- (November 2014)
What Netanyahu and Putin have in common, part II.
(Continued from What Netanyahu and Putin have in common).
By supporting the separatists in Ukraine, Putin has scared all of Russia's
neighbors that have sizeable Russian-speaking minorities.
(During a radio interview Lithuania's president Dalia Grybauskaite has described
Russia as a "terrorist state";
Kazakhstan's president Nursultan Nazarbayev hinted at leaving the Eurasian Economic Union "if it threatens our independence" after Putin visited his country and declared "he created a state in a territory that had never had a state before").
Russia, of course, views its support of Ukrainian separatists as a humanitarian
act, just like the West supported Kosovo's aspiration to independence from
Serbia.
Russia's support for the separatists has also prompted Russia's European customers to look elsewhere for
oil and gas; and this crisis might have helped propel oil and gas production
in the USA to near-record levels.
(Russia, of course, sees it differently: the mess in Ukraine is caused by
the West's indifference towards the legitimate aspirations of Russian-speaking
Ukrainians).
By supporting Assad in Syria, and by selling nuclear technology to Iran,
Russia has alienated the entire Islamic world (except for Iran, of course).
The perception is that, were Russia not involved, the civil war in Syria would
have ended with Assad's fall and the establishment of some kind of federal
republic, not with the expansion of ISIS; and the nuclear deal with Iran would
have been achieved long ago. The two biggest strategic crises in the Middle
East can easily be blamed on Russia.
(Russia, of course, sees it otherwise: the mess in Iraq and Libya was caused
by Western intervention).
Putin signed a deal with China: Russia will sell huge amounts of oil and gas
via new pipelines to be constructed. Many observers interpreted this move
as a way for Putin to reduce Russia's dependence on European markets.
The small print is not a detail, however: China will pay in yuan, not in
dollars. This, again, can be read as Putin's attempt to reduce Western influence
(in this case the world's main trading currency) on Russia's economy.
But the net result of this deal is to admit Russia's inferiority to China and
to treat Russia as the oil and gas provider to the Chinese economy; and this
while trying to establish the yuan as the world's currency.
Russia's border with China has never been safe, and how can it be now:
Russia's vast Far East has a population of seven million people bordering
with three Chinese northern provinces that are home to 100 million people,
of which about five million are estimated as crossing the border daily to
work in Russian territory (in 2004 Putin and then China's president Hu Jingtao
settled all border disputes, but mostly favoring China's view of the disputes).
The net result of Putin's foreign policy is the increasing isolation of Russia
in international affairs plus a strengthening of China's hold on Russia's
economy.
Meanwhile, Israel, run by another egomaniac nationalist, keeps provoking the
Palestinians and then massacring them at the first chance.
(Of course, Israel views it differently: the Arabs cannot be trusted,
Palestinians want to destroy Israel, the West would never accept the
violence that erupts out of Gaza, Israel is just defending the rule of law).
Israel is now
widely despised in Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Traditional
allies such as Turkey have become hostile. Most of the intellectuals that
admired Israel's science, literature and history (including me) have become
disillusioned. Israel has one friend left, the USA, but only because
the public opinion does not pay attention
to Netanyahu's war crimes and to how Israel's policies harm the USA.
I suspect that it is just a matter of time before the US public too turns
against Israel's policies.
The net result of Netanyahu's foreign policy is the increasing isolation
of Israel in international affairs and the rising reputation of moderate
Arab states such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Israel looks
hopelessly like an antiquated (if not rogue and racist) state deeply
entrenched in an antagonistic logic while Jordan and UAE look like modern
cosmopolitan states increasingly integrated within the international community.
Alas, both Netanyahu and Putin enjoy the support of their citizens.
What happens next to Israel and Russia will be an emanation of those societies.
(See also What Netanyahu and Putin have in common).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2014 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (july 2014)
Shooting down civilian planes.
In September 1983 a fighter jet of the Soviet Union shot down Korean Airlines 007 that had violated Soviet air space killing 269 people.
Whether this incident could have been prevented (it happened in the middle of
the Cold War, after US president Ronald Reagan had initiated a massive arms
race with the Soviet Union) is debatable. Tensions were high, the plane did
violate Soviet space.
In July 1988 a US warship, the Vincennes, shot down Iran Air 655. This was an
unjustified act of terrorism because the plane was flying in Iranian airspace
(over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf)
and the US warship was thousands of kms away from the USA.
