The President of the USA is due to arrive in China today. It has been much heralded as the first great occasion when the newly enhanced President Xi will be able to demonstrate his mastery of the regime and the magnificence of the show that can be put on for Mr Trump.
In the run up to this visit, Trump has been forced to recognise that there is a very longstanding and close alliance between Russia and China. He has admitted that any plan more tightly to contain North Korea depends almost equally on the two powers that have land borders with that 'rogue state'. While China has been the main supplier of essential imports to the Pyongyang regime, Russia has also been a friendly facilitator over many years.
There is little room for doubt that both China and Russia are sorry that North Korea has developed its nuclear capabilities so far that Kim can be bombastic to the USA: and, by implication, a major nuisance to Russia and to China. On the other hand, they have noted both Trump's reciprocal bombast towards Pyongyang and his deeply ambiguous situation in regard to Russia.
As Secretary of State and as a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton took a high moral stand on Russia's adventurism in the Ukraine, both the Donbass region and Crimea: she was a major influence on the introduction of sanctions that have affected Russia's trade and the general standard of living of the population negatively and [in a few areas] dramatically. Hence, Russia used all the covert means at its disposal [which are vast] to ensure that Trump had the best chance possible in the general election one year ago. It is very doubtful whether the mass of Russian intervention in any way swayed the election result which, like the Brexit vote in the UK, reflected the despair of swathes of US voters at the failure of the economic and social systems to maintain the American Dream in the rustbucket. The sheer originality - which the literati dismiss as the absurdity - of Trump's approach was combined with a deeply instinctive populism to grab people's attention and stimulate the enthusiasm of the 'forgotten people' in pockets right across the USA. It is noteworthy that Bernie Saunders almost hit the same note from a different pitch, in enthusing the metropolitan young: against him Hillary Clinton displayed increasingly platitudinous arrogance, shouting instead of speaking and thus diminishing any impact that her actual sentences might have achieved.
Russia and China have doubtless agreed a common approach to Trump; based on flattery interspersed with spoonfulls of bitter realism. Mr Xi will spend the next couple of days honouring and further educating the US president. President Putin will be in the same room with them in the following days at the pan-Pacific conference, and it is there, rather than Beijing, that any new understanding on how to deal with North Korea will be agreed.
At the end of the Gorbachev years I twice made the [supposedly] direct flight from Moscow to Beijing, which each time made a heavy - unannounced - landing in Novosibirsk. This was necessary because the old Illyushin aircraft could not carry enough fuel for a non-stop journey. Both times the most conspicuous cohort of passengers were people with massive bags full of empty bags; whose business was to buy up whatever consumer goods were available from the new workshop-factories in China and take them back to Moscow in their many bags. They had a hard time with Russian customs on the way home [doubtless lessened by cash handouts when the KGB turned a blind eye] but their trade was highly lucrative. Russia has never facilitated the sort of entrepreneurial activity that enabled China to build up its balance of payments surplus with the industrial west, and is still largely dependent on China to supply the everyday manufactured goods that middle England takes for granted [and which mostly come into Britain from the emergent economies, not least China]. In exchange for this mass of imports - which are no longer imported by individual chancers as they were in the 'nineties - Russia can pay in oil and other materials; and by allowing Chinese firms to become farming contractors, mostly in the far east where the supply of Russian labour and enterprise are most thinly stretched.
Russia and China are hugely and closely inter-dependent all along the longest international border in the world. This interdependence was slightly set back by the extremities of the Cultural Revolution in China, and then by the economic chaos that followed from the collapse of the USSR. But the long northern border of Russia with China - right to the very eastern point of the Asian mainland - remains, even though other former-soviet republics now border China to the west. The two economies are even more closely symbiotic than that of Canada with the USA, and there will be no room for doubt that the briefings given to President Trump will have emphasised the point. To general surprise, 'The Donald' appears to have been paying more attention to his briefings of late than he did in his early days in office. He is to be watched, closely, over both his days in Beijing and in the ensuing wider conference. Great-power politics could well be reshaped; with North Korea as the carcass to be picked over; rather than the existential threat that it appeared to be in White House demonology just a month ago.
