Russian Manoeuvres In The Dark

There has been a long gap in postings mostly from pressure of work - which is good in these economically uncertain times - but also because there has been little to say that would have added value during a strange phony period in British politics and international affairs.

Instead of second-guessing the shape of British politics before the Comprehensive Spending Review has been completed (which strikes us as a fairly futile analysis at this stage), we thought that we would come back to an old and recently neglected subject - Russia.

Back in May 2010, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov published a keynote article that seems to have passed all but the professionals by and which acts as useful counterpoint to the more aggressive stance taken by Prime Minister Putin towards the West on August 30th.

However, as you might expect, Russian military and foreign policy positions are closely aligned. Russian frustration with Western failures to respond to overtures over European security and global partnership require some investigation.

Changes in Nuclear Doctrine

Before looking at the positions of the two key figures, let us jump a further three months back to the publication of Russia's new Military Doctrine on February 5th, 2010, which was accompanied by a secret protocol on nuclear deterrence for the next decade (which, of course, we have not seen).

This caused much excitement amongst policy advisors in the West because the Russians appeared to be reducing their reliance on nuclear WMD.

Taken in the context of international interest in non-proliferation, this was seen as a positive move away from Cold War positions that many in Washington and London were having difficulty abandoning themselves out of deep distrust of the still opaque post-Soviet military mind-set.

Kremlinologists rarely got things right during the Cold War. There is no reason to believe that things are much better now. Russians know this and like to press analysts' buttons to drive policy as far as they can in their direction.

Analysts had earlier been excited in a negative way by the appointment of Nikolai Patrushev to be chief draftsman of the Doctine because he appeared to be quite prepared (based on an interview in October 2009) to see nuclear weaponry as useful in 'local conflicts'.

In the event, whether all this kerfuffle was designed to manipulate Western opinion or was a genuine debate within the Russian military elite or not, there appeared to be a mild reduction rather than increase in the scope for use.

The nervousness about 'local conflicts' has to be put into some context here - a typical 'local conflict' might be the 2008 Russo-Georgian War so the implication of Patrushev's comment was that the Russians might be prepared to use tactical nuclear weaponry in such a case.

As always, this is 'smoke and mirrors'. The Russo-Georgian War was as much about asserting Russian rights to push back Western attempts to expand into every vacuum appearing on the borders of Russia as if by divine right as it was about substantive local issues.

To assert in late-2009 that Russia might be prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons in local conflicts is really no more than saying that they were deadly serious about their own sphere of influence. This merely mirrored a much earlier American debate about use of such weaponry in, say, Afghanistan.

In this verbal game, what was being asserted by Russia was that its self-confidence, despite economic down-turn, was such that it could, within its sphere of influence, match the ambitions of the West blow-for-blow - perhaps the West might bear that in mind if it was tempted to strut on Russian 'territory'?

The 2010 military doctrine must also be seen as representing an odd but rational aspect of Russian policy. In 1993, the doctrine only assigned such weaponry to global war and then extended this to regional war in 2000 as a means of saying to the West that Russia had returned to the stage.

Russia has now shifted the implicit burden of nuclear use from critical national security (which might embrace, say, problems in the Caucasus) back to something closer to existential threat, bringing it into line with the implicit position of the UK and France - but it has not removed its right of first use.

The key aspect of the case is that nuclear weaponries are primarily positioned as defensive of the integrity of the Russian State and not as an instrument of forward policy.

What really struck policy-makers though was that the doctrine moved Russia further away from tactical nuclear use (following the US after its own flirtations with alternatives) towards the maintenance of a strategic deterrence that could be put on the table for further negotiation.

Back in 2000, it was made clear that nuclear weaponries were only there to provide cover for the modernisation of the Russian conventional military. The mood music of the February 2010 doctrine implied that little had changed in this respect.

Lavrov's Foreign Policy

So what did this mean for foreign policy? Back to Lavrov, three months later and his keynote article of May 24th in the French language Revue Defense Nationale (where we are, of course, relying on translation).

The Russians often use the French strategic community as way-station for communications to Washington but also to make points to the two continental powers of most importance to them - France and Germany. The Franco-German alliance defines Europe for Moscow.

Russians may say things until they are blue in the face but the instinctive suspicion in Washington about Moscow is best alleviated by making public representations in a Paris that still has (limited) Gaullist aspirations to represent itself as an independent voice within the West.