All 290 on board, including 66 children, were killed.
For a long time the USA covered up the real story: the captain of the ship,
William C. Rogers III, was simply a racist psychopath who couldn't wait to kill
Iranians. He is still alive and free.
In retaliation for that tragedy, in December 1988 Libyan dictator
Muammar Gaddafi ordered the bombing of Pan Am 103, which happened over the
Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 243 passengers.
Finally, in July 2014 Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down by a Russian missile
operated by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 on board.
All the evidence points to a tragic mistake by inexperienced "soldiers" armed
with powerful weapons by the Russian government.
These cases are all different. The Soviet incident was not a mistake: the plane
was destroyed on purpose. But the Soviet Union had a justification: the plane
had violated Soviet airspace (and to this day it is not clear why, with many
conspiracy theories claiming that it was in fact a deliberate act of
espionage).
The Iranian incident was pure murder. Rogers should have been sent to Iran
to be tried by an Iranian court for the murder of 290 people. There is no
excuse for the USA.
Ditto for the Lockerbie incident: Libya's dictator was personally guilty
and should have prosecuted by an international court. Instead only some low
level agents were arrested and only one convicted (and he claimed to be
innocent until his last day).
The USA is correct in blaming Russian president Vladimir Putin for the
Ukrainian
incident. He does bear an indirect responsibility: his rogue army of mercenaries
cannot be trusted with sophisticated surface-to-air missiles.
However, Putin did not order the downing. At best one can accuse
the rebel leader of the Donetsk rebellion,
a Russian agent who operates under the moniker of Igor Strelkov and who
tweeted on Russian social media Vkontakte that he had shot down an Ukrainian
military plane. However, by all accounts, even Strelkov (unlike Rogers and
Gaddafi) did not mean to take down
a civilian plane but thought that he was shooting down a military plane.
Gaddafi is dead, but Rogers is still alive. Rogers should face trial in Iran
for his actions. Putin should stop supporting Strelkov and apologize for his
reckless support of the rebels.
Strelkov should be tried at best for involuntary manslaughter.
If all of these murder cases were put to rest in a proper way, it would
prevent future incidents of the same kind.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2014 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (may 2014)
The West and Russia.
There is a historical perspective that is often missing in analysis of
contemporary Russia.
Napoleon's France invaded Russia in the 19th century.
Hitler's Germany invaded Russia in the 20th century.
Both failed miserably.
The British empire fought "the big game" with Russia in Central Asia
and lost all of it.
The Ottoman Empire fought many wars against Russia, but
eventually disintegrated, replaced by the modern state of Turkey.
Britain, France, Germany and Turkey have declined and are still military
"powers" only because they are allied with the most powerful of all military
powers, the USA.
Their influence can still be felt here and there but overall they
are not even remotely what they used to be.
In fact, today's Germany is so pacifist that its weak army would not be able
to stop a Russian invasion. Germany's "life insurance" is Poland: Russia would
have to invade Poland first and that would not be easy.
Therefore Russia's historical enemies are all much weaker in military terms.
Russia, on the other hand, is still the second nuclear power in the world
and still the largest country in the world.
Based on today's forces, Russia would win all the wars that it lost in the
last 500 years.
But of course the Europeans would counter that the European Union as a whole
still matters, and is as strong as Britain or France were back in the old days
of the empires. This may be true when the European Union works, but recently
the European Union has been an ungovernable mess that is struggling to keep
itself together, and therefore has very little desire or power to solve
crises elsewhere. If the majority of Ukrainian people voted in a referendum
to join the European Union, it would be the European Union the one to back out.
Turkey is even less of a threat. Turkey is the country which has the longest
Black Sea coast, right across from Ukraine, and Turkey controls traffic in the
Black Sea through the Bosphorus, but Turkey has its own internal problems
(the Kurdish minority and a corruption scandal involving the prime minister
himself) and at least one external one (the civil war in neighboring Syria).
It is unthinkable that Turkey would close the Bosphorus (through which Russia
ships arms to Syria's dictator and Turkey's enemy Assad, and through which
three million barrels of oil transit every day).
At the same time, Western Europe and Turkey have never been so dependent
economically on Russia.
Almost 40% of all European Union's natural gas imports come from Russia.
The entire supply of natural gas in Finland and the Baltic states comes from
Russia (100%). Eastern Europe is also heavily dependent on Russian gas.
And the biggest importers (in absolute value) are Germany and Italy.