Showing posts with label Crimea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crimea. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 November 2017
Saturday, 28 October 2017
The Sovereign Club, Crimea and Catalonia
The Spanish king and his government are adamant that there should be no truck with a purported 'sovereign' administration that has just been announced to exist in the region/province of Catalonia. The United Nations has asserted that a 'solution' should be found within the Spanish Constitution. Washington has declared that Catalonia is simply part of Spain, and that fact will not change in the perception of the United States [which fought a very nasty civil war to preserve their Union]. Britain, France and Germany have made similar assertions: there will be no recognition of a rebel 'government' by any European Union member state.
President Putin deeply deplores the fact that the Gorbachev administration in the last stage of the Soviet Union acted in accordance with the 'Stalin Constitution' which had enshrined the myth that the state was a federation of independent [largely ethnically-based] sovereign republics. This was very particularly Stalin's constitutional speciality. He had been sent to Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century to find out how the Habsburg regime was coping with the question of Nationality in Austria-Hungary. Slovaks and Czechs were asserting that they were distinct national groups, with a right to statehood of their own. Minorities of the population spoke Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian and various forms of German in distinctive territories split between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian Empire [and the latter contained a massive range of entities from the Kingdom of Bohemia to small counties that were notionally sovereign]. The heir to the throne [Franz Ferdinand, who was to be killed in 1914 thus triggering the war that ended the monarchy] was said to want to change the 'dual monarchy' of Austria-Hungary into a 'trial' [or triple] monarchy with autonomy for the Slavs, in deference to his Czech wife.
Stalin produced a convoluted account of his thoughts on nationality, and after the revolution he was appointed Commissar for Nationalities. As the Soviet Union consolidated its absolute power over all the former Russian Empire, except Finland, it did not matter that a constitutional charade was enacted whereby the political entity was asserted to be a federation of notionally independent states. However, come the end of the Second World War, in their anxiety to keep Stalin on-side with the new United Nations, Britain, France and the USA agreed that three of the Soviet republics should each be independent members: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev - a Ukrainian - almost casually transferred the Crimea from Russia to Ukraine: it did not seem to matter, at the time. The facts that the Crimea had been hard fought for under Peter the Great and Catherine II, and was seen as strategically important, did not cause any controversy while the USSR was operated as a single hegemonic state.
However, suddenly in 1990, the USSR collapsed; while the Communist party stooges who held office as the presidents and premiers of the various [formally fully sovereign] Socialist Republics simply colluded to ignore Gorbachev and his collapsing central authority and go their own ways. The largest component of the Union, Russia, had the charismatic Boris Yeltsin on hand to crush a half-cock attempt by party old hands to reverse all the democratic changes that Gorbachev had instituted: and as head of the Russian Republic's government Yeltsin established his hold over the biggest and most complex Soviet Socialist Republic; thus of Moscow. A notional federation was established of the former Soviet Republics, while the asserted sovereign authority in each of them began doling out the national assets to their families and friends. The Russian Republic itself became the Russian Federation including all the Autonomous Republics and Regions that Russia has inherited from Stalin's manipulations of notional boundaries. Yeltsin and his associates employed American Economists to assist them with a hugely corrupt and corrupting 'privatisation', which transferred much of industry to the hands of the so-called 'oligarchs' and caused massive deprivation to the mass of the population.
Putin's rise to power came after the damage derived from Stalin's constitutional machinations and Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence had been done. In territorial terms, he has tried to rectify what he sees as two major failures: the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine and the welfare of millions of Russians whose families were settled in the southern and eastern Ukraine, particularly in the reigns of Peter I, Catherine II and Stalin's post-1945 implant of Russian speakers into territory known as 'New Russia' that he had assigned to Ukraine. Stalin planted similar minorities of Russians in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; which has ensured that those countries have become very keen members of NATO in order to preserve their territorial integrity. Putin's attempts to make minor revisions of Stalin's and Khrushchev's cavalier actions, at the expense of Ukraine, have placed him under sanction by the western powers, who have set their faces against all tinkering with the pattern of states that was admitted to the United Nations in 1945 and subsequently. I have drawn attention previously to the idiocy of keeping the colonial frontiers in Africa: but they are also part of the stasis that goes with the present, deeply flawed concept of sovereignty.
