First of all, note that there has long been a strand of US foreign policy that has remained viscerally hostile to Russia:
From Patrick Armstrong, analyst for the Canadian government, quoted in Untimely-Thoughts, an excellent newsletter on Russia.
There's always a standing bill of indictment against Russia, although the details continually change. In 2001 the Washington Post warned that Russia would default on debt repayments; the Kursk sinking prompted reflections on the "callous disregard for human life" of Russia's leadership (Knight 2000); in 1997 Kissinger was complaining about Russia's "refusal" to demarcate its borders; no Russian leader had ever left power voluntarily and neither would Yeltsin, warned Stephen Cohen in 1994. Most charges prove ephemeral or false - nuclear tests in Nova Zemlya, the Security Council as the "new Politburo", war over the Black Sea Fleet - but others come up again and again. Some charges have validity. The war in Chechnya was certainly very brutal. Putin has centralized power and tightened control over the media. But, when these charges appear on the bill of indictment, they appear without context.
(...)
While charging Putin with bringing back the "Soviet anthem" (Wall Street Journal, 2000), the fact that all the other state symbols were lifted straight from the Tsars was not mentioned. This is not argument, it is advocacy. The essence of the charge sheet style is that the conclusion determines the evidence. Take the everlasting assertion that Russia is naturally imperialist: this is the oldest of the charges - experts "knew" that Gorbachev would never leave Germany - and as time moves on, the accusation remains. The format is the same: Russia's so-called nostalgia for empire is asserted (Jonathon Eyal in 1993, Pipes in 1994 and 1998, George Tenet in 1997, Paul Goble 2000) and examples are filled in as needed: "democratic Georgia" today, the Baltics yesterday, Germany the day before. As the troops leave one country, another place is found to prove the point. The "energy weapon" is deployed against contumacious neighbors like Ukraine (but be careful not to mention that Gazprom is raising the price for "friends" like Armenia and Belarus, too). The charge predates Putin - in 1993 The Economist decided that Georgia's independence had been already snuffed out and the energy wars have been going on since 1991.
Rarely, however, is it pointed out that Russia's neighbors are more independent each year and that Russian troops are leaving them too. Or that while Ukraine needs Russian energy, Russia needs Ukrainian pipelines to move its gas to those who actually pay for it. The boot here is actually on both feet. "Imperialist Russia", it is clear, is a premise, not a conclusion. The repetitive bills of indictment have a cumulative effect - people forget the alarms that never came to pass but remember the underlying message that Russia is a menace. Why try to take an objective look at the whole of Russian reality when "traditional Russian imperialism" (Kissinger, 1997) is all you need to know? A great deal of opinion in the USA and the West has been shaped by the continual drum roll of warnings, accusations and indictments. Eventually the message gets stuck in: Russia is an enemy.
With Cheney's recent declarations, it appears that this strand of opinion is now again dominant in determining US policy.
It is not my intention to laud Putin's mixed record too much, and I'll stand by my earlier opinions that Putin is slowly reducing freedoms in Russia, and that the war in Chechnya, whatever the context and the appalling actions of some of the Chechens, is little short of genocide and needs to be condemned as such. I'll also restate my opinion that Putin and his cronies are looting the Russian public resources just as much as the oligarchs around Yelstin (if not more) - but are lucky that there is so much loot these days thanks to higher oil prices that they can both loot and redistribute enough to the population to keep it happy.
But the West record on the same topics is so lousy in recent years (Iraq, anyone? "Terrorism" laws shredding our civil rights in various countries? Berlusconi controlling all the media and passing laws favoring his businesses? Cronyism and corruption on a large scale at the Elysée Palace? etc...) that our governments are terribly hypocritical to say things to Putin today, especially after having cultivated him as "nash" (one of ours, a word with very strong meaning in Russian) not so long ago.
Whether it was the oil money or his policies, whether it is centralisation or dictature, Russia has at least undoubtedly moved from chaos to order in recent years, and regained some semblance of prosperity. What achievements can Messrs Berlusconi, Blair, Bush or Chirac claim in the same time period for their respective countries?
But this could all be the kind of silly posturing that politicians indulge in for domestic political reasons (after all, foreigners don't vote, and can conveniently be blamed for one's ills rather than one's policies). what makes it worrying is the context of a really ugly war of words that has been going on between Russia and Europe in recent weeks on the topic of energy. I've covered the various episodes of these spats in various diaries, so I'll just refer you to links here:
The marketistas want to break Gazprom
European energy liberalisation forbids gas deliveries to the UK!
UK protectionism threatens European gas supplies
Blair misses the protectionism meme
The new gas war
A few facts must be noted:
First of all, let us remember that the current war of words was not started by Russia, despite the evocation of the Russian-Ukrainian clash in January. I'll stand by my opinion that this clash demonstrated that Gazprom valued its reliability as a supplier more than whatever cash it gets out of Ukraine (none) - it restored supplies as soon as the clash with Ukraine interfered with its normal deliveries to Europe, and before a solution was found with the Ukrainians. I remain convinced that this clash had little to do with the relationship between Russia and Ukraine and everything with the muddy fights of a few people well placed in both countries over the gas loot - these are happening all the time, but for some reason, they got out of hand this time (my theory is that there was 3-way infighting on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides: Yuschenko/Tymoshenko/Yanukovich and Gazprom Old Guard/Sechin/Medvedev) and became a lot more public than usual, and some explanations for the public and the West had to be cooked up using the existing context.
