Moscow signals place in new world order

Guardian UK
The news that an arms race may be underway once more between Washington and Moscow has brought back some unpleasant memories, but it is also a pointer to a more complicated future.

The Kremlin's threat to counter US missile defence installations in eastern Europe is a sign that Russia will no longer acquiesce in a Pax Americana.

What seemed in the west like a post cold-war honeymoon in the nineties is remembered more as a rape by Moscow's new leaders. In their eyes Russia was taken advantage of at a moment of economic weakness by Washington, London and a band of unscrupulous Russian oligarchs. A new Russian foreign policy, published by the government in recent days makes it clear that Moscow believes the era of American hegemony is now over.

"The myth about the unipolar world fell apart once and for all in Iraq," the review says. "A strong, more self-confident Russia has become an integral part of positive changes in the world."

The policy document is an elaboration of an anti-American polemic delivered two months ago by Vladimir Putin to a roomful of shocked western diplomats in Munich. "The Munich speech may be an event ... we look back to and say: that's when everything changed, but we should have seen it coming," said Cliff Kupchan, a former US state department official now at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Around the world, Putin's Russia has been serving notice for some time it is prepared to challenge US leadership of the international community. It is beginning to push back hard against missile defence and Nato's eastward expansion. It has resisted tough sanctions against Iran, and so far refused to go along with a UN-brokered plan to hand Kosovo autonomy. Moscow is also signalling it wants to be treated as a serious player in the Middle East, meeting Hamas officials at a time they are being ostracised by the US and western Europe.

While there are cold war echoes in the Russian rhetoric over missile defence and in the intractability of some of the disputes in the UN security council, there are more differences than similarities between today's friction and the constant rivalry of the Soviet era.

For one thing, disputes are no longer played out against a backdrop of mutually assured destruction. Most US and Russian intercontinental nuclear missiles are pointing at each other, but they are not on a hair-trigger. Nor are the two countries engaged in a global ideological struggle. Washington may be in the throes of intellectual ferment over the Bush doctrine, of defeating extremism by exporting democracy, but the Putin doctrine is by contrast, an exercise in pragmatism. It stresses the importance of national sovereignty and the primacy of the UN in resolving disputes. The common theme is Moscow's demand for its views to be taken into account.

The roots are economic, and they reach back into the era of Boris Yeltsin, when an impoverished Russia offered itself as a eager junior partner to the west. That period is seen by the Kremlin occupants as a national humiliation. "What drives Putin's Russia is an obsession forged in the nineties," said one diplomat. "They detest its instability and the weakness it brought to Russia."

Soaring oil and gas prices have transformed the environment. Russia is no longer a debtor nation. A new self-assuredness was on show when the Russians hosted the G8 meeting at St Petersburg in 2006. "Suddenly, they had all the right suits, watches and the right cars," said a western official who was there.

Along with all the trappings of western affluence came a new determination that Russia would not be absorbed by the west. The Yeltsin government toyed with the idea of joining the European Union, but that idea is now dead. In an article to mark the EU's 50th anniversary, Mr Putin stated openly that Russia has "no intention of either joining the EU or establishing any form of institutional association with it".

Moscow's relationship with Europe is now defined by its role as the continent's oil and gas supplier. Its tactics have been those of a giant corporation seeking to maximise its market power. Rather than deal with the EU as a whole, Russia has negotiated individual deals with different European countries - agreeing with Germany the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic, and the extension of another gas pipeline to Hungary. Moscow has thus undermined the EU's communal efforts to reduce its dependence on Russia by bringing Caspian gas through Turkey.

After Moscow turned off the gas tap to Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, there are fears that it will ultimately try to translate its market power over Europe into a new political hegemony. But Dmitri Trenin, a former Russian military strategist, argues those fears misunderstand the Putin era. Russia, he says, is simply striving to extract maximum profits from its customers.