Most eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Czech republic, Slovakia,
Ukraine itself) produce nuclear energy, but western European countries like
Italy (that don't have any nuclear power) are at Russia's mercy.
Turkey itself receives roughly 60% of its natural gas from Russia.
When completed, the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline
(bringing Azerbaijani gas to the Balkans and Italy via Turkey) will alleviate
the problem, but it will still be a trickle compared with the total that
Russia ships to the West
(Gazprom exports 158 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe and Turkey and
it won't be until 2026 that the new pipeline will transport 30 billion cubic
meters).
Of course, the imbalance of power in Europe began with the end of World War II,
when suddenly two of the winners (Britain and France) realized that their
empires were disintegrating while the Soviet Union was becoming a nuclear
superpower. But back then at least the western powers did not depend on
Soviet gas and oil. In a sense, what is happening is a continuation of
the decline of the west and of Turkey vis a vis with Russia.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2014 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (may 2014)
The Ukrainian crisis is three crises in one.
July 28 will be the centennial of the start of World War I, and it would
not be a good omen if it were celebrated while an Eastern European country
falls into anarchy.
There are no easy solutions to silly borders that separate people who speak the
same language (and even the historical capital of a country from that country
itself): eastern Ukraine speaks Russian, Kiev is where the Russian state was
born.
There is also no easy way to fix the mess that the Ukrainian themselves created.
Most analyses forget to mention that the country has been run by corrupt and
incompetent politicians since the fall of the Soviet Union, whether they were
pro-Russia or pro-West. Had the country created a decent political class,
everything would be easier, and the economy would be better. As it is,
Ukraine is an absolute disaster. The average citizen has little motivation
to be patriotic about a failed state that only falls from one corrupt leader
to the next one.
The current crisis started when public demonstrations caused the downfall of
the democratically elected president. There is nobody (not even in Russia) who
defends that scoundrel, but he was, nonetheless, the legitimate president.
Justifying his overthrow by force was not the most responsible tactic by the
West. What if Italian demonstrators had deposed Berlusconi, a man who been
found guilty of several crimes by Italian courts? Would the West side with a
new unelected improvised government?
The crisis then got worse when Russia saw a golden opportunity to take back
what Krushev had gifted Ukraine: Crimea. Krushev was considered one of the
many communist dictators of a brutal totalitarian regime (the Soviet Union)
until a few months ago, when his deed was hailed as irreversible by the West.
Russia took back Crimea without firing a shot. Not a single person demonstrated
against Russia in the streets of Crimean cities. It was embarrassing how
out of touch with ordinary people the Western powers were.
The crisis, however, is now continuing and expanding because of clear Russian
manipulations. Putin is salivating like a dog who expect to find more meat
where it found some. Eastern Ukraine speak Russian. Many there have never seen
Kiev as a legitimate ruler. This feeling is certainly not as widespread as it
was in Crimea, but, as mentioned, the average person has little reason to
defend the legitimacy of corrupt Kiev politicians to rule over their towns.
The motivation is missing altogether, regardless of whether those citizens of
eastern Ukraine feel that they are Russian or Ukrainian: mostly, they are
victims of 20 years of bad governments.
The crisis has been amplified by the obvious factor that nobody wants to talk
about: the decline of Western Europe. In older days, when Britain and France
were still imperial powers, and Germany was an industrial powerhouse, and even
small countries like Italy and Holland mattered internationally, Russia could
not have annexed a region so easily. Today, instead, the European Union is
mainly a very sick patient, possibly the only sick patient in the entire world,
and it can hardly teach Russia how to do things, let alone punish Russia.
Western Europe would freeze to death next winter if it dared challenge its
main supplier of heating gas.
What can stop the crisis is only Putin's realization that, in the long run,
Russia will pay a price. The immediate price is already visible: NATO, that
had lost a bit of credibility with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is suddenly
popular again in the media of Eastern Europe. NATO has always been Putin's
big obsession. Welcome to a world in which NATO will matter more, not less.
Another immediate price that Russia is paying is obviously with the public
opinion of several countries, starting with Ukraine itself (where those who
feel Ukrainian probably feel more Ukrainian now than ever) and moving on to
neighboring countries through Poland (historically a cousin of Ukraine) all
the way to Serbia (where this crisis might be eroding the friendly feelings
left by Russia's defense of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis).
In the long run Russia is not making friends in Europe. Nowhere. Even Russia's
close ally in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, might be wondering what this means
for his own Russian-speaking country, which had never existed before the Soviet
Union fell.
