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. 

Afghanistan & British Electoral Politics

We have not looked at Afghanistan as an issue since the High Summer of last year or commented in depth on British foreign policy since the Autumn. Why is this?

Partly because there has been nothing new to say and partly because comment on British policy in West Asia has degenerated into a political sideshow, a subject for knockabout between two political parties seeking to win an election later this Spring.

Miliband's Compton Lecture

David Miliband's Compton Lecture on March 10th might be regarded as the last serious pre-election attempt by the Government to establish precisely what it is doing in this faraway country before a disenchanted public adds it to the melange of issues that will decide its fate.

Within the first few words, he managed to encapsulate what New Labour stands for and to reaffirm the ideology of engagement - enlightenment values in a transatlantic context.

We have recently thrown some doubt on the viability of the latest iteration of the Enlightenment project as an idealism that can be destructive in its attempts to impose systems on the crooked timber of humanity but Miliband has no such concerns.

He gives three reasons for engagement in Afghanistan. Two of these lodge New Labour firmly in a grand strategic camp in which the national interest is seen as identical to that of its chief ally expressed within an idealist and abstract notion of the 'West'.

Naturally, he cannot walk away from the prime motive for engagement that is presented to the British people - that we have to be there because the West Asian badlands pose a terror threat at home.

What is never said is that our active post-imperial engagement with the margins of the West fuels the very insurgency that might be imported back into the country and that some post-imperial ethnic minorities within the UK are disengaged from the Crown, in part, by such actions.

To the costs of the war must be added the costs of a complex 'soft' power operation to monitor and manage lower income ethnic communities, of an almost comically belt and braces security operation around the country and of trying to outmanouevre the extremists' equally evil twin, the BNP.

If we add to this the divisiveness of the war, popular anger and irritation at security measures, the palpable growth in tension between ethnic communities ... all at a time of economic difficulty ... it seems an expensive way of dealing with a threat which is not entirely proven as to its extent or importance.

Party & Crown

The truth is that a balanced budget and internal social cohesion are regarded as wholly worth sacrificing on the altars of the transatlantic alliance and the 'future of Western power'.

In other words, the tragedy of New Labour is that, after over hundred years of struggle to become the dominant ruling party in the country, it has become the Party of Pitt, Walpole, Wellington and Castlereagh rather than the Party of Paine, Jefferson, Shelley and Blake. It has become the Crown.

It is the Crown (not the House of Windsor but the State) that has determined, for complex historical reasons related to its power and institutional ambition, that the transatlantic alliance, NATO and the West represent a community in which it must have a place or have no meaning.

There is an historic rationale for this (albeit an imperialist one) and, even today, there are sound economic and strategic arguments for good relations with the United States, collective security and the defence of core liberal values in a global setting.

But this is not what is happening here. This is not good relations with the US, it is Alliance. It is not just collective security, it is NATO. It is not just defence of values but promotion and extension of values. The qualitative difference is important and it is proving immensely costly.

The Necessity For Settlement

We will leave you to read Miliband's lecture. You may decide whether to be persuaded or not. What is clear is that Miliband knows that our country can no longer afford the forward policy begun under Tony Blair in the late 1990s and he is looking for an 'exit' without the political costs of being seen to withdraw.

Strip away the tub-thumping, the 'our boys' talk and the attacks on the evils of the other side and what it comes down to is a simple fact.

If the West had more resources (and more support at home) it probably could win eventually but the scepticism of the British public, lack of support from wiser heads in Europe and growing budgetary problems no longer give the Government the option of being in on the kill or leading from the front.

With an election on the way, what New Labour has to do is demonstrate that past investment was worthwhile in support of what will be an American victory - or ensure that it withdraws with dignity and honour long before it turns into a wider West Asian American quagmire.

A close reading of the Lecture tells us just how much Western objectives have changed from the heady days when liberal progressives thought that they could bring their much vaunted Enlightenment values, to Afghan women in particular, through the barrel of a gun.

The British and Soviet imperial histories are used by Miliband to demonstrate that the Afghans cannot be beaten into submission but have to be seduced into "a self-governing, self-policing but heavily subsidised Afghanistan, where the tribes balanced each other ..."

Ay, there's a rub. The British (who succeeded) and the Soviets (who failed) had an interest in heavy subsidy because the troubled country was a chaotic threat to contiguous interests whether the British hold over Indian wealth or Soviet determination to maintain order amongst its ethnic minorities.

The essence of such Imperial strategies was complicity in a protection racket - sufficient funds would be applied to keep the Afghans concerned with topping each other rather than interfering in neighbouring countries. So much for Enlightenment idealism!

But Why Us?

But what on earth is the interest of the United Kingdom, an island on the edge of another continent within a global trading system that scarcely touches these backwoods, in taking part in the levels of heavy subsidy that are undoubtedly at the heart of of Miliband's Grand Master Plan.

Of course, Miliband is not expecting the British to pay, he expects the electorates of the 'West' to pay, that is hard-pressed Americans and Europeans who have far more worries about bailing out Greece than about the baksheesh expectations of Afghan tribesman.

All this effort seems increasingly absurd when compared with the exposure of another island nation with a similar profile, Japan, operating a similar distance from the country concerned and with equal dependence on Gulf oil.

