Putin's Master Plan. Douglas E. Schoen

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СКАЧАТЬ Russian help, and the rest of the Middle East is scrambling to be on the right side of history: Putin’s side.

      In Iraq, meanwhile, any positive benefits that may have resulted from America’s decade-plus war there now belong to Tehran. There is plenty of blame to go around for allowing the Middle East to slip into such chaos, and surely America’s politicians of the last fifteen years must shoulder a considerable portion of it. But we cannot forget that Putin has worked tirelessly toward exactly what we are witnessing today: a rising Russia-backed Iran; a disintegrating American alliance system; and growing Russian influence in Arab countries. On all counts, Putin is getting what he wants.

       CENTRAL ASIA

      To many in the West, and especially in America, Central Asia is most familiar as the land of Borat and America’s grinding Afghan quagmire. For most Russians, however, Central Asia is the land of the Osterns, massively popular Soviet-era movies inspired by America’s Westerns but set on Central Asia’s endless steppes and bone-dry deserts, with Turkic nomads filling in for Native American braves and clever Russian frontiersmen replacing stiff-spined sheriffs.⁵⁸ To Vladimir Putin, Central Asia is a land of opportunity, bursting with oil and natural gas begging for export and crisscrossed by well-worn Silk Road trade routes that cry out for high-speed freight trains and intercontinental superhighways. Russian control of Central Asia would hand over to Putin some of the world’s largest natural gas fields, and thereby consolidate Russian control of an energy market vital to both European and booming East Asian economies.

      So far, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have signed on to Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union, with Tajikistan poised to follow suit. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are likely to acquiesce eventually as well. These countries may be among the poorest in the world, but their vast reserves of natural resources make them strategically priceless. Beyond oil and gas, they have coal, uranium, gold, iron ore, and manganese. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, nestled up against the Tian Shan mountains just west of the Himalayas, have enormous stores of fresh water frozen in their glaciers. Soviet-era mismanagement means that the region remains underexplored, with major discoveries of resources worth billions of dollars having occurred within the last ten years. Putin is already working with the Chinese to build high-speed railways that will ship Central Asia’s riches to the hungry economies of Asia.⁵⁹ Putin has built Russia into the power that it is today on the back of commodities extraction and energy exports. If Putin can consolidate control over Central Asia through political alliances and economic links, it will deepen his purse for military expenditures and secure the Kremlin’s position astride strategic trade routes from Europe to Asia.

       EAST AND SOUTH ASIA

      By now, it’s no secret that Putin has built a powerful alliance with China, as one of this book’s coauthors describes in detail in The Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of Leadership (2014). China is a key market for Russian energy, and Chinese funds are also a major source of foreign direct investment in Russian infrastructure, especially in oil-rich Siberia. Chinese president Xi Jinping was Putin’s guest of honor in Moscow during the 2015 Victory Day celebrations, where the two signed approximately $6 billion in infrastructure deals to knit the economies of the two countries closer together.⁶⁰ The relationship between Russia and China is mutually beneficial and pragmatic: Putin denounces American power and promotes a multipolar world, while China cheerily trades with all that approach it. In return for pulling the weight of China’s strategic interests and playing the bad cop, Putin gets to ride shotgun on the Chinese economic bandwagon. Putin delivers China-funded infrastructure projects to his constituents, and the Chinese get improved access to the abundant natural resources of the Russian hinterland.

      The formal vehicle for coordinating relations between China and Russia has been the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which also has as members most of the Central Asian states. In July 2015, India and Pakistan announced plans to join the SCO as full members.⁶¹ India, perennially on edge about the behavior of its traditional rival, Pakistan, and concerned over growing Chinese power, is also a major customer of Russian arms. As in the Middle East, Putin is happy to sell weapons to both sides of a conflict, so long as the checks don’t bounce. A similar motivation applies to Putin’s unseemly relationship with North Korea and its murderous Kim dynasty. In March 2015, Putin welcomed North Korea’s Kim Jong-un to Moscow and pronounced a “year of friendship” between Russia and North Korea.⁶² Putin’s plan for Asia obviously doesn’t discriminate against Stalinist dictatorships.

       CONCLUSION

      Vladimir Putin’s master plan is designed to make the twenty-first century a Russian century. His vision reaches from the United Kingdom to the United Arab Emirates, from Korea to Kyrgyzstan. He is unleashing hybrid warfare against Russia’s immediate neighbors in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics, and has fired warning shots at the Scandinavians and the Finns. Putin backs pro-Russian populist political parties in Central and Western Europe, thereby disrupting continental politics and threatening to undermine NATO and the EU. In the Middle East, Putin is backing Iran’s bid for regional power, but he also has no problem selling arms to disillusioned American allies. Putin is integrating Central Asia into a Russia-centric political and economic system, pursuing an ever-deeper strategic partnership with China, and backing the North Korean regime. Taken together, this amounts to a comprehensive strategy to break apart the world order that has governed the last twenty-plus years of global affairs, which will be much to the benefit of Russia’s regional and global positioning. And so far, it’s working.

       CHAPTER 3

       How NATO Is Failing Itself, Europe, and America

      America’s commitment to collective defense under Article 5 of NATO is a sacred obligation in our view—a sacred obligation not just for now, but for all time.

       —VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN ¹

      The Russians will keep probing until they meet resistance. If we don’t stand up to small provocations, eventually they will reach Article 5.

       —SENIOR EUROPEAN DIPLOMAT ²

      There is a high probability that [Mr. Putin] will intervene in the Baltics to test NATO’s Article 5.

       —FORMER NATO SECRETARY GENERAL ANDERS FOGH RASMUSSEN ³

      The core mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had always been to defend Europe from Russian aggression. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it appeared that this mission had been a success, and that Russia would no longer pose a military threat to Europe. Indeed, in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, NATO has invented new missions for itself, from attempting to mitigate the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s to its more recent operations in Afghanistan and Libya. But a resurgent Russia, invading its neighbors and threatening the security of NATO members, means that NATO must return to its roots: deterring and defending against Russian aggression. Unfortunately, NATO, in part because its members are more preoccupied with Islamic terrorism, has failed to address the Russian threat and has put the safety of Europe and the United States in jeopardy as a result.

      It is clear that Russia poses a direct threat to NATO countries. The cross-border raid in Estonia may be the only time, at least that we know of, that Russian ground troops entered NATO ground territory, but Russian violations of NATO airspace are far more frequent and just as alarming. In 2014 alone, NATO members scrambled jets 442 times in response to Russian activity. Russian fighters and bombers have flown into Norwegian and Polish airspace,⁴ been intercepted over the English Channel,⁵ and were caught forty miles off the coast of California СКАЧАТЬ