Stratfor, so some salt might be needed, but still interesting. By Peter Zeihan
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his anointed successor, Dmitri Medvedev, were in Bulgaria on Jan. 17. The point of the trip was to put the crowning touch on a Russian effort to hook Europe into Moscows energy orbit. After a touch of bitter rhetoric about how Russia and Bulgaria were doomed to be partners, Putin agreed to grant equal rights to the South Stream natural gas pipeline Moscow hopes to lay through Bulgaria. Yet the tension of the meeting and the concessions that Putin had to make simply to get permission are symptomatic of a broad unraveling of Russian foreign policy toward Europe.
The Russian Scheme
Russia often has had a love-hate relationship with Europe. Dating back to the time of the czars, Moscow has had to aim for a mix of economic integration and military intimidation to make its voice heard. In the aftermath of the Cold War and the degradation of the Red Army, the military intimidation factor has largely fallen away, leaving economics as the primary method of impacting Europe. In this, Russia has forces at its disposal every bit as useful as Soviet tank divisions. Cold War-era infrastructure provides the 27-member European Union with roughly one-quarter of the natural gas and oil it consumes. Such dependence might not be sufficient to force European deference, but it certainly guarantees that Europe will hear Russia out.
Natural gas is unique among the various industrial and energy commodities. The combination of its gaseous nature and the sheer bulk that is required to power large economies (the European Union uses more than half a trillion cubic meters of the stuff a year) means that it can only be efficiently transported via pipeline. While oil and coal and alumina and wheat and platinum can all be loaded into trucks, rail cars and tankers allowing any producer to supply any consumer natural gas can travel only along existing pipeline networks. Canada therefore only supplies the United States and Russia only supplies former Soviet republics, Turkey and Europe. This contained relationship gives Russia leverage in a way that its mineral and oil wealth do not. And so it is here that the Europeans have tried with some success to slice through the ties that bind.
Putin has sought to strengthen this energy leverage via two pipeline projects in particular. The two natural gas lines Nord Stream, which would run under the Baltic Sea from St. Petersburg to Germany; and the aforementioned South Stream, which would run under the Black Sea from near Novorossiysk to Bulgaria would increase the European dependency on Russian natural gas from 25 percent to 35 percent of its total consumption.
Economically, neither of these projects makes sense. Building long underwater pipelines to Europe a region with which the former Soviet Union shares a land connection is simply asinine; landlines typically cost less than a third of their underwater equivalents. Additionally, Nord Stream would be the worlds longest underwater natural gas pipeline and South Stream the deepest.
But the Russians did not plan these projects with profitability in mind having tripled their natural gas export prices since 2000, they have profit aplenty. Instead, they are thinking of the Americans. The Kremlins Cold War mantra has long been that if the Europeans can be neutralized, then American influence can be purged from Europe. Ergo, American presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan have opposed (explicitly or not) any expansion of trade and energy links between Europe and Russia. And there also is the minor detail of Russia hating to involve transit states such as Belarus and Ukraine that are able to siphon off Russian energy en route to hard-currency-paying Europeans.
Given the political nature of these projects, then, the numbers have always been a touch wacky. The Russians have underestimated the costs of both of the natural gas lines to a humorous degree (likely by a factor of four or more), they lack the technological ability to build the lines themselves and they have insisted that the Europeans foot the bills. Specifically they expect ENI to pay for South Stream, and BASF, Gasunie and E.On to cover Nord Stream. Topping it off, they expect themselves not the countries on which the pipes will lie or the companies that finance and build them to own the projects when they are completed.
The European Response
The Europeans certainly exchanged some worried looks when these projects were proposed and Russia started assembling consortia to work on them. But in January 2006 an event happened that galvanized European action to wean the Continent off of Russian energy. A natural gas pricing dispute with Ukraine resulted in a brief suspension of deliveries to Europe (Russian natural gas deliveries to Europe currently transit Ukraine and Belarus). Russia attempted to leverage this energy crisis to force the Europeans to back Russian policy in Ukraine. Specifically, Moscow wanted Europe to repudiate Ukraines Orange Revolution against Russias preferred Ukrainian government and recognize Russian suzerainty in the former Soviet Union.
