrifying weakness of the west is starkly exposed. For during the cold war, the capitalists and the freedom-fighters were on the same side. Even the most cynical and amoral moneybags could see that communism would be not just bad for business: it would be bad for him. It was that alliance between idealism and self-interest that fuelled the fire of western determination and unity, until the evil empire and the Berlin wall came crashing down in ruins.
But now idealism and self-interest are pulling in different directions. Human-rights campaigners may stand up for Russian dissidents and political prisoners. Politicians with a conscience (often in faraway America, rather than nearby Europe, it must be said) still care when small countries such as Estonia and Georgia face the full blast of Russian hate campaigns and economic sanctions. But the business lobby is pulling in the other direction. The city bankers and pinstriped lawyers who launder Russia’s money and reputation abroad may know what they are doing—but it is bad for business to admit it. Inside Russia, every western businessman has a story to tell about the rampant corruption and terrifying lawlessness. But nobody speaks up.
The truth is that nobody in power in the west wants to confront the Kremlin—even when Russian officialdom shelters those who have committed an act of nuclear terrorism in the heart of London. Privately, politicians such as Tony Blair, George Bush and Germany’s Angela Merkel are deeply gloomy about Russia’s future, and detest Mr Putin. But they are hamstrung by the need to deal with Russia on issues such as the middle east, North Korea, Iran, nuclear security and the like. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, boasted recently: “Not one single significant international problem can be resolved without Russia or against Russia.”
Just as in the cold war, the Kremlin can count on what Lenin called “useful idiots”: those in the west who, whether from naivety, wrong-headedness or darker motives, are willing to defend Russia and criticise those who attack it. The predictable bleats of moral relativism form a deafening chorus. “Has Russia done wrong in its genocidal war Chechnya? Well what about Iraq?” “Is Mr Putin a thug? Well, George Bush is an idiot.” “Corruption in Russia is atrocious? Yes but at least it is stable and prosperous”. “Russia is bullying its former satellites? Just what America did for decades in Latin America”.
Those useful idiots looked pretty silly when the Soviet Union’s crimes and shortcomings were finally exposed. What will it take to embarrass them this time?