www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,2202715,00.html - Russian democracy in action
nation.ittefaq.com/issues/2007/11/01/news0846.htm - Russia cozies with Iran
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article692157.ece - Russia arms Venezuela
www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070306201334.qse2sfab&show_article=1 - And they're keeping it quiet
www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=11796 - But the people still "love" Putin!
Not a middle eastern country, but probably the most important coming conflict is with Russia. Russia has been slipping further and further from a sane democratic super power under the authoritarian direction of Vladimir Putin. (Is anyone with the first name Vladimir not evil?) At the same time it's been allying itself with countries that have been on this administration's shit list since the beginning. Iran and Argentina have been it's biggest targets. Now what is it that Russia could possibly want from those two countries that it's willing to sign arms deals with them? Maybe the same reason that the US has been kissing the Saudi royal family's asses for years.
The lines are beginning to be drawn, between groups of countries, over oil rights. Russia is "claiming" Venezuela and Iran, as well as attempting to claim the arctic oil reserves as their own. The US maintains tenuous relationships with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and has just about made Iraq into a US principality. Why else would we be building permanent bases there as well as the largest embassy complex ever constructed? The lines aren't necessarily being drawn because a war is imminent, or even that likely. We're too far away from oil running out to be worried about wars starting because of it. However, we are at the point where oil production can't keep up with the expansion of industrialism. China and India being added to the world's oil demand is straining this planet's capacity to keep our cars running.
The threat with Russia in the present though, is that they're turning back into the Russia that we were in the cold war with, and isolating them for dealing with the countries we've designated as evil will only strain relations even further. It's unlikely that the US and Russia will ever be very good allies, but it used to be that world opinion regarded Russia as the crazy ones, and the US was the good guys. After the last few years though, the world is starting to regard the US as crazy, and Russia as slightly less crazy. The terrible part about this is that if the US were still in good standing we could have some sort of influence on the state of affairs in Russia, but since we can't get any countries to follow our lead lately, what can be done? Someone needs to step in and keep Russia from becoming a de facto dictatorship again, for the sake of it's citizens and for the sake of the world. It's too bad we're STILL bogged down in Iraq.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
There's some crazy stuff going down. It definitely looks like we're drawing alliances around oil. Are we pretty much the biggest oil-monger (consumption-wise) out there with Russia trying to be the oil upstart? Where does the majority of the EU stand in all this? What about Dubai? I saw a special on them on 60 minutes, it seems like Dubai (ok, well, the UAE... but seriously, it's Dubai) has much to gain by keeping things kosher between the US and Iran. They have so much frickin' money invested from both sides that a split could put them in a very precarious spot. Who are the major consumers of all this oil and where are all the allegiances gonna fall?
Also, what I'm really curious about is how this is going to affect the presidential elections and how the incoming president will affect this situation. I feel these are two distinct questions that are tightly coupled, but with answers that could be very different. Is the general voting public going to be smart enough to vote with foreign policy in mind? George Bush has definitely fallen out of favor, but that's only because this war has no end in sight with him. I think that if the war in Iraq had been more effective, and we were able to set up our own version of democracy there with less insurgency, that Americans would be perfectly happy. The rest of the world would still be pissed off at us, but Americans would be happy. It seems that a lot of our populace has no problem sending a big middle finger to the rest of the world, and that troubles me about this upcoming election. It won't be difficult to do a better job than Bush at managing the war, but we need to be more farsighted than that. We need to have candidates who are opposed to the war because they don't want us to be seen as war-mongering imperialists, not just because they don't want us to throw money & troops into a black-hole of desert.
To the second point of how will the president affect the situation, I think this one is still up in the air. I have no doubt that it will take a tremendous effort to repair the blemishes that this administration has put upon our great nation. I truly hope that the candidates who earn their party's respective nominations are up for this challenge.
I don't have any answers. I know little about the candidates right now, but I know what I'm looking for in a candidate. I almost always favor a democrat over a republican, but if I get the impression that the democratic champion doesn't have a vision for the foreign policy, I'll vote for whoever I think can get us out of this mess. Things aren't quite looking dire, but it's not a stretch to say that if things continue to progress down the line we're going, we're not too far from World War: War III or some other major conflict, and I don't even think that could be generations away. With the way things are going, it could be much sooner.
A lot of these countries really have no choice but to team up against us... the US has chosen to take an extremely aggressive antagonistic stance against Venezuela largely because they refuse to privatize their oil, and more justifiably against Iran. I think it's understandable that Russia would naturally try to capitalize on this by taking advantage of our mistake (after all, we'd do the same thing in their position). Basically, it all boils down to the fact that we largely created the situation we're in regarding those countries. We pushed them away, so Russia snapped them up.
That's one of the reasons I think our standing with those countries can be reversed, given intelligent leadership over a reasonable period of time... those countries are not irrational actors, we just need to be smart and open to diplomacy and I'm confident the situation can improve (especially while the US is as economically influential as it currently is).
I think the EU will be a very positive force, because they're fairly close to the US but are more willing to engage in diplomacy with countries with which they have disputes.
However, the one country I worry most about is China. Their economy is growing at an ungodly rate while consuming massive quantities of oil; they're really the only country that could conceivably challenge America's economic dominance anytime soon. I suspect that whatever happens with China will dwarf anything that is going on with any other countries... looking farther into the future, I can imagine two sides. On one side, US and allies, and on the other, China and allies. And the Chinese government is even more authoritarian than Russia's, from what I understand....
I agree for the most part with both you guys, few quick points:
-yes, the chinese government is much more oppresive than russia's. but if we look the other way long enough, they may catch up
-the EU realized long ago that they couldn't count on cheap oil forever and began working on alternatives, so they aren't faced with the same tough choices that the US currently is. Besides, the conglomerate is too complicatedly bureaucratic to do something like start a war.
- the thing I'm looking for most in the next president is a good energy policy. We'll never be able to divest ourselves from the Middle East until we don't need their oil any more. As long as that imbalance exist relations are always going to be strained, though they can definitely be repaired to where we aren't talking about going to war with just about all of them.
Post a Comment