The strategy backfired and sparked intense interest across Europe in diversifying sources of petroleum and reducing total demand. European states and firms launched alternative supply lines, rafts of terminals were built to import natural gas shipped by tanker in more expensive liquefied form, a new fleet of nuclear reactors were commissioned, and the European Union adopted ambitious alternative energy and conservation programs (which incidentally dovetailed nicely with Europes anti-greenhouse-gas plans). The formal European goal is now to reduce total energy consumption by 20 percent with 20 percent of the remaining total coming from alternative sources by 2020. The EU states are still squabbling over who needs to bear what specific burdens, but there is no disagreement as to the goal or the reasons it exists in the first place.
There are two questions remaining.
The Question of Time
First, how long will it be until the Russians realize that their energy tool is no longer sharp? The answer is, longer than you might think.
The Russians have persevered in their pursuit of these projects despite increasingly obvious signs that the Europeans not only are not interested in the projects, they are not interested in the Russians. In part it is because, if Moscows plan were realized, it would be a very good plan indeed, as it would harness Europe irrevocably to Russia.
But mostly the lack of realization is because of Russias historical blind spot. Russias wide-open geography means that it has few barriers to invasion. Consequently, Russian history is one of occasional foreign occupation, which has resulted in a culture that mixes xenophobia, bitterness, persecution and a sense of entitlement in equal measure. This idea of we have suffered so much so you should do what we say a sort of superiority complex based on an inferiority complex clouds Russian strategic thinking and contributes to the seeming inability of the Kremlin to sense that the Chinese are stealing Central Asia from under the Russian nose.
It also explains why the Russians have not realized that the Europeans are moving away from them in as expeditious manner as feasible. The European reactions to Russian entreaties on these natural gas projects can best be summated as humoring the Russians. Few states want an out-and-out breach in their relations with Moscow, which could result in an actual and immediate energy cutoff before the Europeans are prepared to sever economic ties. So they have been taking advantage of Russias cultural blind spot while quietly developing alternatives.
This is doubly true for firms such as E.On and Gasunie, which supposedly are involved in consortia to build the projects. All are key purchasers of Russian energy exports and have found it easier to feign support than to be bluntly honest and so risk losing reliable deliveries of Russia natural gas. The one possible exception might be ENI, which is desperate for any source of natural gas to maintain its market position in Italy. But even here, it is far from clear that a single firm even one as large as ENI can shoulder realistically the massive burden of financing and building a project as questionable as South Stream by itself.
Years from now, Putins Jan. 17 trip to Bulgaria will likely be seen as the turning point in the European-Russia power balance, because that is when the humoring broke down. As Putin was en route to Bulgaria, Sofia insisted that, should South Stream come about, it will be Sofia not Moscow that holds a majority share in the portion on Bulgarian territory. A compromise a 50-50 ownership split was ultimately struck, simply because there is little Moscow can do to punish Bulgaria without deeply damaging its own interests. Bulgaria does not border Russia (or any former Soviet republic) and since it is a transit state for Russian natural gas to third countries, it cannot simply be cut off.
Bulgaria is hardly the bravest or most powerful of the EU states. It also is not among the crop that has done the most to diversify its energy consumption away from Russian sources. Consequently, it stands to reason that the nod-and-smile approach that has dominated European attitudes toward all things Russian is starting to crack. In the first 10 months of 2007 alone, total European demand for natural gas already dipped sharply, according to International Energy Agency data reversing a 50-year upward trend.
Add in increased alternative supplies that are not merely prospective (such as the Nord and South Streams), but actually under construction within three years Europe will have established alternatives for at least two-thirds of the natural gas Russia currently supplies and Russias energy grip on Europe is slackening quickly.