In this case, Lavrov was ostensibly making a pitch to European aspirations for peace and security but the message was also one to the Atlantic Alliance that Russia was a partner and not an enemy in integrating the West as primary force for global peace and security.

Lavrov's introduction could almost have been written by any senior security official in the West. He says that Russia shares Western concerns about instability: three of the six 'threats and risks' (terrorism, drug trafficking and piracy) are quite definitely arising from non-State actors.

In other words, Lavrov is saying from the beginning that, as States, Russia and the Western Powers have every reason to collaborate and that Russia will collaborate if the West understands that Russia has essential interests in regard to its perceived integrity, interests that must be respected.

The Re-invention of NATO

Let us briefly jump back a few days to see what Lavrov was concerned about. On May 17th, a week before Lavrov's article was leaked, Madeleine Albright had released a 46-page Strategic Concept for NATO that is now under full discussion within the Organisation.

The Report recommended that NATO engage dynamically with the world beyond Europe and the Atlantic and restructure itself to operate within a UN Mandate alongside the forces of other willing states, not excluding Russia and China.

In other words, NATO was to reinvent itself into the military arm, albeit dominated by the US, of the Western wing of that 'world government' that puts the fear of God into Mid-Western populists.

American interest in this is obvious. It can no longer afford to single-handedly police the world yet remains, by far, the most technologically advanced military power in the world. It has problems getting moral support overseas and domestically for its project of pacifying the world.

Equally to the point, and Lavrov's reference to non-State actors would appeal to this mentality, various forms of organised crime and political insurgency are both disrupting the global economy and creating dangerous pools of capital accumulation that can out-buy and sometimes out-think the West.

The state of Mexico and the US-Mexican borderlands is dire and Europe and Russia have similar issues that pull the anarchic potential of their southern borderlands into the potential for criminal melt-down in the inner cities and banlieus of their respective heartlands.

Lavrov, in his article, positions Russia as part of Europe and as having a similar interest in the stabilisation of Central Asia and in energy and food security. He adds dealing with the economic crisis but also the fashionable issue of climate change to the pot of common interests.

To cut the long story short, Lavrov is offering collaboration - 'confrontation is not what we look for, and we will never choose this option.' At the worst, he says, Russia will simply remain aloof until the rest of the world 'gets it' (our phrase).

What Russia wants (and this makes many in London and Washington nervous) is a comprehensive European security settlement between Europe and Russia that integrates the Russian economy into the European Project as supplier of energy in return for investment.

Ay, there's the rub! In theory, the NATO concept and the Russian concept of collaboration are perfectly consonant - Russia co-operates in pacifying its sphere of influence and adds muscle to the UN Mandate to deal with its far more extensive 'empire'.

Lavrov is actually saying to Washington, almost over the heads of Europeans despite the positioning of the article to a Franco-German audience, 'we will help you run the world as junior partners (implicitly with China and the European Union) and all we ask for is respect for our national interests.'

Unfortunately, those national interests include the maintenance of a massive conventional armed force, paid for by the energy and raw material reserves of the East that could sweep into a Europe that has no political mandate for re-militarisation and depends for its security on an American nuclear umbrella.

The idea that Russia might reach economically to the Atlantic to all intents and purposes without firing a shot and deal with the European Union's troublesome Eastern neighbours (Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus spring to mind) with only a few border troop movements unnerves the West.

Freedom and Security in Europe

The Russian pitch would certainly put an end to the dreams of radicals who want to extend liberal democracy on Western free market terms ever westwards. Soros, eat your heart out! Here we have two opposing models fighting for the souls of Atlanticist and Eurasianist Europeans respectively.

The first has the EU being dragged into an expensive global policing role through NATO under conditions where the social Europe model is already under threat on economic fundamentals and where the arguments about the benefits of global engagement may be highly spurious.

The second has the EU becoming the wealthy dependent of a rising Russia that collaborates with the other Great Powers to carve the world up into spheres of influence directed at pacifying borders (whether Mexico, Tibet or the Caucasus) and at suppressing insurgency and threats to State integrity.

Lavrov concentrates this crisis into his tale of Kosovo where his analysis is not unjustified. For the West, led by Tony Blair, this was a story of humanitarian intervention by which any means were necessary to extend liberal ideological culture into a vacuum that had emerged between security regimes.

