Russia, the world’s critical "swing" state

Brahma Chellaney The Hindu newspaper June 16, 2009

Even if it is to prescheduled Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit meetings, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is making the symbolically significant first foreign visit of his second term in office to Russia, which he had once called a “tried and tested friend” of India. Russia, with its vantage location in Eurasia and matching strategic concerns, is a natural ally of India. A robust relationship with Moscow will help New Delhi to leverage its ties with both Washington and Beijing. 

Which is the only power India can tap for critical military technologies? Which country today is willing to make a nuclear-powered submarine for India? Which state is ready to sell India a large aircraft carrier, even if an old one? Which power sells New Delhi major weapons without offering similar systems to India’s adversaries? The answer to all these questions is Russia. Little surprise Dr. Singh admitted in early 2007: “Although there has been a sea-change in the international situation during the last decade, Russia remains indispensable to the core of India’s foreign-policy interests.”

Three facts about Russia

Three important facts about Russia stand out. One, Russia has gradually become a more assertive power after stemming its precipitous decline and drift of the 1990s. Two, it now plays the Great Game on energy. Competition over control of hydrocarbon resources was a defining feature of the Cold War and remains an important driver of contemporary geopolitics, as manifest from the American occupation of Iraq and U.S. military bases or strategic tie-ups stretching across the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia.

Three, Russian democracy has moved toward greater centralized control to bring order and direction to the state. During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, government control was extended to large swaths of the economy and the political opposition was systematically emasculated. 

Such centralization, though, is no different than in, say, Singapore and Malaysia, including the domination of one political party, the absence of diversified media, limits on public demonstrations and the writ of security services. But in contrast to Russia, Singapore and Malaysia have insulated themselves from official U.S. criticism by willingly serving Western interests. When did you last hear American criticism of Singapore’s egregious political practices?

Yet Russia faces a rising tide of Western criticism for sliding toward autocracy. Indeed, ideological baggage, not dispassionate strategic deliberation, often colours U.S. and European discourse on Russia. Another reason is Russia’s geographical presence in Europe, the “mother” of both the Russian and U.S. civilizations. There is thus a greater propensity to hold Russia to European standards, unlike, say, China. Also, Russia was considered a more plausible candidate for democratic reform than China. Little surprise Russia’s greater centralization evokes fervent Western reaction.  

Today’s Russia, however, bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union. Life for the average Russian is freer and there is no Soviet-style shortage of consumer goods. There are also no online censors regulating Internet content. But what now looks like a resurgent power faces major demographic and economic challenges to build and sustain great-power capacity over the long run. 

Demographically, Russia is even in danger of losing its Slavic identity and becoming a Muslim-majority state in the decades ahead, unless government incentives succeed in encouraging Russian women to have more children. The average age of death of a Russian male has fallen to 58.9 years — nearly two decades below an American. Economically, the oil-price crash has come as a warning against being a largely petro-state.

In fact, Moscow’s economic fortunes for long have been tied too heavily to oil — a commodity with volatile prices. In 1980, the Soviet Union overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer. But oil prices began to decline, plummeting to $9 a barrel in mid-1986. U.S. intelligence, failing to read the significance of this, continued to claim Moscow was engaged in massive military modernization. During the Putin presidency, rising oil prices played a key role in Russian economic revival. The higher the oil prices, the less the pressure there is on Russia to restructure and diversify its economy. The present low prices thus offer an opportunity to Moscow to reform. 

Still, it should not be forgotten that Russia is the world’s wealthiest country in natural resources — from fertile farmlands and metals, to gold and timber. It sits on colossal hydrocarbon reserves. It also remains a nuclear and missile superpower. Indeed, to compensate for the erosion in its conventional-military capabilities, it has increasingly relied on its large nuclear arsenal, which it is ambitiously modernizing.

Right international approach

Whatever its future, the big question is: What is the right international approach toward a resurgent Russia? Here two aspects need to be borne in mind.

That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Burma after 1988 — to pursue a punitive approach relying on sanctions. Had the Burma-type approach been applied against China, the result would not only have been a less-prosperous and less-open China, but also a more-paranoid and possibly destabilizing China. The lesson is that engagement and integration are better than sanctions and isolation.