In short, Europe is reorienting its entire energy sector to eliminate the Russian factor. This is allowing the Europeans to take a firmer line on Russia in other areas as well. For example, on Jan. 17 the European Union gave Ukraine the green light to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). Until recently the Europeans had expected Ukraine under a pro-Russian government to join the WTO at the same time as Russia, so the Europeans played softball with the Russians in accession negotiations. But now that a pro-Western coalition has returned to power in Kiev, and since a pro-Western Ukraine will have the ability to block Russian accession on its own, the Europeans sense an opportunity to pry Ukraine out of Russias economic orbit and lash it into Europes. Consequently European negotiators have switched to hardball tactics on economic issues ranging from timber to transport, pushing back yet again serious efforts to bring Russia itself into the WTO.
Such isolation is far more damning than it sounds. According to the European Commission, if energy is shorn from Russian-European trade, then the new (much reduced) total value of that trade shrinks to an amount equal to that of the European Unions trade with Iceland, a country with fewer than half a million people.
The Question of Response
That brings us to the second question. What will the Russians do about it?
For Russia, the challenge is not about the lost income between rainy day funds and currency reserves, Moscow has socked away nearly $700 billion but lost influence. Russias other exports, primarily metals, minerals and weapons, still fetch a pretty penny and put Russian fingers in pots the world over, but none grant it influence where it truly matters: in Europe.
Russia faces a near future in which the economic might of Europe will reinforce the geopolitical ambitions of the United States. Washingtons desire to whittle Russia back to a more manageable size is nothing new, but few realize that Brussels has its own ambitions. The Europeans would like to expand their economic reach into the bulk of the territory between the EU border and Moscow, as well as into the Caucasus. Europe does not see this as an imperialist venture, but simply as the natural order of things. The Russians, of course, see the world through a different lens, and European plans would be even more damaging in the long run to Russian interests than will American efforts, as they would make these border territories not only politically unreliable, but rather like the Baltics: firmly integrated into a rival system.
If economic tools no longer are relevant, Russia will be forced to fall back on political and military tactics, including:
Military intimidation of the Baltics and Finland.
Reunion with Belarus and a return of the Red Army to the Polish border.
Overt intervention in the Russian-speaking portions of Ukraine.
Active and public participation in Georgias secessionist conflicts, both to block European influence and to disrupt some of those alternate energy supplies.
Support for Europes various secessionist regions.
None of these options is clean and easy, and all are laden with consequences. Two of those consequences are critical enough to warrant mention here. First, any action from this list would rejuvenate NATO to the point that a Western military response, likely resulting in a new containment strategy, would be a foregone conclusion. Second, a renewed Russian confrontation with the West would certainly provide ample opportunity for China to make inroads into Central Asia and the Russian Far East, a region where Russias own intelligence services warn that Chinese squatters already might constitute the majority of the population. Yet with Russias economic toolkit impotent, such options are all that remain before the Kremlin.
Russias best hope is to recognize, before it is too late, that the tide is irrevocably turning. But Moscow faces one other complication in wrestling with the changing geopolitical reality one that could critically delay an adjustment in strategies: itself.
Though Putin is undoubtedly the man in charge, he is not the only one with ambition. His inner circle is split roughly in half by a clan war between Vladislav Surkov and Sergei Ivanov. Both are loyal to Putin, but their battles have absorbed the majority of the states ability to deal with any issue. While the two overlords clash, the Europeans make ever-greater strides toward freeing themselves from dependence on Russian energy, steadily closing the window of opportunity for the Russians to adjust.
And when that window closes, Russia will face a world in which the United States no longer is consumed with all things Middle Eastern and the Europeans no longer are afraid of all things Russian.
#2
As you say, salt to taste, but this does explain why pulling all US troops out of Europe as a punishment for political disagreements is not in the best interests of the US...
#3
See PRAVDA > RUSSIA, ISLAND OF STABILITY, MAY SAVE THE WORLD FROM GLOBAL CRISES. But-t-t, Russ Gold + Currency Reserves is only approxi US$500.0Bilyuhn, which may NOT be enough to save the USA proper. Given the present US financial meltdown on Wall Street [read - inflationary effects vv US dollar], the true price of oil-per-barrel may NOT even be US$100.0 or even US$50.0.
Without even knowing it, Egypt helped Israel on Wednesday to complete the disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
While the 2005 withdrawal included the evacuation of Israeli military personnel and settlers from the Palestinian territory, Israel and Gaza have remained interlocked ever since due to the Palestinian dependency on Israel for electricity, food, medical supplies and fuel.