Let us also note that the same energy wars went on throughout the 90s. Just google BTC, Itera, Chechnya bypass, Blue Stream, Ventspils, Majeiku refinery, BPS, etc... The short version of these wars is that Russia mostly lost the oil wars, and mostly won the gas wars, both for the same reason: reliability.
Oil & gas investments represent huge amounts put at risk for very long periods, and even the rich oil companies of the West need some basic level of certainty that they will get something out of it. Whoever can provide the best reliability in delivering - repeatedly, year after year - will be the preferred partner. On the oil side, Russia chose for a long time a "grab the loot" strategy, which to some extent reflected the fact that the industry was cut into pieces, ownership of assets was uncertain for a while, and all players tried to get their loot as quickly as possible, without really caring about the long term impact of such behavior. Thus Russia was avoided as much as possible as a transit route for pipelines from the Caspian area (thus the BTC pipeline, and the CPC, which goes through Russia, is not controlled by Transneft, the national monopoly); it was also generally avoided as an area for investment when other countries were more welcoming. On the gas side, Gazprom demonstrated its discipline and its strategic acumen in its longstanding policy of building a coherent and "exhaustive" pipeline system, including a growing number of export routes. Thus the Blue Stream pipeline to Turkey, which Gazprom build despite a massive US effort to kill it and push the competing (but unfinanceable) PSG pipeline from Turkmenistan, the Polish bit of the Yamal-Europe pipeline, and the smart neutralisation of Turkmenistan as a competitor. Above all, Gazprom has always been aware that it is a business where commitments are made in decades, and it has been a reliable counterparty to its clients and main suppliers (it has also helped Russia - and several of its neighbors - survive, literally, through the 90s). Banks know that, and have financed the company throughout the 90s, and even after the 1998 crash - and Gazprom has always focused on that bit: reliability, trustworthiness and long term relations based on trust.
Several things have changed today.
One is that in the current worldwide context of oil supply tightness, there are no longer many alternatives to Russia where to find oil, and the Western oil majors suddenly need access to Russia more (a lot more) than Russia needs their investments.
The other is the sudden move of the UK from net exporter to importer of oil and gas, and the apparent lack of readiness of the country for that event, which has already caused a few scares on the markets (with natural gas prices reaching the equivalent of 240$/boe) and led the Blair government on a massive hunt for scapegoats. France played that role, quite naturally, early on, but Russia now seems to have been selected as a more worthy enemy. Both the Ukrainian spat earlier this year, and the Centrica episode, seem to have motivated that choice. I also suppose that Russia's less than enthusiastic position viz. punishing Iran for its nuclear moves plays a role as well.
So in the past weeks, we've seen a relentless barrage of attacks on Russia and Gazprom, via several angles: the need for diversification of Europe's supplies (and the explicit threat to find other suppliers - how is it that when Gazprom says it will look for other clients, it's "blackmail", but when Europe seeks other suppliers, it's not worth commenting upon?), the need for Russia to open up its pipelines to third party exporters and its upstream sector for Western investors to bring their "superior" technology to help out increase production. The meme of Gazprom's declining production (which I claim Gazprom cultivates to avoid having to give too much gas at low prices inside Russia, and to thus claim higher prices and less taxes in its bilateral relationship with the federal government) has been grabbed with enthusiasm by the West as a way to justify investing in gas fields in Russia - and gaining access to the pipelines as a quid pro quo.
And now Dick "Guantanamo/Halliburton" Cheney comes up with his new cold war speech and his criticism of Gazprom's supposed power politics. New dimensions of chutzpah have been discovered in recent years...
No amount of posturing by Cheney or other administration officials will make uneconomic projects happen. However, pushing them hard, as Cheney seems to be doing, uses politicla capital, and pisses off the people/countries which are explictly labeleld as unreliable or unfriendly, and may pushe them, eventually, into choosing other options of their own, for pipelines or for other things (like policies re Iran).
The worry is that the heated talk of the recent weeks (described by the Economist as "sanctimonious by the Europeans, and resentful and threatening by the Russians", which I suppose is the fairest one can expect from the Economist) will create irreversible damage in a relationship that can only be broken at major cost to all parties.
Hopefully cooler heads will eventually prevail. The onus is on the West for now. I have one simple suggestion: get serious about energy conservation!
In the meantime, do not believe everything that Cheney (or his cronies in various think tanks) says about pipelines in the reigon; do not believe every announcement on "contracts", "pipelines", etc... that are made with stunning regularity in the press, but do worry, as should be customary by now, about the recklessness and arrogance of Cheney & co.
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