Today, with a new chill setting in on relations between the West and Russia, that lesson is in danger of getting lost. Russia’s 16-year effort to join the World Trade Organization has still to bear fruit, even as Moscow is said to be in the last phase of negotiations, and the U.S.-Russian nuclear deal remains on hold in Washington.

Little thought is being given to how the West lost Russia, which during its period of decline eagerly sought to cosy up to the U.S. and Europe, only to get the cold shoulder from Washington. Also, turning a blind eye to the way NATO is being expanded right up to Russia’s front-yard and the U.S.-led action in engineering Kosovo’s February 2008 self-proclamation of independence, attention has focused since last August on Moscow’s misguided but short-lived military intervention in Georgia and its recognition of the self-declaration of independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia — actions that some portrayed as the 21st century’s first forcible changing of borders.

But having sponsored Kosovo’s self-proclamation of independence, the U.S. and some of its allies awkwardly opposed the same right of self-determination for the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It is as if the legitimacy of a self-declaration of independence depends on which great power sponsors that action.

The world cannot afford a new Cold War, which is what constant bear-baiting will bring. Fortunately, there are some positive signs. Nuclear arms control is back on the U.S.-Russian agenda, and U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to be in Moscow for a July 6-7 summit meeting. The U.S. is going slow on missile-defence deployments in Eastern Europe and there is a de facto postponement of NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. As part of what Obama has called a “reset” of the bilateral relationship, a U.S.-Russia joint commission headed by the two presidents is to be established, along with several sub-commissions. This is an improvement on the 1993 commission established at the level of No. 2s, Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

The key issue is whether the U.S. and Russia will be able to seize the new opportunity to redefine their relationship before it becomes too late. For Russia, the challenge is to engage the West more deeply. It also needs to increase its economic footprint in Asia, where its presence is largely military. For the U.S., the challenge is to pursue new geopolitics of engagement with Moscow.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

(c) The Hindu, 2009.

China aided Sri Lanka bloodbath

The Economic Times, June 8, 2009

Like in the case of the Darfur genocide in Sudan, Chinese weapons and aid to Sri Lanka facilitated the bloodbath on that tiny island-nation that left thousands of trapped civilians dead this year as government forces decimated the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in a brutal military campaign. More people have been killed in Sri Lanka this year than in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza combined, according to the United Nations.

George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh — nuclear soulmates?

By Brahma Chellaney

A Reuters column January 20, 2009

They were certainly not made for each other. Yet the trigger-happy George W. Bush found a soulmate in diffident Manmohan Singh. When the Indian prime minister publicly told the little-loved Bush that the "people of India deeply love you," he was expressing his own deep-seated admiration of a U.S. president whose just-ended term in office constituted a nadir from which it will take America years to recoup its losses.

Singh’s fulsome praise for Bush stood out at that September 25, 2008 White House news conference. The Indian leader had actually timed that visit to Washington so that it coincided with the expected congressional ratification of the controversial U.S.-India nuclear deal. But the Senate clearance of the deal got delayed because of the new congressional and executive focus on a bailout package to rescue sinking U.S. financial institutions.

Almost every paragraph in the prepared statement Singh read out at that press conference ended with a sappy tribute to Bush:

•"And the last four-and-a-half years that I have been prime minister, I have been the recipient of your generosity, your affection, your friendship. It means a lot to me and to the people of India."

•"And Mr. President, you have played a most-important role in making all this happen."

•"And when history is written, I think it will be recorded that President George W. Bush made an historic goal in bringing our two democracies closer to each other."

•"And when this restrictive regime ends, I think a great deal of credit will go to President Bush. And for this I am very grateful to you, Mr. President.”

•“So, Mr. President, this may be my last visit to you during your presidency, and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you.”

Referring to Singh’s expression of love for the much-despised Bush, Anand Giridharadas wrote in the New York Times, “Laura Bush is not alone, after all.” Perhaps the only thing Singh didn’t do at that event was to hand Bush, with tear-welled eyes, a rose.

Bush’s otherwise negative legacy includes a foreign-policy triumph – the nuclear deal with India, consummated through his bonding with Singh.

