Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: It’s the West that’s starting this new Cold War

It’s the West that’s starting this new Cold War
Russia’s belligerence is hardly surprisingAnatole Kaletsky 
Know your enemy ? a phrase coined by Sun Tzu, the Chinese military
strategist, 2,000 years ago ? is even more critical in diplomacy than it
is in warfare. As the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations
gathered in Germany last night for the annual G8 summit, the identity of
the enemy was pretty clear.
He was not, as might have been expected, George W. Bush. Nobody can be
bothered to talk to the White House any longer about Iraq and Iran, while
on climate change Washington has successfully created a diversion and
thwarted the German and British desire to make this the summit’s central
issue. Best of all, an alternative villain has suddenly upstaged the
hapless President Bush. Enter Vladimir Putin, the new global enemy No 1.
Casting Russia as the enemy suits everyone at this year’s summit. It
distracts attention from President Bush’s contempt for Europeans on
climate change and his geopolitical blunders. It helps Angela Merkel and
Tony Blair to disguise the failure of their Atlanticist diplomacy while
allowing Nicolas Sarkozy to sound tough, without being antiAmerican. It
gives all the European leaders at the summit a chance to “show solidarity”
with the EU’s newly admitted Eastern members without making any
concessions on the discriminatory economic and labour policies that will
keep these countries firmly in their place for decades ahead. And best of
all, from every nation’s standpoint, the starring role of villain is one
that President Putin himself craves.
Mr Putin faces a difficult transition from his present position as a
wildly popular czarist-style absolute ruler to some kind of power behind
the throne ? a kingmaker or political puppeteer possibly modelled on Deng
Xiaoping, of China, or Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, but with no real
parallel in Russian history. In managing this unprecedented transition,
nothing is more useful to Mr Putin than his image as the first national
leader since Stalin who could stand up for Russia’s interests against an
inherently hostile world. This is why all the EU’s complaints about
neo-imperialist bullying of Poland and Estonia, all the lectures from
President Bush about democracy and all the admonitions about human rights
from Mrs Merkel are water off a duck’s back to President Putin.
It’s Grrrrr8 (honest) 
As the G8 summit begins in Germany, Hugo Rifkind explains everything you
need to know – and lots of stuff you don’t 
Multimedia
Video: Our young man in Heiligendamm
Audio: Behind the scenes at the G8
Pictures: G8 summit
Background
Quotes: what Putin told The Times 
Blair reinvented the Middle Ages 
The West is starting this Cold War 
Save the planet: give to China 
Related Internet Links
Official site of the G8 summit Heiligendamm
Far from being intimidated, Mr Putin relishes and deliberately provokes
such “insults”, as in his interview this week with Western media, in which
he threatened to target his nuclear arsenal against Europe and
simultaneously joked that he was the “purest” democratic politician since
Mahatma Gandhi. Mr Putin must surely have expected the furious response
these statements provoked from the other summit leaders and from Western
public opinion, so it has to be assumed that he wanted to cast himself as
Global Public Enemy No 1.
But if Mr Putin is consciously redefining himself as the West’s enemy ?
and if he is doing this with the enthusiastic acclaim of the Russian
public ? then we must try to know this enemy, in accordance with the
advice of Sun Tzu.
Why is hostility to the West so popular in Russia? Let us try to look at
the West through Russian eyes. Despite all the past sentimental rhetoric
of Western politicians describing Russia as a friend and “strategic
partner”, US and European behaviour has consistently treated Russia more
as an enemy than an ally. Russia has been told it could never join Nato or
the EU and Mr Putin’s invitation to G8 summits is scant consolation for
the denial of WTO membership and the continuation of US trade sanctions
dating back to the Cold War. On human rights and extrajudicial
assassinations, Russia’s record may be deplorable, but its abuses pale in
comparison with those of Western friends such as Saudi Arabia and China,
not to mention President Bush’s “boil them in oil” ally, Uzbekistan.
But far more serious from the Russian standpoint than any diplomatic
conflicts is what the West has done to their country’s territorial
integrity. Ever since the first Bush Administration undermined Mikhail
Gorbachev by denying him the financial assistance of the International
Monetary Fund and then encouraged the dissolution of the Soviet Union
under Boris Yeltsin, the West has appeared, at least from Moscow’s
standpoint, to seize every opportunity to weaken, isolate and encircle
Russia.
Not only has Russia lost its Eastern European satellites, but the homeland
itself has been dismembered. No reasonable Russian could object to the
independence of Poland, Hungary and even the Baltic states, which were
forcibly annexed into the Soviet Union after the Second World War. But the
loss of the Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus and central Asia are a
different matter. These areas ? or at least large swaths of them ? were
integral parts of the Russian “motherland” long before Texas and
California belonged to the United States. For Russians, the separation
with Ukraine and Belarus in particular is at least as emotionally
wrenching as Welsh and Scottish independence would be to Britain or
Catalonian and Basque secession would be to Spain.
While Westerners see Russian resentment about these territorial losses as
a throwback to 19th-century imperialist thinking, consider how the process
might look when viewed from the Russian side. What Russians see is a
powerful and wealthy empire expanding steadily on their Western border and
swallowing all the intervening countries, first into the EU’s economic and
political arrangements and then into the Nato military structure. Consider
from the Russian standpoint the EU’s explicit vocation to keep growing
until it embraces every European country with the sole exception of Russia
itself, and the almost automatic Nato membership now granted to EU
countries. Is it so very unreasonable to view this EU-Nato juggernaut as
the world’s last remaining expansionist empire, or even the natural
successor to previous German and French expansions that were considerably
less benign?
Western politicians may ridicule such fantasies as Russian nationalist
paranoia. But why shouldn’t the Russians worry about Western armies and
missiles on their borders, when these contribute to a process of
territorial encroachment similar to what Napoleon and Hitler failed to
achieve by cruder means?
America and Europe, regardless of their warm words about Russia, are
treating it objectively as an enemy, taking every opportunity to cut it
down to size. After 15 years of this experience, is it really surprising
if the Russians, emboldened by their newfound oil wealth, now respond in
kind? In other words, it is not Russia but America and Europe that have
restarted the Cold War.
The West may well be right to treat Russia as a natural enemy ? that is
certainly the attitude in Estonia and Poland. But if we are going to treat
the Russians as enemies, let us at least try to see the world from their
point of view.
da
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article1896029.ece
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