East Germany was allowed to vanish into West Germany, and an independent Scotland arising from due democratic process would have gained international acceptance: provided it had been set on the international stage by the United Kingdom government acting as its sponsor.
On the other hand, if the Chechens declared themselves independent of the Russian Federation, President Putin could call on the UN to help him to suppress such pretension; at least, with verbal assurances such as have been given to Spain in respect of Catalonia.
The Catalans are having an exciting game; but they need to learn from history, quickly; before hotheads start getting hurt.
President Putin deeply deplores the fact that the Gorbachev administration in the last stage of the Soviet Union acted in accordance with the 'Stalin Constitution' which had enshrined the myth that the state was a federation of independent [largely ethnically-based] sovereign republics. This was very particularly Stalin's constitutional speciality. He had been sent to Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century to find out how the Habsburg regime was coping with the question of Nationality in Austria-Hungary. Slovaks and Czechs were asserting that they were distinct national groups, with a right to statehood of their own. Minorities of the population spoke Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian and various forms of German in distinctive territories split between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian Empire [and the latter contained a massive range of entities from the Kingdom of Bohemia to small counties that were notionally sovereign]. The heir to the throne [Franz Ferdinand, who was to be killed in 1914 thus triggering the war that ended the monarchy] was said to want to change the 'dual monarchy' of Austria-Hungary into a 'trial' [or triple] monarchy with autonomy for the Slavs, in deference to his Czech wife.
Stalin produced a convoluted account of his thoughts on nationality, and after the revolution he was appointed Commissar for Nationalities. As the Soviet Union consolidated its absolute power over all the former Russian Empire, except Finland, it did not matter that a constitutional charade was enacted whereby the political entity was asserted to be a federation of notionally independent states. However, come the end of the Second World War, in their anxiety to keep Stalin on-side with the new United Nations, Britain, France and the USA agreed that three of the Soviet republics should each be independent members: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev - a Ukrainian - almost casually transferred the Crimea from Russia to Ukraine: it did not seem to matter, at the time. The facts that the Crimea had been hard fought for under Peter the Great and Catherine II, and was seen as strategically important, did not cause any controversy while the USSR was operated as a single hegemonic state.
However, suddenly in 1990, the USSR collapsed; while the Communist party stooges who held office as the presidents and premiers of the various [formally fully sovereign] Socialist Republics simply colluded to ignore Gorbachev and his collapsing central authority and go their own ways. The largest component of the Union, Russia, had the charismatic Boris Yeltsin on hand to crush a half-cock attempt by party old hands to reverse all the democratic changes that Gorbachev had instituted: and as head of the Russian Republic's government Yeltsin established his hold over the biggest and most complex Soviet Socialist Republic; thus of Moscow. A notional federation was established of the former Soviet Republics, while the asserted sovereign authority in each of them began doling out the national assets to their families and friends. The Russian Republic itself became the Russian Federation including all the Autonomous Republics and Regions that Russia has inherited from Stalin's manipulations of notional boundaries. Yeltsin and his associates employed American Economists to assist them with a hugely corrupt and corrupting 'privatisation', which transferred much of industry to the hands of the so-called 'oligarchs' and caused massive deprivation to the mass of the population.
Putin's rise to power came after the damage derived from Stalin's constitutional machinations and Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence had been done. In territorial terms, he has tried to rectify what he sees as two major failures: the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine and the welfare of millions of Russians whose families were settled in the southern and eastern Ukraine, particularly in the reigns of Peter I, Catherine II and Stalin's post-1945 implant of Russian speakers into territory known as 'New Russia' that he had assigned to Ukraine. Stalin planted similar minorities of Russians in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; which has ensured that those countries have become very keen members of NATO in order to preserve their territorial integrity. Putin's attempts to make minor revisions of Stalin's and Khrushchev's cavalier actions, at the expense of Ukraine, have placed him under sanction by the western powers, who have set their faces against all tinkering with the pattern of states that was admitted to the United Nations in 1945 and subsequently. I have drawn attention previously to the idiocy of keeping the colonial frontiers in Africa: but they are also part of the stasis that goes with the present, deeply flawed concept of sovereignty.
