Re: Russian Far-Right Plans Anti-Immigrant Marches
On Oct 25, 2006, at 11:30 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
What, no accolades in the Washington Post for this manifestation of Russia’s anti-Putin civil society? Words fail me! ;)
That fucking idiot Thomas Friedman uncorks an anti-Putin rant in
today’s NYT. I love the way Putin makes people like TF fulminate, and
there’s not a goddamn thing they can do about him.
Doug
New York Times - October 25, 2006
The Really Cold War By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Berlin
The Berlin Wall fell almost 17 years ago. At the time, the future
seemed clear: The fall of the wall would unleash an unstoppable tide
of free markets and free people — and for about 15 years it did just
that. Today, though, when you stand where the Berlin Wall once stood
and look east, you see a countertide coming your way. It is a black
tide of petro-authoritarianism emanating from Russia, and it is
blunting the Berlin Wall tide of free markets and free people.
Why? Russia is a classic example of what I like to call “the First
Law of Petropolitics,” which posits that the price of oil and the
pace of freedom operate in an inverse relationship in petrolist
states — states with weak institutions and a high dependence on oil
for their G.D.P. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom
goes up. The day the Soviet Union collapsed the price of oil was near
$16 a barrel. And as the price of oil goes up the pace of freedom
goes down. Today, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, flush with
surging oil and gas profits, is crushing domestic opponents,
renationalizing major energy companies, throwing out Western human
rights groups and generally making himself the big man on campus in
Europe.
When Europeans tell you that they fear a new “cold war,” this time
they really are talking about the temperature — and the fear that
Russia, if it wanted to turn off the gas, could make Europeans very
cold. About 40 percent of Europe’s natural gas imports come from
Russia, and that is expected to grow to 70 percent by 2030.
With prices high, Russia has gone from the sick man of Europe to the
boss man. Russia is a having a much bigger impact on Western Europe
“with gas pipelines than it ever had with SS-20″ long-range nuclear
missiles, remarked the German foreign-policy expert Josef Joffe,
author of the smart book “Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of
America.”
“Ten years ago we thought Russia was out of it,” Mr. Joffe said. “We
knew it was going to come back. But suddenly, out of the blue, with
the rise in oil prices, it is back on stage, and this time it’s much
more skillful. The image we have of Russia is [the port of] Murmansk,
where the Russian fleet is rotting — but power comes in many forms.”
And the most popular form today is oil and gas.
Goodbye NATO, hello Citgo.
The other day, the BBC quoted a senior “E.U. insider” as saying of
European Union leaders: “You know what happens when they get in the
same room with Putin?” They all prostrate themselves “and say, ‘I
love you, Vladimir.’ ” The BBC was reporting about a tense summit
meeting last Friday in the Finnish town of Lahti. E.U. leaders
reportedly beseeched Mr. Putin to honor contracts with Western oil
companies, as well as to ease his crackdown on press freedoms, on
human rights groups in Russia and on Georgia, and to investigate the
murder of a crusading Russian journalist.
What the E.U. wants, a senior German official explained, is to be
able to invest in more Russian oil and gas drilling projects and
pipelines upstream, so that Russian and E.U. energy interests will be
so intertwined Russia will never consider turning off the gas. Mr.
Putin wants Gazprom, the giant Russian gas company, to be able to buy
into more downstream consumer operations in Europe. That way Russia
could dominate the industry from its oilfields all the way to the gas
meters of Berlin and Brussels. Right now, the two sides are in a
standoff.
“We cannot allow energy to divide Europe as communism once did,” José
Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, told The Financial
Times. But it is.
In fairness to Mr. Putin, turnabout is fair play. After the Soviet
Union collapsed and Russia was enfeebled, the U.S. and the E.U.
crammed NATO expansion down his throat. He’s now using petro-power to
push back. “Russia is very different from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia,”
remarked Clemens Wergin, an editorial writer at the German daily Der
Tagesspiegel. Russia has nukes and oil, he noted, and therefore has
the potential to play a much more domineering geopolitical role in
Europe.
German officials don’t really think Russia is about to turn off the
gas if it doesn’t get its way on some issue. After all, it never did
that during the old cold war, and Russia today is much more dependent
on Western markets. But still, centuries of uneasy relations between
Europe and Russia make German officials queasy about how dependent
they’ve grown on the Kremlin to heat their homes and offices. Queasy
or not, one thing they know for sure: Russia is back. The gas man
cometh.