Putin's speech at Munich conference

I meant to blog about this earlier. Last week Russian President Vladimir Putin made a speech at a security conference in Europe which NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer described, in the most diplomatic words possible, as 'disappointing and unhelpful'. According to a BBC report Putin claimed,

The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres - economic, political and humanitarian, and has imposed itself on other states," he said.

It was a formula that, he said, had led to disaster: "Local and regional wars did not get fewer, the number of people who died did not get less but increased. We see no kind of restraint - a hyper-inflated use of force.

Not surpisingly, the talk afterward has been of the 'new Cold War'. Ariel Cohen writes about 'Confronting Putin's Push' noting the Russian plan to spend $189 billion over the next five years on arms which sounds like a lot but should be taken with a large grain of salt. There've been half a dozen major reform and rearmament plans for the Russian Army since the collapse of its mighty predecessor none of which have amounted to much. The Guardian reports today that Russian conscripts have been forced to work as prostitutes which, if true, marks a low which surprises even me (I spent 1996 to 2001 researching and writing about the decrepitude of the Russian military in some detail).

So let's keep things in perspective here. Russia's important. But if the Soviet Union was accurately characterized as 'Upper Volta with nuclear weapons' , then Russia today is the smaller, poorer, more decrepit neighbour of Upper Volta--with nuclear weapons. Max Boot has it right when he writes 'Putin: the louse that roared'. Putin is a man who has famously played his cards as well as could be done. He's clever and he has his hand on Western Europe's gas valve which gives him some stick. But he's overplayed his hand here.

Update: Excellent article by Andrei Piontkovsky.

The attitude of the Russian political class to Europe, and to the West in general, over the latest three to four centuries has always been contradictory, hypersensitive, and extremely emotional. The best Russian political text on the subject remains, even today, Alexander Blok's 1918 poem, The Scythians, with its famous lines about Russia and its attitude toward Europe: "She stares, she stares at you with hatred and with love," and "We will turn our Asiatic snout toward you." Just as 300 years ago, and 200, and 20, Russians know perfectly well that we cannot do without Western technology and investments, and that autarky and an Iron Curtain spell economic and geopolitical disaster for Russia. We understand that Russian culture is an integral part of European culture.

And yet, the West seems to irritate us by the very fact of its existence. We see it as a psychological, informational, spiritual challenge. We are constantly trying to convince ourselves that the West is inherently hostile and malevolent toward Russia, because this flatters our vanity and helps to excuse our shortcomings and failures.

If you take any mainstream Russian publication and read the last 100 articles dealing with foreign policy matters, 98 will be full of bitterness, complaints, irritation, poison and hostility toward the West. This despite the fact that most of the authors of those articles like to spend as much time as possible in Western capitals and Western resorts, keep their money in Western banks, and send their children to study in Western schools and universities.

As in Blok's famous poem, a passionate declaration of love for Europe turns, at the slightest doubt as to whether it is reciprocated, into a threatening "And if you won't, there's nothing we can lose, and we can answer you with treachery!"