East Germany was allowed to vanish into West Germany, and an independent Scotland arising from due democratic process would have gained international acceptance: provided it had been set on the international stage by the United Kingdom government acting as its sponsor.
On the other hand, if the Chechens declared themselves independent of the Russian Federation, President Putin could call on the UN to help him to suppress such pretension; at least, with verbal assurances such as have been given to Spain in respect of Catalonia.
The Catalans are having an exciting game; but they need to learn from history, quickly; before hotheads start getting hurt.
Monday, 29 May 2017
Putin Near Paris
President Putin is today due to visit France, where he will open an exhibition on Franco-Russian relations over three centuries and have lunch with President Macron in a house once lent to Peter the Great of Russia during his study-tour of western Europe.
Macron will go into the meeting with a list of conversational objectives, all of which will be to some extent constrained by his commitment to the European Union. The French president's smirk during last week's Trump tirade against those members of NATO who under-provide for their defence spending will have been copied into Putin's file; together with a reminder that France [unlike the UK] has a truly independent capability to deliver nuclear weapons. Britain's nuclear missiles are under joint American-UK control; France's are entirely at the disposal of M Macron. This alone makes France a 'power', and the commitment that Macron has expressed to a closer EU must be set alongside that independent capability. France is also one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, which alone will justify the two presidents comparing their positions on the major global issues that have recently been on the Council's agenda, and those that might appear there soon.
France was, in effect, the colonial power over Syria from 1919 to the nineteen-fifties, under the Franco-British carve-up of the Arab lands that were separated from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the First World War. More recently, France has played little active part in the awful war in Syria, as the Russian commitment to the Assad regime has been increasing. France has huge background knowledge and understanding of the country, and the opinion of the French establishment [of which Macron is a selected product] may be helpful to Putin as he looks through the murk that is deepening in Syria as Trump appears to be more willing to take more military action against Assad. France's role in helping to keep the EU states [and NATO, as such] out of that conflict can be useful to Putin; and reinforcing the pressure for a benign neutrality of 'Europe' towards Russia will be well worth the visit.
Closer to home, for Putin, are the questions of Ukraine and Crimea. France has supported the NATO and EU policies of utter opposition to the recent Russian seizure of the Crimea, including the imposition of sanctions. The French economy has suffered slightly from the loss of trade with Russia that has resulted from the sanctions; and gained no benefit from them. There may be time in the two presidents' wide-ranging discussion to exchange hints on how that standoff could be resolved.
Russia regards Ukraine as an integral part of a single homeland. Kiev, now the Ukrainian capital, was the centre of the first city-state that grew into Russia. Moscow [the Grand Duchy of Muscovy] is a much more recent development; and deep in Russian history and sentiment are the sense that Moscow and Kiev belong together in a single state. The fact that the people who speak Ukrainian were abominably brutalised during Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture made many of them willing, at first, to welcome the German invaders in 1942 as liberators. Within a year most people recognised their mistake: the racist brutality of the Nazis exceeded even what Stalin's police had imposed, and thus the eventual Soviet victory was welcomed; at first. Then the Communist regime imported ethnic Russians who had been made homeless by the war to rebuild the shattered industrial cities, especially in the Donbas, adding linguistic complexity to the situation within the Soviet Republic of Ukraine [which, along with Belarussia was a given a separate seat in the UN, alongside Russia, as an inducement for Stalin to join the organisation]. The separate soviet republics had no independent power anyway, until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics simply fell apart when Gorbachev lost his grip. Then the former soviet republics gained international recognition as sovereign states, as that term was generally understood in international law. Colonel Putin and his colleagues in the KGB watched, aghast, as the Baltic states, the Balkan states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even Putin's former workplace East Germany joined NATO and applied to be admitted to the EU.