Unless British foreign policy makers are genuinely and insanely concerned with the preservation of neighbouring empires (Russia, China, India) from dissolution regardless of the effects on the national budget, there are only two motives for the expenditure of blood and gold by the Crown.

Neither can be spoken of in blunt terms because, if the British population understood what was being said, there might be a political reaction that could lose this Government its mandate.

Social Cohesion At Home

The first truth is not that terrorism might be imported into British cities from Afghanistan but if Afghanistan is not settled then the destabilisation of Pakistan and so of Kashmir really does threaten to bring sectarian war into British cities - and not necessarily just as Islamism.

What discomforts the British is that post-imperial mass immigration, promoted for economic and ideological reasons, and not discouraged by a New Labour Government that gains significant votes from these communities, would very soon be linked to violent social disorder.

The size and spread of the warring communities and their concentration in the poorest areas of our major post-industrial cities creates a nightmare scenario for the Crown - one where Enlightenment values crumble in a local competition for resources fuelled for profit by radical ideologues.

The link between terrorism and mass migration is one that has not been proved. Discussion has sometimes been silenced as 'racist' - but anyone who watches the push and pull between the poorest communities and their homelands and growing 'ressentiment' amongst indigenous rivals is concerned.

So, for this reason alone, both Crown and New Labour (indistinguishable in their concern for social order) have increased the number of authoritarian tools for social control and have pressed, under security advice, to get the rest of the West engaged in settling Afghanistan before the infection spreads.

When Miliband speaks of earlier British imperial settlements designed to protect British investment in India, it suggests that his settlement is required to avoid the real cost of that massive overseas empire - chaos in an aging urban-industrial structure with low wage populations whose allegiances are obscure.

The Burden Of History

A second 'real' reason for engagement with Afghanistan derives from another burden from history - in this case, recognition of strategic and economic dependence on the US. This is an old story that does not need to be told again here - it is about the necessary displacement of one empire by another.

The point is not that this has happened but that New Labour and the Crown have become the depressed victims of that history. Questions are being raised that directly affect British post-imperial strategy.

First, is the dominance of London as global centre (which is the central economic core of the transatlantic alliance) really in the interests of the British people as a whole?

Equally to the point, have the interests of Crown, City and Alliance become wholly detached from the interests of the nation in the light of the recent economic crisis? This is more salient when we consider the social order questions raised by our decaying urban-industrial infrastructure (see above!).

Our engagement in West Asia would appear to require taxing the population to sustain the interests of Crown, City and Alliance. The economic benefits from that bloc may be regarded as questionable looked at from a council estate in outer Manchester or amongst the small retailers of Guildford.

Second, much as the British like to preen and swagger about their world status, no different of course in this from the French, the question arises as to why we bother when most people are not nationalist in orientation in the traditional way and would much rather the quiet life without ideology or 'service'?

The Crown and conservative authoritarians of all parties may like 'Great Power Status' [GPS] but it is becoming increasingly costly. The tension between the costs of sustaining it and maintaining social cohesion become much more manifest as economic conditions worsen (as we noted some years ago).

GPS is sustained through the same sort of legerdemain that has put New Labour in control of the State through means that undermine the nation. In this case, Britain's 'destiny' as an independent power is being undermined by a determination to seek GPS under the wing of another power.

The Politics Of Confusion

Miliband's Lecture is intelligent and informative but he cannot raise these questions himself because in so doing he would undermine the very basis for New Labour's role which relies both on denial about post-imperial causes of social disorder and on promoting the illusion of GPS.

Afghanistan, far more than Iraq which was just a costly mistake with no long-lasting effects on national cohesion, pulls together all the internal contradictions within the New Labour project.

The desire to build votes on economic growth and full employment has created the conditions for social disorder that owe too much to accidents of history on the North West Frontier while its determination to strut for its right-wing vote on the world stage continues to turn the country into a poodle. 

In the long run, Afghanistan can be 'won'. The US might well be able to afford to settle a dowry for peace of sufficient size through its massive security budget but that settlement might be, for the British, a horribly expensive way to invest in maintaining social order in Britain's inner cities.

Many may ask why we lacked the courage to by-pass this war and just take our gold, put it into our troubled communities and save blood not only overseas but perhaps, one day, at home.

Short Note - Iraq

We note continued nervousness about the US pull-back from urban areas in Iraq. Half a million Iraqi police officers and a quarter of a million Iraqi military are set to take over from 131,000 US military.

The Iraqis (in general) want the Americans off their streets but, equally, they fear a great deal of violence before their Government is in a position to restore full order. There will be problems – the Iraqi forces are still under-equipped. Insurgents and gangsters are moving into the partial vacuum already.

Yet another car bomb (in Mosul on June 29th) killed 10, including six Iraqis. There were separate attacks in Kirkuk and Ramadi. Yesterday, a bomb in Kirkuk killed 30 and wounded 40 just as the US was completing its scheduled withdrawal.

In fact, much of the fear is media-driven and the Government is doing its best to reassure the public. It has even declared a national holiday.

Whatever we think of the origins and aims of the war, it is probable that Iraq has passed a milestone after six years of misery. Albeit with a bit more misery on the way there, it is now on the path to becoming a more or less stable national democracy.

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