Rense.com
US And Russia Seed Of
'New World Order' Seen
| WASHINGTON (AFP) - Terror attacks
in the United States this month instantly thrust Washington and Moscow
into common cause on a top strategic priority, a historic shift presaging
a genuine realignment in world order, according to US and European experts
in geopolitics. In the days since jets plowed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, both countries have made dramatic shifts that put them strikingly in sync on the US-declared war against terrorism and, some experts say, on other global objectives too. This abrupt convergence of interests between the two Cold War-era superpower rivals will have important consequences in the immediate campaign to eradicate terrorism and could also yield fundamental and long-term shifts in the northern hemisphere's balance of power. "Yes, the Russians are open to proceding more in cooperation with the United States, to building a new world order of which they are a part," said Celeste Wallander of the Center for Strategic and International Studieshere. "The reality is they have common interests and central Asia is important among them," explained Wallander, director of the CSIS Russia and Eurasian program. While the two countries do not agree fully on who constitutes a terrorist -- Washington has not accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin's description of rebels in Chechnya as "terrorists" -- the September 11 attacks have generated a strong synergy of views between them that terrorism in general is the biggest danger facing each. And that synergy, the experts say, has the potential to rearrange radically the ways in which the United States, Russia and Europe work together in areas ranging from defense and trade to access to natural resources in central Asia, the Caucasus and elsewhere. "Fundamental changes in security policies are, as a rule, made as a result of crisis situations and that is the case here," said Adam Rotfeld, director of the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institutebased in the Swedish capital. "When the United States said it wanted to organize a global anti-terrorism coalition, Russia was an obvious partner to help do that and we are now in the process of a dramatic redifinition of strategic priorities," he said. In particular, Rotfeld and other experts said, the momentum to continue expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), regarded by Russia as a serious threat to its security, has virtually halted in its tracks. "Who is talking about NATO enlargement now?" Rotfeld said. "It's still important, but has gone way down on the US list of priorities." At the same time, the US-led alliance seems to be rallying to an argument advanced by Putin for the past two years that it should focus not on Russia but instead on areas south and east of Europe including the Caucasus and central Asia. "The Russians have been saying for some time that 'you guys aren't focusing on the real security threat'," Wallander said. "And that's legitimate. NATO finally invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history and it invoked it to deal with a terrorist threat." While no one denies that there has been a sudden and pronounced convergence of goals between the United States and Russia, some reject the notion that it might have repercussions beyond the immediate efforts to combat terrorism. The two countries still have many points of contention and will compete more intensely on many fronts -- notably for control of the vast oil and natural gas reserves of the Caspian Sea basin -- in the future, complicating longer-term pursuit of common objectives, experts say. "Russia and the US have a shared interest in fighting the organized, international aspects of terrorism," said Thomas Keaney, executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. He and other experts agreed that US President George W. Bush's claim Wednesday of links between Chechen rebels and Osama bin Laden, Washington's prime "terrorist" suspect in the September 11 attacks, was clear evidence of that common goal. "But this new cooperation won't go beyond that. There are so many other things that they disagree on and this cooperation continues to be hampered within Russia by a basic anti-US influence," he said. Moscow's assent to basing US warplanes in central Asia, opening of Russian airspace, offer to assist US military operations with search and rescue and sharing of intelligence, he said, was merely a tactical marriage of convenience. Others who have studied or been directly involved in the making of US policy on Russia disagreed. They said the Moscow-Washington warming marked a tectonic strategic shift that many had anticipated could occur when the Soviet Union collapsed and the then-US President George Bush first evoked the emergence of a new world order. It will result not just in acceleration of a more inclusive security scheme for Europe, possibly through Russian membership in NATO, but could also speed Moscow's admission to the World Trade Organization and full integration into the security, commercial and political institutions of the West. "We are in the process of establishing totally new rules in the game," Rotfeld said, saying that moves in central Asia by Russia, the United States and other countries would determine how that game shapes up. Both the United States and Russia have rapidly-growing interest in the resources of the Caspian Sea basin and any cooperation between them in establishing control over those resources would present a formidable geostrategic juggernaut. "We should focus on that region: it is the new area of possible conflict and new kinds of cooperation also," Rotfeld said. |
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