A Closer Look At Russia
Yuri Fedotov, Russian Embassy, London
has shed light on Putins very abrasive posturing over the proposed US missile interception system in Eastern Europe. He states that Russia is threatened by it – involving the siting of radar stations and rockets in eastern Europe – because: “This radar station will cover part of Russia, or potentially could cover a part of Russia, which is now not covered by any surveillance systems . . . That is something which is going to change military and strategic balance.â€
Well, of course. I have wondered why Bush felt it was so necessary to put in systems that would have only the minimal capability of stopping a maximum of 10 missiles from Iran. For all the expense of such systems, billions of dollars, with no guarantee that nuclear warheads from Iran wouldn’t get through anyway, we would be far better off to fuse the earth into glass over Irans nuclear facilities and be done with it. It would be much cheaper, no one would fault us for it or attack us for it except the Iranians themselves, and Bush has said repeatedly that he would never allow the Iranians to have nukes.
So why do this? Bush is trying to keep the Russians boxed up in a corner. Exactly why, I don’t know… yet. But Putin, for all his apparent ham-handedness, refuses to allow it. The increase in energy prices has brought their collapsed economy back to a position of power. The people aren’t prospering but the government is, and Putins “Russia first” attitude is putting new pride back into them.
Our government has not been much of a friend to Russia since the collapse of the Union, and our lack of cooperation is now a source of complaint for them. Yet the plain fact is that Russia has never been much of a friend to us either. We have always been competitors, sometimes cooperating but usually not, so it should be no shock to anyone that they prefer to see us in a hostile light. As we see them.
We should remember that Russia is twice the size of the US and has vast oil reserves that we don’t have. Russia is once again a rising star while the US may be declining. They also have their own islamic terrorism problems and in that regard can be considered our allies. We might do well to back off of that anti-missile deal and set it up in Azerbaijan as Putin proposed or else in Iraq, and stop creating tensions in Eastern Europe.
Russia could do the same by not building nuclear power plants in Iran that Iran doesn’t need. Iran has vast power reserves of oil. The nuke plants have only one purpose and that’s aggression. Perhaps that’s the strategy. They stop building the nuke plants and we stop building the radar stations. Sounds fair to me. After all, we wouldn’t need the radar if they didn’t have nukes.
June 11th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Good analysis. One has to wonder, if the situation was reversed and Russia was planning a system in Mexico to counter a threat from an anti-russian state, if the US would simply accept their assurances.
Some would say the Russians are not being reasonable because Bush has offered to cooperate with them. Yeh right. I have worked in defence long enough (and have seen documents on export controls only recently) to know bullshit intended for public consumption when I see it. There is no way that the Bush administration would share enough on the technology to reassure the Russians that they were not the intended target and not a hope in hell they would let them have any say over when and in what circumstances any counter missiles would be launched.
As for Iran, the chance of those nutjobs getting a credible nuclear missile system does no bear thinking about. No option should be ruled out, including first nuclear strike.