Egypt's decision to open the Rafah crossing allowed around 300,000 Palestinians - almost a quarter of the entire population of Gaza - to enter Egypt and stock up on goods made scarce by the blockade Israel imposed on the Strip following last week's Kassam bombardment of Sderot. While Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said he opened the crossing for Gazans since they were "starving due to the Israeli siege," what he did proved to the world that his country is perfectly capable of caring for the Palestinians when it comes to food and medical care.
On Wednesday afternoon, senior defense officials responsible for overseeing the crossings into the Gaza Strip and supplying the Palestinians there, convened to analyze the consequences of Mubarak's decision. "By going into Egypt, Hamas loses its claim that it is under siege by Israel," one of the participants said.
The idea to completely shut down the crossings between Israel and Gaza is not new and has been debated in various forums within the Israeli defense establishment over the past year. Proponents of the proposal argued it would grant Israel more freedom to operate against the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza. The opponents claimed it would bring Israel an unprecedented level of international criticism. Wednesday's events and particularly Mubarak's decision to open a floodgate into his country for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, demonstrated that there are alternatives to Israel when it comes to being Gaza's provider.
Up until the restrictions clamped on the crossings late last week, Israel was responsible for facilitating the daily transfer of food, medical supplies, fuel, gasoline and other necessities into Gaza. Israel was responsible for coordinating the transfer of the goods with the various international organizations - UNRWA, United Nations World Food Program, World Health Organization and more. Israel was also responsible for allowing sick Palestinians to travel to Israeli hospitals for treatment and for supplying more than 70 percent of Gaza's electricity.
All of this was being done while Kassam rockets pounded the western Negev. Egypt's decision to open its border shows that Israel has an alternative.
HMMMM, starting to wonder iff an Eyptian "great game" trifecta = land grab agz Israel, PA has started, as EGypt has enuff probs wid the MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD???
Why is the Middle East so at odds with modern life, laggard in everything from literacy to standard of living, from military prowess to political development?
A profound new book by Philip Carl Salzman, professor at McGill University, with the deceptively plain title Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Prometheus), offers a bold and original interpretation of Middle Eastern problems.
An anthropologist, Salzman begins by sketching out the two patterns of rule that historically have dominated the Middle East: tribal autonomy and tyrannical centralism. The former pattern, he argues, is distinctive to the region and key to understanding it. Tribal self-rule is based on what Salzman calls balanced opposition, a mechanism whereby those Middle Easterners living in deserts, mountains, and steppes protect life and limb by relying on their extended families.
This immensely intricate and subtle system boils down to (1) each person counting on paternal relatives (called agnates) for protection and (2) equal-sized units of agnates confronting each other. Thus, a nuclear family faces off against another nuclear family, a clan faces a clan, and so on, up to the meta-tribal level. As the well-known Middle Eastern adage sums up these confrontations, "I against my brother, I and my brothers against my cousins, I and my brothers and my cousins against the world."
On the positive side, affiliation solidarity allows for a dignified independence from repressive states. Negatively, it implies unending conflict; each group has multiple sworn enemies and feuds often carry on for generations.
Tribal autonomy has driven Middle Eastern history, as the great historian Ibn Khaldun observed over six centuries ago. When a government faltered, large tribal confederations would form, leave their arid badlands and seize control of the cities and agricultural lands. Having seized the state, tribes exploited their power unabashedly to forward their own interests, cruelly exploiting their subject population, until they in turn faltered and the cycle started anew.
Salzman's tour de force lies in updating Ibn Khaldun, demonstrating how the dual pattern of tribal self-rule and tyrannical centralism continues to define life in the Middle East, and using it to explain the region's most characteristic features, such as autocracy, political mercilessness, and economic stagnancy. It accounts, likewise, for the war of annihilation against Israel and, more generally, Islam's "bloody borders" the widespread hostility toward non-Muslims.