Economically, Putin will pay only insofar as an economy that was already
weakening will suffer from a flight of western capital. There are certainly
many investors who feel that Russia is not the best place where to invest
your money in 2014. However, Russia sits on such huge foreign reserves that
it can comfortably live without Western investment, especially if it were
offset by increased Chinese investment.
A potentially huge price for Putin to pay is within his own Russian federation.
There are a few million Chechens who are wondering why the Crimeans are entitled
to choose their future and they are not. Chechnya fought two bloody independence
wars against Russia. The second one was crushed by Putin himself. Nothing that
happened in Ukraine so far compares with the bloodshed of Chechnya. If the
turmoil by a few pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine is enough to justify
redrawing the borders, then certainly the many anti-Russian separatists of
Chechnya should be entitled to the independence that they demanded.
It is just a matter of time before someone will attack Putin with his own logic.
Putin might have just planted the seeds for the ultimate disintegration of
Russia.
So there are really three crises hidden in this turmoil: a crisis of Ukraine
(a crisis mostly of corruption), a crisis of Western Europe (unable to play
any significant role towards a country that would like to be a closer ally)
and a brewing crisis in Russia (a federation of wildly different ethnic and
religious peoples).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2014 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (march 2014)
Job well done, Putin.
Dear president Putin, job well done in Crimea: under your leadership the people
of Crimea have been able to determine their future and separate from Ukraine.
Now we are all eagerly waiting for you to grant a referendum on independence
to Chechnya, a region that has fought a bloody war to gain independence from
Russia.
- (march 2014)
Why Putin is right again, and why he might lose again.
Following months of unrest, the Ukrainian parliament switched sides and
deposed president Victor Yanukovych, de facto ceding power to
the leaders of the protests. The protesters have been widely depicted as
pro-European as opposed to pro-Russian, but
Victor Yanukovych was not popular with the Russian-speaking half of Ukraine
either: he was a corrupt and inept politician who brought Ukraine close to
bankruptcy while furnishing his presidential palace like a Renaissance king.
There is little doubt that Putin himself disliked and despised Yanukovych.
The protesters were simply fed up with bad government.
Nonetheless, Yanukovych had won a fair and free election, and Putin correctly
points out that his overthrow was illegitimate under international law.
Had this happened in a Western country, or even an African country, probably
the West would be sending troops to restore the legitimate government like
it did in Mali. Because the deposed president had just moved Ukraine into the
Russian orbit, the West defends the coup.
Russia is obviously right in this analysis. The facts speak for themselves.
Russia has an agreement with Ukraine to maintain its fleet in Crimea, which
also happens to be a historical Russian place that was ceded in 1954 (exactly 60
years ago) to Ukraine when both Russia and Ukraine were part of the Soviet
Union. It was a meaningless gift at the time, since the Soviet Union ruled
both states, but, once the Soviet Union disintegrated, Crimea became an odd
place: inhabited mostly by Russians, and physically controlled by Russian
military ships, but technically part of Ukraine. Crimea is the most obvious
ethnic mess, but there are Russian-majority towns all over southeastern
Ukraine. Many of these Russian-speaking people never wanted to be part of
the Ukraine and feel closer loyalty towards Russia. Now that "their" president
has been deposed many of them may feel that they prefer to be Russians than
Ukrainians. Putin is sending troops to Crimea to protect this Russia "minority"
(actually almost half of the population).
The West would do the same to defend any minority threatened by a coup,
especially if that "minority" constitutes half of the population.
The rest of the world also has to remember that Russia and its Christian
religion (the Orthodox Church) were born in Kiev, which is now the capital
of Ukraine. It is not easy to tell Russians that they have nothing to do with
Ukraine: imagine how the French would feel if Paris had accidentally fallen
under German or British rule.
For many this is now a replay of what happened in Georgia in 2008
After a brief war against Georgia, Russia de facto annexed the
Russian-speaking regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that welcomed such
annexation. The West protested but it sounded very hypocritical to Russian
ears: wasn't this the same West that helped Kosovo split from Serbia on the
basis that the people of Kosovo don't want to be ruled by Serbia?
Isn't this the same West that facilitated the breakdown of Sudan in north Sudan
(mostly Muslim and anti-Western) and South Sudan (mostly Christian and
pro-Western?)
And isn't this the same USA that is currently negotiating the birth of a
Palestinian state out of lands occupied by Israel?
