The United States and the World - Russia and China

Extract

[...] Whatever the view one may hold, it is evident that the Russians have been furious of the support granted by the US Administration and by US Non-Governmental Organizations to overthrow of dictatorships in Ukraine (December 2004), in Georgia (November 2003), in Kyrgyzstan (March 2005), the so-called "coloured revolutions". They fear the same development in Byelorussia. All those countries were part of the former Soviet Union and are officially considered in Moscow to be part of the Russian sphere of influence (there is still a modicum of common organization, called the Community of Independent States, which plays a role for economics and for energy and transportation and industrial exchanges among the factories of the former SU; there are important Russian minorities in most of those countries). [...]

[...] We might see the beginning of a world-class confrontation there. The Russian Chinese message of August 2005 The big troubles resulting for the US from their intervention in Iraq have opened for Russia and China vast new opportunities, and a great scope for pressures on Washington, particularly to redress the overall world balance, and specifically to deter the US from meddling in Central Asia, which both countries consider as vital for them. In August 2005 China and Russia sent a message: they held common naval and military maneuvers. [...]

[...] And Russian defence expenditures are rising again. Putin is developing Russia's economy, which is now in a better shape, and a very special kind of authoritarian democracy. The new concept in Moscow is to react in the same way in the Republics of the former SU: not supporting post-Soviet dictatorships, but new regimes with the same mix of economic liberalism and political authoritarianism as in Moscow, using as levers the Russian minorities, the Russian language, the past, the economic tools. [...]

[...] That is the view of the so-called realists, very much in evidence in Washington those days. We shall see: If the realists finally prevail And whether Russia responds. As of now, its policy would seem to be more successful than the US one, at least depriving Washington of the control over Central Asia, for the time being preventing Ukraine to join NATO and thwarting American pressures in the UN to decide sanctions against Iran. [...]

[...] The United States and the World - Russia and China At the beginning of his first term, President Bush neglected Russia and considered China as the next major geopolitical adversary. At the same time, American analysts were quite confident that Washington would be able to manage the "Geostrategic Triad" between Washington, Moscow and Beijing to the best of American interest, sitting at the apex of that triangle. The EU was seen as largely irrelevant, important things would happen in the context of that triad, and for instance Brzezinski was quite sanguine, in his book of 2001 The Geostrategic Triad, about that prospect. [...]