These two dissimilar personalities displayed similar political traits at critical times. Their bond served as a reminder that, contrary to international-relations theory, history is shaped not just by cold calculations of national interest, but heavily by the role of personalities, including their personal attributes, idiosyncrasies and hobbyhorses.

Their personalities were apart, yet Bush and Singh showed they share a lot in common, including an emphasis on spinning reality to suit political ends. While Bush led the U.S. into Iraq through lies and deception, Singh’s Iraq was the nuclear deal, into which he led India blindly. And just as Bush claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Singh asserted fanciful benefits in the nuclear deal.

While Bush was a catalyst in America’s declining global influence, Singh has served as a catalyst in undermining India’s inner strength to the extent that New Delhi today pursues a policy of propitiation toward China and a policy of empty rhetoric against Pakistan-fomented terrorism even as its internal security has come under siege.

Under their leadership, America and India became internally weaker.

Bush and Singh, although one was strident and the other soft-spoken, displayed the same fondness for generalities and the same knack of handling crises in ways that make them exponentially worse.

Yet neither wavered from his chosen path even when the democratic majority was against that course.

When Bush could not have his way, he resorted to bullying and intimidation. Singh does it differently — he goes into a sulk, threatening to resign, as he did last summer until the Congress Party gave in to his wishes on the nuclear deal.

Singh’s obsessive fixation on that deal was matched by Bush’s destructive mania on Iraq, where his swan song involved ducking shoes.

While Bush will be remembered for horrors like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and blunders like Iraq and Afghanistan, Singh will be remembered for the “cash-for-votes” scandal that marred his July 22, 2008 win in a Parliament confidence vote and his memorable credulity in setting up a joint anti-terror mechanism with terror-exporting Pakistan.

Indeed, Singh’s first diplomatic response to the Mumbai attacks was to invite the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief to India. But for second thoughts in Islamabad, the head of that rogue Pakistani agency would have landed up in India, as per the invitation, “to assist in the investigations” — analogous to a mafia leader assisting police.

Handing Islamabad a dossier of evidence the same day Singh said “some official agencies in Pakistan must have supported” the attacks symbolized unremitting naïveté. If state agencies were involved, how could New Delhi expect the Pakistani state to act against them?

While Bush allowed his national-security agenda to be hijacked by neocons, the onetime-socialist Singh emerged as India’s chief neocon.

His two votes against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board, for example, cost India hundreds of millions of dollars as Tehran, in reprisal, reneged on the terms of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) contract, forcing New Delhi to buy LNG from other suppliers at a much higher price.

Bush was always protective of Singh. The Bush administration’s unclassified answers to 45 congressional questions on the nuclear deal were kept secret for nine months not only because the replies belied Singh’s assurances to Parliament, but also as their disclosure “could have toppled the government” in New Delhi, according to Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post. The answers became public only after the danger to Singh’s political survival had passed.

Singh, for his part, shielded even a Bush political appointee. “To err is human,” Singh famously said when Ambassador David Mulford triggered a furore in early 2006 with undiplomatic remarks.

Now, on two consecutive days this month, Mulford ticked off Singh himself for linking Pakistani “official agencies” to the Mumbai attacks.

On one occasion, Mulford said: “I think one needs to be very, very careful about making those kinds of allegations unless you have very concrete evidence to that degree of specificity.” On another occasion, he declared: “I don’t think we want to take the view that we make accusations against certain parties without the usual evidences and proofs.”

How did New Delhi respond to that scolding? It made not even a peek.

Both Bush and Singh squandered taxpayer money. While the economic costs of the Bush-initiated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already totalled a staggering $1.6 trillion, with the Bush administration having awarded billions of dollars in no-bid reconstruction contracts to favoured companies that did little on the ground, Singh, as a “thank-you” to Bush for the nuclear deal, unveiled yet another purchase of obsolescent arms — eight Boeing P-8I long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft, in a $2.1 billion deal.

Another “thank-you” — a nuclear-accident liability coverage bill, currently in circulation within the government — could be pushed in the brief Parliament session in February in the same manner eight bills were rammed through in 17 minutes on December 23, 2008 in the midst of continuous uproar in the Lok Sabha, the ruling lower House.