Does self-determination apply to everybody or only to friends of the West?
If South Ossetia and Abkhazia openly want to be part of Russia and do not want
to be part of Georgia, why force them to be part of Georgia?
If Crimea and any other region of Ukraine wants to become part of Russia and do
not want to be part of Ukraine, why force them to be part of Ukraine?
The contradiction is even more evident in the case of former Soviet states,
whose borders were decided by a totalitarian regime that never asked the
opinion of the people. Paradoxically, the West is defending the decisions
made by a totalitarian regime that the West fought against and called
"the empire
of evil". Apparently this empire of evil was right in assigning Crimea to
Ukraine, according to the Western powers.
The West doesn't seem to have any appetite for a referendum in Crimea.
No surprise, since the West specializes in accepting the outcome of elections
only when they favor the West (Hamas won in fair and free elections in
Palestine, but no Western country recognizes its government). And this is the
same West that right now is tacitly approving of the military dictatorship
in Egypt that deposed and imprisoned the democratically elected president Morsi.
Didn't Morsi get to power exactly the same way the new Ukrainian leadership
got to power, through widespread street protests? Unlike the new Ukrainian
government, Morsi also won a fair and free election, whereas the new Ukrainian
government still has to prove that it represents the majority of the country.
However, in Egypt's case we prefer the military dictatorship whereas in
Ukraine we side with the protesters.
Putin can easily prove the West's incoherence and hypocrisy to Russia's public
opinion. The West's credibility in Russia is an at all-time low.
Many wars have been fought over Crimea, a strategic outpost.
In another odd coincidence, exactly 160 years ago in March 1854
Britain and France joined the Ottoman Empire against Russia in the
"Crimean War". That war ended with Russia defeated and with its western vassal
states increasingly independent.
The situation in 2014 grants Russia the moral right to invade Russian-speaking
regions in Ukraine and even annex them if they so desire. However, Russia should
also realize that the price to pay is not so much hysterical sanctions imposed
by the West (Russia is largely self-sufficient and Europe has much to lose
from imposing sanctions), but the fact that the entire world is interpreting
this crisis in the same way: the West is protecting protesters who overthrew
a corrupt politician, whereas Russia is protecting the crook. This sounds
eerily similar to what happened in Syria. In fact, some Syrian rebels have
been photographed waving Ukrainian flags. If Putin was trying to depict
the USA as the evil or at least dangerous force being tamed by good Russia,
the annexation of Crimea and the split of Ukraine in half would almost
certainly annihilate that perception (assuming that Syria hasn't already
done irreversible damage to that narrative).
Putin has to manoeuvre carefully so as to defend
the right to self-determination for the Russian population of southeastern
Ukraine without defending the deposed, widely unpopular president Yanukovych.
Obviously Putin will lose on two other fronts too: this move will accelerate
Europe's plans to reduce its dependency on Russian natural gas
(especially if the USA lifts its restrictions on oil and gas exports),
and this move
will prompt Eastern European countries and the three Baltic countries to become even more integrated into NATO.
Sweden is not a NATO member, but it is now more likely to join the alliance
(it has immediately deployed troops in Gotland).
And obviously the other half of Ukraine (the non-Russian one) has become
even more anti-Russian than it already was.
The consequences might even be felt as far as Central Asia: Kazakhstan,
whose dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev has so far been a trusted comrade of
Putin's, harbors a sizeable Russian-speaking community just like Ukraine,
and might not feel too comfortable hearing that Putin reserves the right to
intervene outside Russia's borders to "protect" Russian-speaking communities.
The logical thing for the West to do, if it really wanted to act in the
interest of the Ukrainian people and to defuse the tension, would be to
encourage negotiations to redraw the borders between Russia and Ukraine.
This would make Putin a winner at home (where almost every Russian sides
with Crimea against the new Ukrainian government) while at the same time
removing the main opposition to the new Ukrainian government, thus increasing
the chances that Ukraine can exert full control on its territory and that
the next elections are about good government and not ethnic/linguistic
alliances.
For anyone who wants to weaken Putin this would also be a magisterial move.
There are a few million Russians who don't want to be Russian: the Chechens to
start with. If the people of Crimea are allowed to decide in which country
they should be (as Putin argues), then why shouldn't Chechens do the same?
By defending Crimea's right to self-determination, Putin might be reopening
a pandora's box in his own country.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2014 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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