But since the Kremlin makes no secret of its plans, the West does not have to wonder about its intentions or what steps it must take to counter its increasingly aggressive and self-confident moves. To stop Russia’s energy blackmail against Europe, alternative energy routes have to be found and the Atlantic Alliance needs to be reinvigorated. Putin has succeeded in part because Obama has been AWOL. “You know that the Polish-US alliance isn’t worth anything,” Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said in a private conversation leaked in June. “It is downright harmful, because it creates a false sense of security.” These words should cause shame in Washington and provoke a reassessment of its policy objectives. The core EU-US alliance not only needs to be rehabilitated but supplemented by an approach to the new, successful democracies of the global south. As historian Anne Applebaum points out in a recent “Democracy Works” paper for the Legatum Institute, India, Brazil, and South Africa should all be examples of how liberal democracy can be successful. But during the crisis in Ukraine, Western diplomacy didn’t take the trouble to present its case to these nations, so Russia was able to manipulate residual anticolonial, anti-Western resentment in all three, and all three refused to condemn the annexation of Crimea or back sanctions against Moscow. These “swing states” need to be made stakeholders in the camp of international democracy, and the idea of the “West” needs to be expanded to include them. Particular attention must also be paid to what is perhaps the strongest weapon in the Kremlin’s armory: the ability to corrupt Western elites, which both stymies geopolitical action and in turn strengthens the Kremlin’s underlying argument that Western democracies have no true values. Once upon a time, for example, Russian and Ukrainian dissidents used to speak of the West generally, and London in particular, as their guiding beacon. Today, by being so ready to take post-Soviet money and ask so few questions, these places are now increasingly perceived as supporting the autocratic, corrupt systems of Moscow. “Don’t you realize you risk creating a global system where corrupt, state-connected companies from Russia win and your companies aren’t able to compete?” asks Vladimir Ashurkov of the Anti-Corruption Fund. In the 1970s and ’80s, Soviet dissidents would try to catch out the Kremlin by telling it to abide by its own human rights laws (spelled out in detail but ignored in fact), appealing to the communist leadership’s desire to be seen as on the right side of history. Today, it’s time for the West to make the world’s financial capitals abide by their own money laundering laws. This might mean some potential financial loss for London and Wall Street in the short term, but by raising the bar they would also set the standards of the game and define a new kind of globalization that would not allow states such as Putin’s to thrive. worldaffairsjournal.org/article/yes-russia-matters-putin%E2%80%99s-guerrilla-strategy
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 21:32:50 +0000
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