Bush famously said about Russian leader Vladimir Putin: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward… I was able to get a sense of his soul.” That prompted Senator John McCain to claim he also looked into Putin’s eyes, only to see three letters: K-G-B.

But if there is anyone who says he got a sense of Bush’s soul it is Singh. He looked into Bush’s eyes and read three words: love for India. While the U.S.-India relationship began to blossom under Bush, the wreckage he has left — extending from Pakistan-Afghanistan to Wall Street — will cost India dear.

(Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi)

(Brahma Chellaney is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own.)

http://in.reuters.com/article/specialEvents1/idINIndia-37547520090120?sp=true

A forward-looking approach on Burma

Brahma Chellaney

May 14, 2008

When the imperative is for a more balanced and forward-looking international approach toward impoverished, cyclone-battered Burma, the danger of a self-perpetuating cycle of sanctions has been underlined by new, ill-timed penal actions.

The politicisation of international assistance at a time when Burma’s food bowl, the Irrawaddy Delta, has been devastated by a major cyclone has brought the plight of ordinary Burmese to the fore. This month began with U.S. President George W. Bush announcing yet more sanctions against Burma. Less than 36 hours later, Cyclone Nargis had left a vast trail of death and destruction. Tragedy has come to symbolise Burma in a year marking its 60th anniversary as an independent nation.

Such is the politics of food aid that Western governments and outside relief agencies have insisted on the right to deliver assistance directly to the homeless and hungry. But the regime, fearful that such delivery could be intended to incite a popular uprising at a time when it has put a new Constitution to vote, has blocked the large-scale entry of foreign aid workers. Calls for forcible humanitarian intervention by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and others have made the junta’s hackles rise.

The regime postponed the constitutional referendum in the cyclone-racked areas until May 24, but held the balloting on schedule elsewhere last Saturday. With the military ensconced in power for 46 years, there are few takers for the junta’s seven-step “roadmap to democracy.” Widening sanctions, in fact, make it less likely that the seeds of democracy will sprout in a stunted economy. Punitive pressure without constructive engagement in a critically weak country, where the military is now the only functioning institution, is counterproductive.

Crucial factor

Distance from Burma has been a crucial factor in determining major players’ approach toward that country. The greater a state’s geographical distance from Burma, the more gung-ho it tends to be. And the shorter a state’s distance from Burma, the greater its caution. At one end of the spectrum is the U.S., which has followed an uncompromisingly penal approach toward Burma under Mr. Bush. At the other end are Asian states, emphasising a softer approach. The European Union used to be somewhere in the middle, but since 2007 has stepped up its own penal campaign.

The West, with little financial stake left in a country marginal to its foreign-policy interests, can afford to pursue an approach emphasising high-minded principles over strategic considerations, and isolation over engagement. About 95 per cent of Burma’s trade last year was with other Asian countries. By contrast, Burma’s neighbours cannot escape the effects of an unstable Burma. The imperatives of proximity dictate different policy logic. The current situation underscores eight international imperatives.

The need for a course correction. It is vital to carve out greater international space in Burma, rather than shut whatever space that might be left. When an approach bristles with sticks and offers few carrots, results are hard to come by. The sanctions path has only strengthened the hand of the military, with Burma now coming full circle: Its ageing junta head, Than Shwe, has amassed powers to run a virtual one-man dictatorship in Ne Win-style.

An approach predicated on the primacy of sanctions may have been sustainable had Burma been a threat to regional or international security. But Burma does not export terror, subversion or revolutionary ideology. Its focus is inward. If sanctions continue to undermine its economy and impede its regional integration, a dysfunctional Burma could pose a serious transnational security threat.

Target the junta, not the people. The weight of the sanctions has fallen squarely on ordinary Burmese. By targeting vital sectors of the Burmese economy — from tourism to textiles — the sanctions have lowered living conditions without helping improve human rights. An unaffected military has ensured continuing revenue inflows for itself by boosting gas exports to Thailand and signing a lucrative, 30-year gas deal with China.

What objective is served when disengagement blocks the flow of liberal ideas as well as investment and technology?