While Belarus was consolidated as a puppet state to Russia, Ukraine made attempts to establish itself as a significant, independent European power; but fell prey to corruption, faction and alien interference. Russia would like the Ukraine to form a close federating with Russia, accepting Russian foreign and defence policy. France has joined with its allies in opposing Russian attempts to push that situation along. There is every reason to expect that Putin will push Macron to take a more pragmatic view of the Ukrainian [and thus the Crimean] situation than have his predecessors; and it would be interesting to know what quid-pro-quo Putin is able to offer France on that delicate topic.
Macron will go into the meeting with a list of conversational objectives, all of which will be to some extent constrained by his commitment to the European Union. The French president's smirk during last week's Trump tirade against those members of NATO who under-provide for their defence spending will have been copied into Putin's file; together with a reminder that France [unlike the UK] has a truly independent capability to deliver nuclear weapons. Britain's nuclear missiles are under joint American-UK control; France's are entirely at the disposal of M Macron. This alone makes France a 'power', and the commitment that Macron has expressed to a closer EU must be set alongside that independent capability. France is also one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, which alone will justify the two presidents comparing their positions on the major global issues that have recently been on the Council's agenda, and those that might appear there soon.
France was, in effect, the colonial power over Syria from 1919 to the nineteen-fifties, under the Franco-British carve-up of the Arab lands that were separated from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the First World War. More recently, France has played little active part in the awful war in Syria, as the Russian commitment to the Assad regime has been increasing. France has huge background knowledge and understanding of the country, and the opinion of the French establishment [of which Macron is a selected product] may be helpful to Putin as he looks through the murk that is deepening in Syria as Trump appears to be more willing to take more military action against Assad. France's role in helping to keep the EU states [and NATO, as such] out of that conflict can be useful to Putin; and reinforcing the pressure for a benign neutrality of 'Europe' towards Russia will be well worth the visit.
Closer to home, for Putin, are the questions of Ukraine and Crimea. France has supported the NATO and EU policies of utter opposition to the recent Russian seizure of the Crimea, including the imposition of sanctions. The French economy has suffered slightly from the loss of trade with Russia that has resulted from the sanctions; and gained no benefit from them. There may be time in the two presidents' wide-ranging discussion to exchange hints on how that standoff could be resolved.
Russia regards Ukraine as an integral part of a single homeland. Kiev, now the Ukrainian capital, was the centre of the first city-state that grew into Russia. Moscow [the Grand Duchy of Muscovy] is a much more recent development; and deep in Russian history and sentiment are the sense that Moscow and Kiev belong together in a single state. The fact that the people who speak Ukrainian were abominably brutalised during Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture made many of them willing, at first, to welcome the German invaders in 1942 as liberators. Within a year most people recognised their mistake: the racist brutality of the Nazis exceeded even what Stalin's police had imposed, and thus the eventual Soviet victory was welcomed; at first. Then the Communist regime imported ethnic Russians who had been made homeless by the war to rebuild the shattered industrial cities, especially in the Donbas, adding linguistic complexity to the situation within the Soviet Republic of Ukraine [which, along with Belarussia was a given a separate seat in the UN, alongside Russia, as an inducement for Stalin to join the organisation]. The separate soviet republics had no independent power anyway, until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics simply fell apart when Gorbachev lost his grip. Then the former soviet republics gained international recognition as sovereign states, as that term was generally understood in international law. Colonel Putin and his colleagues in the KGB watched, aghast, as the Baltic states, the Balkan states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even Putin's former workplace East Germany joined NATO and applied to be admitted to the EU.
While Belarus was consolidated as a puppet state to Russia, Ukraine made attempts to establish itself as a significant, independent European power; but fell prey to corruption, faction and alien interference. Russia would like the Ukraine to form a close federating with Russia, accepting Russian foreign and defence policy. France has joined with its allies in opposing Russian attempts to push that situation along. There is every reason to expect that Putin will push Macron to take a more pragmatic view of the Ukrainian [and thus the Crimean] situation than have his predecessors; and it would be interesting to know what quid-pro-quo Putin is able to offer France on that delicate topic.
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