The dual pattern even explains key aspects of Middle Eastern family life. The imperative to aggregate more agnates than one's neighbors, Salzman argues, means developing tactics to outnumber their male progeny. This has several implications:
* Marrying one's daughters to cousins, as a way for the family to benefit from their fertility.
* Practicing polygyny, so as to benefit from the fertility of multiple women.
* Scrutinizing other families' females, hoping to catch them in an immoral act, thereby compelling their men-folk to kill them and forfeit their fertility.
This last point suggests that balanced opposition largely accounts for the well-known Middle Eastern custom of "honor killing," whereby brothers murder sisters, cousins murder cousins, fathers murder daughters, and sons murder mothers. Significantly, the woman's indiscretions are tolerated within the family and lead to murders almost only when they become known outside the family.
More broadly, balanced opposition means the Middle East lacks abstract principles by which to measure actions "against general criteria, irrespective of the affiliation of particular actors." Instead, intense particularism requires a family member to support a closer relative against a farther one, regardless of who may be at fault. Tribesmen and subjects, not citizens, populate the region. That most Middle Easterners retain this us-versus-them mentality dooms universalism, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. Trapped by these ancient patterns, Salzman writes, Middle Eastern societies "perform poorly by most social, cultural, economic, and political criteria." As the region fails to modernize, it falls steadily further behind.
It can advance only by breaking the archaic system of affiliation solidarity. "This is possible not through the replacement of traditional groups by newly conceived groups [such as political parties], but by the replacement of groups by individuals." Individualism will make headway among Middle Easterners, however, only when "what they are for is more important than whom they are against."
That fundamental change may take decades or even centuries to accomplish. But Salzman's deep analysis makes it possible to understand the region's strange affliction and to identify its solution.
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01/24/2008 16:42 ||
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#1
That fundamental change may take decades or even centuries to accomplish.
I don't know... I think enough ACID in the drinking water would rather quickly brake down even this tribal mindset..
Okay, it might totally break down their minds but is that a bad outcome or different from the current status?
The failure of Islamic states to incorporate the Enlightenment's advances in thought has caused their stagnation, if not decline, over the last several centuries. In contrast, the incorporation of Enlightenment and democratic principles into Western governance has resulted in history's most rapid improvement in the human condition. Only those Muslim countries that have embraced, in some fashion, Western principles of democracy, free markets, property rights, tolerance, and the rule of law have prospered. Most Arab states refuse. Bernard Lewis, perhaps the doyen of Middle East studies in the Western world, explained, "By all indicators from the United Nations, the World Bank, and other authorities, Muslim countriesin matters such as job creation, education, technology, and productivitylag ever further behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind the more recent recruits to Western style modernity, such as Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore." All majority Muslim countries except Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Turkey, which have recently adopted significant free market and democratic reforms, rank in the bottom half of world productivity; of the rest, only Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh reach the third quartile. According to the World Bank, the average per capita income of all majority Muslim countries collectively is less than half of the average for the globe. Only Kuwait approaches the global average life expectancy; all other Muslim majority states lag in the bottom half of the world in this important measure of health.
Jihadis thrive in such stagnated conditions. This leads to negative annuity: Jihadism both grows amid stagnation and fuels stagnation. It accelerated coincident with the European Enlightenment and the relative decline of the Muslim Middle East. At its core, jihadism is a violent rejection of many of the fundamental principles of the European Enlightenment. Democracy, free markets, tolerance and freedom of religion, secular government, and separation between the religious, the political, and the individual spark religious fury. It is no coincidence, then, that jihadis, under the banner of cleansing their religion of evil Western influence, have focused their attentions on the United States, the clearest manifestation of the European Enlightenment today. They will continue to threaten Western civilization until they are checked.
The Islamists could improve their countries by instituting free markets and even ensuring property rights. But they have to stop at freedom of religion, which means no freedom of thought and no secular government. We see that problem with Malaysia, which is following the free market model, even having some success with it, but keeps falling back into the master religion-subject peoples model that will eventually push them back into the cesspool of theocracy. It's pretty notable that the engine driving Malaysia is the non-Malay population -- the Chinese and the Indians -- and that special provisions have to be made to "empower" the 60 percent majority religiously primitive natives.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
