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Russians Playing According to American Scenario

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  • Russians Playing According to American Scenario

    Russians Playing According to American Scenario

    Igor Muradyan, Political Analyst
    Comments - Wednesday, 28 May 2014, 12:27


    The Russian propaganda is choking from pleasure and at the same time
    demonstrates its stupidity and limited arguments on the
    Russian-Chinese "gas" deal which is a life buoy for V. Putin and his
    team (which, apparently, does not belong to him any more). However,
    ask a question to a more or less sane Russian commentator, and he will
    tell you that the deal is not just written on water with a fork but
    also may mislead and create illusory hope for perspective.

    Most probably, a traditional "pipeline game" is underway without a
    clear start and a comprehensible result. Apparently, the perspective
    is clear to all the stakeholders except Russia. Such a large-scale
    pipeline, irrespective of what is going to flow via it, belongs to
    consumers rather than to suppliers. A classic example is the Blue
    Stream through which Russia supplies gas to Turkey: the consumer
    dictated the prices and conditions when the pipeline had already been
    laid out.

    The failures of South Stream, as well as the Burgas-Alexandropoulos
    oil pipeline also illustrate vulnerability of such projects due to the
    position of consumers. The dark side of this situation may be
    transportation of the Russian oil via Baku-Tbilisi-Geihan which Russia
    fought so ardently and which was an important element of Israel's
    national security.

    Russia is trying to demonstrate the results of agreement with China as
    a factor of counterbalance in the relations with the United States and
    the entire Western world. At the same time, the Chinese leaders were
    reserved and did not try to overtake the events, in other words, it
    would be funny to detect formation of a Russian-Chinese alliance
    against the United States and the West. China is trying to squeeze all
    use from its relations with Russia but is not going to set up an
    alliance with Russia, especially in counterbalance to the United
    States.

    Over the past few years China has diversified its foreign trade,
    developed technology and is able to produce anything without any
    "special favors" from Russia. China is only interested in raw
    materials and carbohydrates and unlike its northern neighbor it makes
    real plans rather than propagandistic and demagogic turns. However
    strong the Chinese-American controversies are, both great powers play
    the same pre-arranged games which will never be accessible to other
    great powers. Now the United States and China understand each other so
    well that they do not need the odd man out, only some add-ins to their
    positions.

    Washington has never considered a Chinese-Russian alliance as
    realistic. It considers relations between these two powers in the
    light of historical practice and the real balance of forces. The
    United States has attentively followed Shanghai Cooperation
    Organization and even tried to co-opt Pakistan into this organization,
    apparently in order to disorganize it. However, neither SCO, nor
    relations between China and Russia were ever viewed by Washington as a
    threat to its interests. Too deep are controversies among them,
    especially in a medium-term perspective.

    The Russians understand that it is better than the Americans and
    always reserve factors for counteraction. In any case, the Russians
    believe that they have such levers of counteraction.

    However, in this case the point is to what extent the "gas deal"
    contradicts or is in line with the interests of the United States and
    Europe, i.e. to what extent it fits into the global energy policy and
    to what extent it will influence the global situation of
    carbohydrates. Therefore, it is important to understand that China and
    the United States have been trying to agree division of zones of
    influence based on the mutually favorable principle.

    Now it is evident that the United States has conceded Central Asia to
    China not because the Americans were weaker there. The United States
    mostly controls Central Asia having considerable military contingent
    in Afghanistan and technical and political capacity to limit Russian
    and Chinese presence in the region. However, they preferred conceding
    the region to China because it was meaningless to agree with Russia on
    anything, especially that China does not pretend to involvement of
    regional states in its empire while Russia is speaking too much about
    it.

    Central Asia is the arena where observation of processes helps figure
    out most rules of development of regional and global geopolitical and
    geoeconomic situations. By analogy the United States and the West
    "conceded" all or part of Russia's resources to China because the West
    does not need those resources. It would be logical to think in the
    following way: if the European Union implements a policy of reduction
    of dependence on Russian carbohydrates, it is better to concede
    Russian gas to China than force China to participate in development of
    carbohydrates in other regions, such as Africa or Latin America.

    It should be noted that Chinese economic and political expansion in
    Southeast Asia has changed in nature. In other words, if it is not
    limited, it mostly takes into account the interests of the United
    States and its partners. Some experts tend to explain this by concerns
    of the countries of this region about Chinese expansion but this
    dissatisfaction had occurred earlier whereas recently the Chinese
    policy has been limited a little more.

    In other words, in the U.S.-Chinese relations Eurasia is a priority
    zone of Chinese influence, especially that the United States is not
    interested in the resources of this region. This has been highlighted
    for multiple times and it is found in the U.S. government's documents.

    The Eurasian direction of Chinese expansion is an important trick for
    distracting Chine from other directions. Of course, in a long-term
    perspective every scenario will be revised for more than once but now
    the Russians have been offered this scenario, and it has to accept it.

    Hence, ostensibly, there is a U.S.-Chinese agreement on the Russian
    "gas deal", in other words, the American scenario is followed. This is
    not bad if everyone is happy and benefits. However, the notion of
    benefit is highly relative in geopolitical arrangements, and this
    category should be studied in its dynamics. Europe will not suffer,
    because such immense investments in a "gas project" are impossible
    without the participation of European banks, possibly also
    transnational companies.

    - See more at: http://www.lragir.am/index/eng/0/comments/view/32491#sthash.i6KxOJgg.dpuf


    From: Baghdasarian
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