Kosovo might be said to have lead ineluctably to the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been draining Atlantic resources for nearly a decade, much as the re-occupation of the Rhineland led to the Anschluss and the occupation of the Sudetenland. A succesion of ideological invasions ....

Russians have a keen sense of the conditions that led to the bloody Great Patriotic War. The determined intervention in Georgia was, no doubt, a deliberate attempt to deter the West from its own Danzig - an intervention too far that triggered a regional conflict (Iran springs to mind but also Ukraine!).

The intervention over South Ossetia was intended to be a deliberate counterpoint to Kosovo - thus far and no further, it said to the West. There would be no failure to face off the fascists by letting them take that last bit of land before the move that triggered regional and then global conflict.

Georgia as case study in soft power operations to bring yet another country into the Western Empire might be compared in the Russian mind's eye with Sudetenland as a case study in bringing Czechoslovakia into the Nazi domain.

Myths and Narratives

How close might we have been to regional war if the West had used a victory in Georgia to encourage pro-Western Ukrainian moves against Sevastopol during the recent gas crises?

Lavrov, in his article, does not accept the idea of the divide between a liberal Europe and a tyrannical East that is implicit in the entire liberal myth of the West.

He presents an idea that is wholly alien to London and Washington - an integrated European civilisation with Washington and Moscow as two different and balancing poles. 

It is a reversion to another myth - that of wartime collaboration for four brief years (1941-1945). Lavrov is trying to persuade us that Russia is now a form of Western democracy that is certainly no worse than the Tsarist Great Power that worked with the West in the era of the dreadnoughts.

London and Washington are never going to be persuaded by this ideologically so the seduction is being aimed at Paris and Berlin who are aware of the slow progress of the European Project and the problems of an American ally who rarely consults yet who guarantees their freedom.

What Lavrov wants is for the Paris-Berlin axis to start a dialogue over security co-operation that might be long-winded and slow but which offers the opportunity for Russia to build in economic collaboration with itself against the expensive efforts of the Atlanticists to avoid such commitments.

Before the economic crisis knocked them sideways, the Russians were already adopting an energy-led policy that threatened to put the squeeze on Europe with the co-operation of some of its most energy-reliant members, notably Italy. This is something to which they will eventually return.

Temptations and Seductions

This is the background to the European Security Treaty proposed by the Russians and to the attempted seduction of Washington into global partnership in return for a Security Council mandate that would allow the Americans much more of a free hand to settle issues of concern.

It is as if Lavrov is saying: "Look guys, instead of pushing up into our sphere of influence and not getting the mandate for your own strategic interests in the Gulf, why not give us a mandate for our sphere and we'll give you the clear mandate to do what you need to do elsewhere."

The implicit idea may be that Iran might come as part of a package, especially given the cat-and-mouse game Russia itself plays with Tehran.

Some in Washington might be tempted by this but it would mean a realist approach to foreign policy that faces formidable opposition amongst both neo-conservatives on the one hand and the 'soft Left' on the other.

Above all, Lavrov is offering global co-operation to the London-Washington axis for sphere of influence outcomes at two levels - first, Russian imperial integrity and, only then and second, appropriate near-equal influence over European affairs.

As he puts it:

" ... the qualitatively improved co-operation within the NATO-Russia Council [viz. a carve-up, my words] and the strategic partnership with the European Union will be Russia's national 'segment' in this all-European program."

Now that won't go down well in Warsaw, Prague and Bucharest!"

Putin Does Tough Guy

Move forward again to August 30th, when Prime Minister Putin lambasted the West for 'deceiving Russia' and think of this context  - first , a new military doctrine that continued the slow shift away from nuclear to conventional forces and, second, the proposed European security treaty.

Now, add the fact that, although the Russo-Georgian War had effectively halted the Western push into Russian territory, NATO is not withdrawing one inch from its strategy of world domination on its own terms, despite the economic weakness of its members.

Lavrov offers the carrot of co-operation so Putin offers the stick of potential confrontation or, at least. withdrawal into aloofness, a national-populist repetition of the tactical tub-thumping of the 2007 Munich Security Conference.

