Russia To Europe: Let's Have An Anti-US Alliance

[Ryan Ruck]

Russia To Europe: Let's Have An Anti-US Alliance

Somehow, I doubt that Russia's latest diplomatic project will gain much traction with its closest European neighbors, but it does at least expose the Russians as something other than allies to the US. Dmitry Medvedev has called on France and other European nations to form an anti-American front. Nicolas Sarkozy declined direct comment:

THE President of Russia has called on Europe's leaders to create a new world order that would minimise the role of the United States.

Confident that a row with Europe prompted by Russia's invasion of Georgia in August was over, Dmitry Medvedev arrived in the French spa town of Evian on Wednesday determined to woo his fellow leaders into creating an anti-US front. …

In a speech delivered to European leaders at a conference hosted by the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to discuss the international financial crisis, Mr Medvedev sought to show that the US was at the root of all the world's problems. He blamed Washington's "economic egotism" for the world's financial woes and then accused the Bush Administration of taking Europe to the brink of a new cold war by pursuing a deliberately divisive foreign policy.

He also maintained that the US was once again trying to return to a policy of containing Russia.

Small wonder. Vladimir Putin has tried strongarming former Soviet republics into falling back into Moscow's satellite system. He attempted to interfere with elections in Ukraine, with some convinced that the Russians were behind the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, who then launched the Orange Revolution and pushed the pro-Moscow Viktor Yanukovych out of power. The UK believes that the Russians assassinated former KGB agent and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko, which Litvinenko himself said before he died of radiation poisoning from a dose of polonium. The attack on Georgia only escalated Putin's return to empire-building.

Medvedev wants an end to NATO. Instead, he wants a new European security pact based on the "inadmissibility of the use of force", which hardly sounds like a security pact at all. In fact, in light of Russia's attack on Georgia, it's staggeringly hypocritical. Russian forces invaded Georgia — they didn't ask the West to pressure Georgia to stop attacking separatists who had attacked them, with Russian backing. The newly militarized Russia wants Europe to end its century-long partnership with the US and disarm itself, and undoubtedly there are enough fools in western Europe that this proposal will get taken seriously — especially in France and Spain.

They should talk to Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, the Czechs, and others in the former Iron Curtain region. They know and understand Russia better than anyone else in Europe, and they understand the nature of the beast Putin has created again in Moscow. They have lived for centuries under the threat of Russian oppression as well as the reality of it, and they have no desire to experience the latter again. Russia wants its empire back, and they want Europe as a doormat once again.

[Ryan Ruck]

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev Calls For Europe To Freeze Out US

Confident that a spat with Europe prompted by Russia's invasion of Georgia in August was over, Mr Medvedev arrived in the French spa town of Evian determined to woo his fellow leaders into creating an anti-US front.

Gone was the kind of war time rhetoric that saw Mr Medvedev lash out at the West and characterise his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili as a "lunatic". Instead Mr Medvedev spoke of a Russia that was "absolutely not interested in confrontation".

Yet there was little doubt that Mr Medvedev was playing the divide-and-rule tactics of his predecessor Vladimir Putin by seeking to pit the United States against its European allies.

In a speech delivered to European leaders at a conference hosted by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to discuss the international financial crisis, Mr Medvedev sought to show that the United States was at the root of all the world's problems.

He blamed Washington's "economic egotism" for the world's financial woes and then accused the Bush administration of taking Europe to the brink of a new cold war by pursuing a deliberately divisive foreign policy. He also maintained that the United States was once again trying to return to a policy of containing Russia.

"After toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the United States started a series of unilateral actions," Mr Medvedev said. "As a result, a trend appeared in international relations towards creating dividing lines. This was in fact the revival of a policy popular in the past and known as containment."

While he called for a cooling of the noxious rhetoric that has blighted East-West relations in the past two years, Mr Medvedev clearly laid the blame for the deterioration on the United States, which he said was again viewing Russian through the prism of the Cold War.

"Sovietology, like paranoia, is a very dangerous disease, and it is a pity that part of the US administration still suffers from it," he said.

To remedy Washington's ambitions to play the global policeman, Mr Medvedev proposed an overhaul of the world's security and financial structures.

In order to end the "unipolar" model in which the world depended on the United States, he proposed creating new financial systems to challenge the dominance of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, both of which had fallen under Washington's spell.

Slamming the enlargement of Nato, which he said had advance provocatively towards the borders of Russia, he also proposed drafting a new European Security Treaty. While Russia has insisted it is not intending to supplant Nato, Mr Medvedev made it clear that the US-dominated alliance was partly responsible for the war in the Caucasus by its failure to rein in Georgian "aggression".

If the tone was softer, the theme of the speech was familiar, and drew comparisons with an address by Mr Putin in February last year in which the former president, now prime minister, railed against US "hyperpower". Many observers say that address heralded the beginning of a new era in East-West confrontation.

"Medvedev's speech was more balanced than previous ones, but it was still permeated with criticism of the United States," said Nikolai Petrov, a Russian foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Centre think-tank in Moscow. "He curtsies to Europe but what he proposes is ultimately anachronistic rather than constructive."

To what extent Europe will warm to Mr Medvedev's policies is uncertain. It is clear, however, that Russia's diplomacy with Europe's major powers – Britain aside – has been remarkably successful in the aftermath of a war that saw Moscow branded an international pariah, even by traditional allies like Germany.

The Russian president won fulsome praise from Mr Sarkozy after he announced that all Russian troops had been withdrawn from buffer zones around Georgia's rebel enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia before Friday's deadline for a pull out.

Describing his guest as a man who had "kept his word", Mr Sarkozy immediately declared that talks on an EU-Russia partnership deal, suspended as punishment for Russia's military operation in Georgia, could resume.

Russia has also mended fences with Germany, concluding a new bilateral energy deal and winning assurances from Angela Merkel, the chancellor, that Berlin would not support granting Georgia or Ukraine Nato candidate status when the alliance meets in December.

While Russia may have pulled out of undisputed Georgian territory, Kremlin critics fret that the EU has won a pyrrhic diplomatic victory. Russia has doubled its troop presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in contravention of United Nations resolutions and in defiance of earlier EU calls, which now appear to have been dropped, to withdraw to pre-conflict positions.

Despite international condemnation, Russia has also unilaterally recognised the independence of both provinces, a fact that observers say could cause instability in the Caucasus for years to come.