The
Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke yesterday at the yearly Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi.
A video with English translations and excerpts of the transcript are here.
With regards to the global system Putin made an interesting historic
comparison:
in
the 19th century they used to refer to a “Concert of Powers.” The time has come
to talk in terms of a global “concert” of development models, interests,
cultures and traditions where the sound of each instrument is crucial,
inextricable and valuable, and for the music to be played harmoniously rather
than performed with discordant notes, a cacophony. It is crucial to consider
the opinions and interests of all the participants in international life. Let
me reiterate: truly mutually respectful, pragmatic and consequently solid relations can only built
between independent and sovereign states.Russia is sincerely
committed to this approach and pursues a positive agenda.
The Concert
of Europe was the balance of power system between 1815 to 1848
and from 1871 to 1914:
A
first phase of the Concert of Europe, known as the Congress System or the
Vienna System after the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), was dominated by five
Great Powers of Europe: Prussia, Russia, Britain, France and Austria. […] With
the Revolutions of 1848 the Vienna system collapsed and, although the
republican rebellions were checked, an age of nationalism began and culminated
in the unifications of Italy (by Sardinia) and Germany (by Prussia) in 1871.
The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck re-created the Concert of Europe to
avoid future conflicts escalating into new wars. The revitalized concert
included France, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Italy with Germany as the main
continental power economically and militarily.
Bismark’s concert kept peace in a usually warring Europe for 43
years. If Putin wants to be the new Bismarck I am all for it.
Putin
also made a rather extraordinary announcement:
Russian president Vladimir
Putin has said that Moscow is helping China build a system to warn of ballistic
missile launches.Since the cold war, only the United States and Russia have had
such systems, which involve an array of ground-based radars and space
satellites. The systems allow for early spotting of intercontinental ballistic
missiles.
Speaking at an international
affairs conference in Moscow on Thursday, Putin said Russia had been helping
China develop such a system. He added that “this is a very serious thing that
will radically enhance China’s defence capability”.
His statement signalled a new
degree of defence cooperation between the two former Communist rivals that have
developed increasingly close political and military ties while Beijing and
Washington have sunk into a trade war.
That is as good for China as it is for Russia. China has an immediate
need for such a system because the U.S. is taking a significantly more
bellicose posture against it.
The
U.S. left the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia to build a
nuclear missiles force in South Asia that will aim at China. It is now looking
for Asian countries in which it could station such weapons. China is using its economic might to prevent that
but the U.S. is likely to succeed.
While
China has capable weapons and can defend itself
against a smaller attack the U.S. has about 20 times more nuclear warheads than
China. It could use those in an overwhelming first strike to decapitate and
destroy the Chinese state. An early warning system will give China enough time
to detect such an attack and to launch its own nuclear deterrent against the
U.S. The warning systems will thus checkmate the U.S. first strike
capability.
Over the last two years
Russia and China both unveiled hypersonic weapons. Currently the U.S. has
neither such weapons nor any defensive system that can protect against these.
Russia
was smart enough to develop both – the super fast offensive weapon and a
defense against it. Via Andrei Martyanov we learn of a recent Russian press notice:
Translation: Combat crews of S-400, in
Astrakhan Region, held combat exercises against hypersonic target-missiles
“Favorit PM” and destroyed all targets. The statement of the press-service of
Western Military District announced. The crews of S-400 Triumphs were from the
units of air-defense of Leningrad Army of Air Force and Air Defense of Western
Military District.And what this “Favorit PM” missile-target complex
is? Very simple, it is deeply modernized good ol’ S-300 P series which allows
to use missiles of types 5V55 which have their explosives removed and are
capable of atmospheric maneuverable flight with the velocities of Mach=6 (in
excess of 7,000 kilometers per hour). These are genuine hyper-sonic
missile-targets and, evidently, and I don’t have any reasons to doubt it, S-400
had very little problems shooting them down.
On top of the missile warning system China will also want to
have that most capable air and missile defense system. Russia will make it a
decent offer.
Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov’s talked a day earlier than Putin. His speech and the Q
& A with him are here. The talk was mostly about the Middle
East and Lavrov’s tone was rather angry while he passed through a long list of
U.S. sins in the region and beyond. There were also some interesting remarks
about Turkey, Syria and the Ukraine. The most interesting passage was his
response to a question about U.S. sanction against Russia to which some
senators want to add even more. Lavrov said:
I have heard that Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin are two famous
anti-Russia-minded members of the US Congress. I don’t think that this implies
that they have any foresight. Those with a more or less politically mature
opinion of the situation should have realised long ago that the sanctions don’t
work in the direction they wanted them to work. I believe that they will never
work. We have a territory and its riches that were bestowed on us by God and our
ancestors, we have a feeling of personal dignity, and we also have the armed
forces. This combination makes us very confident. I hope that economic
development and all the investment that has been made and continues to be made
will also pay off in the near future.
The
U.S. loves to dish out sanctions left and right and the Trump administration
has increased their use. But sanctions, especially unilateral ones, do not
work. The U.S. has not recognized that because it has never assessed whether
those sanctions fulfill their aims. A recent Government Accountability Office
report found:
The
Departments of the Treasury (Treasury), State (State), and Commerce (Commerce)
each undertake efforts to assess the impacts of specific sanctions on the
targets of those sanctions. […] However, agency
officials cited several difficulties in assessing sanctions’ effectiveness in
meeting broader U.S. policy goals, including challenges in
isolating the effect of sanctions from other factors as well as evolving
foreign policy goals. According to Treasury, State, and Commerce officials,
their agencies have not conducted such assessments on their own.
The
U.S. sanctions and sanctions and sanctions but never checked if sanctions work
to the intended purpose. The efforts to sanction Russia have surely led to some
unintended consequences. They are the reason why the alliance between China and
Russia deepens every day. The U.S. has the exorbitant privilege of having its own
currency being used as the international reserve. The sanctioning of U.S.
dollar transactions is the reason why the U.S. is now losing it:
Russia’s Rosneft has set the euro as the default currency for
all its new export contracts including for crude oil, oil products,
petrochemicals and liquefied petroleum gas, tender documents showed.The switch
from U.S. dollars, which happened in September according to the tender
documents published on Rosneft’s website, is set to reduce the state-controlled
firm’s vulnerability to potential fresh U.S. sanctions.
Washington has threatened to
impose sanctions on Rosneft over its operations in Venezuela, a move which
Rosneft says would be illegal.
Iran
has taken comparable steps. It now sells oil to China and India in either local
currencies. Other countries will surely learn from this and will also start to
use other currencies for their energy purchases. As the transactions in dollars
decrease they will also start to use other currencies for their
reserves.
But the U.S. is not
losing its financial or sole superpower status because of what China or Russia
or Iran have done or do. It is losing it because it has made too many
mistakes.
Those states who, like Russia, have done their homework will profit
from it.
Reprinted
with permission from Moon of Alabama.
Copyright
© 2019 Moon
of Alabama