What he objects to is the continuation of Western cat-and-mouse tactics - the Polish missile defence system is removed from Poland only to appear elsewhere but also (using the Yaroshenko case) US actions against global criminality take place without reference to global partners.

He could have a point if he asserted that Western foreign policy does have the appearance of being both unstable and ideological. From Kosovo to Iraq, ideology dominated Western thinking and the instability probably arises from the psychological inability of many politicians to re-learn 'realism'.

Russian Rationalities

Still, even here, Putin praises Obama as sincere. All the signs are that Russia has not given up on its mission by any means. Russia thinks that its position is quite simply logical and rational - Lavrov, in his article, was at pains to remove any notion of ideology in the Russian position.

We may try a post-modern approach and say that there is no thought that is not ideological but it does seem to be true that Russian policy now bases itself on simple national interest where its opponents are thoroughly confused as to where national interest ends and 'doing the ethical thing' begins.

What the US has to decide is whether a regionally resurgent Russia, now incapable of presenting a serious global threat, would be an added value participant in the massive task of policing a chaotic world through the United Nations (clearly a NATO and so, in effect, a primary US concern).

And, if its collaboration in creating global pacification mandates is valuable, would America be willing to relinquish its somewhat expensive and demanding unique position as guarantor of European security in return for bringing in Russia as junior partner alongside a more militarised European Union?

The problem here is obvious - as protests mount across Europe at the unravelling of the social democratic model in many countries, there is scarcely any mandate in the short to medium term for the increased defence spending required to deter Russian adventurism under a less rational leader.

There are immense risks in jumping either way but what is clear is that the absolute peak of American power has passed even if it will remain relatively far ahead of its rivals for some decades to come.

The US can by-pass Russia completely perhaps, but it will probably have to concede Russian demands for non-interference in its sphere of influence under any rational regime of its own (Palin is the wild card here). Whether it goes to the next stage and brings Russia into partnership is another matter.

The Europeans, living in an economically troubled half-State with profoundly divided opinions on the Russian behemoth, will have their own opinion and any attempted nuclear re-militarisation of the European Union is not going to do very much for world peace. 

Taking The Security-Industrial Complex Seriously

The radical anarcho-libertarian monitoring organisation Statewatch has, with the social activist Transnational Institute, come up with an extensive report on what it calls the 'neoconopticon'.

In essence, the report claims to expose the emergent European security-industrial complex that mirrors those of the United States and other security-minded 'empires'. This is its own summary of what it tries to do:

Despite the often benign intent behind collaborative European ‘research’ into integrated land, air, maritime, space and cyber-surveillance systems, the EU’s security and R&D policy is coalescing around a high-tech blueprint for a new kind of security. It envisages a future world of red zones and green zones; external borders controlled by military force and internally by a sprawling network of physical and virtual security checkpoints; public spaces, micro-states and ‘mega events’ policed by high-tech surveillance systems and rapid reaction forces; ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘crisis management’ missions that make no operational distinction between the suburbs of Basra or the Banlieue; and the increasing integration of defence and national security functions at home and abroad.

It is not just a case of “sleepwalking into” or “waking up to” a “surveillance society”, as Britain’s Information Commissioner famously warned, it feels more like turning a blind eye to the start of a new kind of arms race, one in which all the weapons are pointing inwards. Welcome to the Neo-ConOpticon.

We have often commented on the siloviki system in Russia but it seems that all states and proto-states (which is what the EU is until the Lisbon Treaty is finally approved) are developing their equivalent structures.

Something very big is going on here. The public are, perhaps, not fully aware of the possible implications in terms of the diversion of taxation and the potential for restrictions on freedoms otherwise taken for granted - or the potential for damage to 'inconvenient' minorities.

Part of the problem here is that those researching these issues tend to be over-enthusiastic political nerds whose sense of outrage puts off most ordinary citizens.

But they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they try to get their message across in over-simplified terms, they will be pigeon-holed with the often dim-witted people who go on marches and undertake campaigns that merely elicit a yawn from a bored establishment.

Yet if they do what they are doing now - supplying detailed intelligent argument about the shape of things to come - then they have to rely on a steady drip of understanding working through layers of political self interest until someone finally wakes up to what is happening, probably too late.

This is a shame but it may also be a tragedy because what they have to say is of vital importance, whether you agree that they have the full picture or not.