Recognise that a “colour revolution” is just not possible in Burma. Despite the temptation to portray the monk-led protests of last September as a “saffron revolution” in the making, Burma is unlikely to experience a tumultuous political transformation of the type symbolised by Kyrgyzstan’s “tulip revolution,” Ukraine’s “orange revolution” and Georgia’s “rose revolution.” No colour revolution has occurred in a country bereft of institutions except the military. Burma, with its deep-seated institutional decay, is closer to Sudan and Ethiopia than to the successful democratic-transition cases.

Help build civil society in Burma. It is a growing civil society that usually sounds the death knell of a dictatorship. But years of sanctions have left Burma without an entrepreneurial class or civil society but saddled with an all-powerful military as the sole surviving institution — to the extent that Aung San Suu Kyi’s party says the military will have an important role to play in any transitional government.

The “roadmap to democracy,” however flawed, offers an opening to incrementally prise open the Burmese system. After being in power since 1962, the military has become too fat to return to the barracks. In fact, it won’t fit in the barracks. It has taken the junta more than 14 years just to draft a new Constitution.

With the military determined to hold on to its special prerogatives, the demilitarisation of the Burmese polity can at best be an incremental process. But if that process is not to stretch interminably, it is important for the international community and the U.N. to utilise the new opening, however constricted, to get involved in capacity-building programmes that can help increase public awareness and participation and create a civilian institutional framework for a democratic transition. Although the military is the problem, it has to be part of the solution, or else there will be no transition.

Shift the focus from negative conditionalities to positive conditionalities. To help create incentives for a phased democratic transition, Burma’s rulers should be given a set of benchmarks, with the meeting of each benchmark bringing positive rewards. With sanctions to continue until the junta collapses or caves in, there are at present no incentives, only disincentives.

Indeed, recent penal steps against Burma run counter to the junta’s gestures and concessions — such as facilitating U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari’s three visits in six months; permitting him to meet with Ms Suu Kyi; allowing Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, a special rapporteur to the U.N. Human Rights Council, to come and investigate the September 2007 violence; and implementing the “roadmap.” Mr. Gambari had sought a time-bound transition plan, but after the junta unveiled just that, Burma has been slapped with more sanctions, undermining the U.N.’s role.

In that light, the latest U.S., EU, Canadian and Australian sanctions suggest a lamentable lack of an incentives-based strategic approach.

Insist on ethnic reconciliation and accommodation. The struggle in Burma has been portrayed simplistically as a battle between Ms Suu Kyi and Gen. Than Shwe; a fight between good and evil; and a clash between the forces of freedom and repression. A complex Burma is actually the scene of four different struggles.

Four different struggles

One conflict rages within the majority Burman community between the mainly Burman military and democracy-seeking urban Burmans. Another struggle is between the military and the non-Burman nationalities, which make up a third of the population. While the Burmans live in the valleys and plains of central Burma (and dominate the cities), the ethnic minorities largely inhabit the rugged areas around the periphery. An inter-religious conflict also rages in Burma.

Then there is a larger unresolved struggle over the state’s political meaning and direction — whether Burma ought to be a true federation that grants wide-ranging local autonomy, or a unitary state. That mirrors the struggle, for example, in Sri Lanka, where the majority ethnic community has sought to give the state a distinct Sinhala imprint, triggering an unending civil war.

Avert a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Burma. The widening sanctions have sought to throttle industries on which the livelihood of millions of Burmese depends. Import bans, investment prohibitions, tourism restrictions and measures forcing foreign companies to disengage have contributed to serious unemployment and poverty.

As far back as 2003, then U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Daley had warned in congressional testimony that many female garment workers made jobless by sanctions were being driven into prostitution. Yet, in its 2004 report to Congress, the State Department boasted that U.S. actions had shut down more than 100 garment factories in the previous year alone, with “an estimated loss of around 50,000 to 60,000 jobs.”

Foreign investment and trade boost local employment and wages and exert a liberalising influence on a regime. A weaker Burma will only fall prey to and spawn a range of transnational security threats.

Both carrots and sticks need to be wielded, but not in a way that the sticks get blunted through overuse and the carrots remain distant. Without a more balanced and progressive approach permitting engagement, democratisation is unlikely to progress. International principles need to be anchored in forward-looking pragmatism. There is no logic to Burma being held to a higher international standard.

© Copyright 2008 The Hindu

URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/05/14/stories/2008051453141000.htm