The lack of debate means that unaccountable people are putting in place, without scrutiny or adequate questioning from a supine political class, a complex internal security structure in the interstices of liberal democracy with the eager connivance of private sector interests talking up threat for profit.

This may not surprise us in a communist state like China or a post-communist empire like Russia but both the US (guarded by its Constitution to a great though not certain degree) and the European Union (with a framework now actively being moulded by security interests) purport to be liberal democracies.

The argument for a diversion of tax revenue into internal security, border settlement along the edges of the 'empires' and population management (in effect, intervention from above in the political proces, culture and society) is ostensibly one of citizen protection.

Unfortunately, the rhetoric does not quite match the reality. Citizen protection (essentially, preserving the ability for freedoms to be enjoyed) slides into more complex issues of economic security (especially energy and food security) and then into a very different kettle of fish, state security.

State security and citizen protection are not as perfectly aligned as the theoreticians of the new world order would like to suggest. We don't have to quote chapter and verse on Stalinism but even the most liberal and democratic of republics can elide without scrutiny and debate into:

• considering radical dissent to be prima facie evidence for radical acts
• considering radical acts to justify radical counter-measures
• considering the cover-up of radical counter-measures such as restrictions on freedom of information or torture as essential to their success

Instead of the protection of the rights of each individual citizen being paramount as free individuals, the authoritarian mentality judges individuals by their alignment with social norms that are eventually designed to make the job of security and social control easier.

Every incident of threat or any barrier to easy or cheap security implementation becomes a tool for extending the boundaries of authority through new legislation and regulation demanded of weak legislatures who have been half house-trained through the agency of weak and centralised parties.

The report's title brings together two separate ideological concepts in its 'neoconopticon' neologism. We all think we understand the neocon bit because of recent history but it is a little more complicated than the foreign policy adventuring of Messrs Bush and Blair.

The essence of neoconservatism is not its apparent politics of the Right masked by a revised post-communist progressivism, but the fact that it is the political expression of the authoritarian personality in the West, beyond Left or Right, one that sees liberty as necessarily to be protected by auctoritas.

This is Roman thinking, designed to preserve the boundaries of empire and free trade by politically emasculating all forms of liberty that do not fit with an atomised population that trades, pleasures itself, moves around and chooses from its range of non-threatening lifestyles without politics.

This atomisation of the population, withdrawn from the active politics of locality and tradition (including class, religious and national tradition), creates the very security problems that have encouraged atomisation - organised crime, 'leaderless resistance', the rise of atavistic ethnicisms, terrorism ....

This leads us to the second part of the neologism, a reference to a rational but inhumane attempt to be humane - the panopticon prison system of leading liberal theorist of the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham.

Like the guillotine, the panopticon was supposed to be a reform, an improvement on the cruel disorder of previous systems of social control. Rationalism, perhaps the most anti-human of idealisms, looks down upon creation, thinks it is not up to scratch and invariably comes up with new cruelties.

Bentham's purpose was clear - the system (which ensured that no prisoner was ever free of the gaze of his jailer) was "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."

This impulse can only be considered totalitarian and yet it was also classically liberal. Persons had done wrong and rationally were to be considered as worthy of this treatment because they had stepped over the bounds of a free society based on trust and contract.

Totalitarian, authoritarian and yet liberal, designed to ensure freedoms within the carapace of accepted constitutions by ensuring constant surveillance, paid out of the people's own funds in order to isolate off those who are deemed a threat and still ensure 'right thinking' in the rest.

But wait, consider what crimes might have placed a man under this omniscient system in the 1780s if it had ever been implemented - idleness, poverty (the system was specifically designed to displace the poor laws), poaching, homosexuality, blasphemy.

Now consider what thought-crimes and politically correct expectations in regard to conduct are emerging within the new 'liberal totalitarianism'. Will it become a 'crime' to have the wrong light bulb or give your children too much sugar at meal times? Holocaust denial can get itself a prison sentence already.

The obsessive fears of the paranoid security class, the greed of new industries providing goods and services, the float of security officials between public and private sectors, progressive expectations and nostrums and the instinct for order may all see the 'neoconopticon' develop beyond democratic control.

Statewatch's detailed and interesting report should not just be shelved alongside other radical moans about the State or the ruling order. It is a vital document of political education in a debate that should inform our thinking as voters and of our politicians as our representatives.