There is an article in the current issue of The Nation by Stephen F. Cohen entitled The New American Cold War. It is a long article with some excellent premises and conclusions. I heartily recommend it, not so much to stimulate activity in Russian Studies in our colleges and universities, but to endorse the idea that Bush/ Cheney/ Rumsfeld/ Rice are playing a very dangerous game with a very sick country.Russia is not well. The same two Republican lawyers with whom I sat a couple of weeks ago coming back from Yearly Kos asked me about Russia and Vladimir Putin, and I said this:Putin has his hands full. Russia is not stable and, if I were in Putin's shoes, I would want to reduce the number of variables in the brew to a managable few. This means a clamp down on free speech, ... but Russians over fifteen years of age know how to do this. It means a mix of state run economy, while nurturing home-grown industries to life free of direct state control, ... but Russians know about state control and how to deal with it. What they do not understand is the concentration of vital resources in private for-profit hands, accomplished by the way by enviable chutzpah and outright thievery. Russia is the land of patience, but what Russians hate with a passion is having their noses rubbed in it.
I told them much more, of course, but it was anecdotal stuff about Russians and their view of capitalism, crime, punishment, and religion. It amounts to this: Russia missed the Enlightenment. Russia missed the development of grass-roots intellectual liberal politics. Russia missed the first stirrings of private commercial enterprise. Russia missed the frenzy of empire the first time in the 16th and 17th centuries and again in the 19th. Russians who are Orthodox have a distinctly different view of the individual in the church from that of Roman Catholics and completely different from western Protestant sects. Russians are proud of their perseverance and prouder still of their intelligentsia, their writers, musicians, science, and engineering. Russians are, as Cohen clearly outlines, starving in contemporary Russia amid waves of HIV and tuberculosis. Putin has his hands full, for it is obvious to him and to most of the educated people in Russia that Russia as it now is cannot survive.
But, it must survive! It is a thermonuclear power and continuing to arm itself against a sea of troubles surrounding it.
This brings us to the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice foreign policy, such as it is. Underlying all foreign policy decisions made by Bush & Co. are the twin and mutually consistent principles that it is good to spend lots of money on warfare and its infrastructure ... so as to "Starve the Beast" of liberal social programs ... so long as the money is spent to enrich American corporations, especially those which have contributed significantly to the Republican Party, for the ultimate goal (to be achieved by any means whatsoever) is permanent power.
So, with that Bush & Co. are confronted with several inescapable realities ... not their favorite thing, by the way ... among them being the reality that most of the worlds' petroleum is not in American hands, but controlled by regimes like the Saudis that are wildly different culturally from America, like Nigeria where tinpot despots are as likely as rain in the jungle, like Venezuela and its current leader, Hugo Chavez, who is ideologically antipathetic to Bush & Co., like Russia, where instability is rampant and yet there always seems to be a reasonable possibility gaining an upper hand as Russia writhes under the forces of undercapitalized modernization let loose two decades ago.
Petroleum is the key, it begins in Texas and ends wherever oil is found. The goal is to control petroleum and the means are Texan, direct and brutal, if necessary. The Enron highjacking of California was but a small taste of what Texans are willing to do to prove themselves ... to themselves.
So, Asian Russia and her former Soviet Socialist Republics in Muslim Central Asia are replete with petroleum or are pipeline places of strategic value. Bush & Co. are drawn to these places like James Dean to west Texas, and Bush will do anything that fits the nested goals described above.
So far the policy is has been to "needle" Putin on liberalization issues by consorting with his neighbors as if the intent were to establish a new "cordon sanitaire" around the decaying Russian state, (more to keep in the rot than against the Russian army), but principally to maintain a hostile relationship leading perhaps to a smaller version of the hugely profitable Cold War. Courting Ukraine and Georgia fit this model. Courting Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, and the other Caspian states fits the "needling" model and the petro model.
China is on the chess board, too, of course, and the situation there is a petroleum/energy situation compounded by an out-of-control balance of payments problem exacerbated by the desire to effect liberalization of the Chinese regime (up to a point, of course). The U.S. hopes to infiltrate the burgeoning Chinese corporations with American MBA agents provocateur, that is, to colonize China from within her industries like wasps laying eggs in the larvae of insects many times their size. Russia then feels herself caught on the horns of the "needling" and Chinese competition/hegemony dilemma.
The problem, as Cohen, so adequately points out, is that Russia may not be stable enough to play too much Texas Hold 'Em in the petroleum market place or take too much "needling" on the diplomatic fronts, given the strong (state-assisted) resurgence of Russian nationalism, which is (by the way) the current antidote to unhappy economic circumstances. Russians on the street may force Putin's hand in one of these little "needling" stunts and give the Bushites exactly what they want, but not when they want it—a cold war and a violent contest over what used to be Soviet Central Asia.
The most interesting part of the Bushite policy is the slight of hand diplomacy of involving Russia in the Iran nukes problem. Putin has almost nothing to win in this theatre except the ephemeral warm regards of petroleum minded folks in China and the U.S. He can't export Russian petroleum to Iran; Iran is, afterall, the third largest petroleum reserve in the world (after Iraq/Kuwait (#2), and Saudi Arabia (#1). The "Guard" in Iran want nukes as befits their custodianship of world petroleum. Putin does not want them to have nukes because that will destabilize central Asia even as it destabilizes the middle east.
The U.S. should adopt a policy of sustaining Russia ... and Putin ... for the next couple of decades on the principle that all that military hardware Russia has should be controlled. Second, the Russians could be significant allies when, as it surely and inevitably must come to pass, China decides that the world monetary and trade situations no longer suit its level of development and it cashes in all those U.S. IOUs. It is unlikely that Bush or Cheney will be able to see this far, though, since both are playing their own personal boyish games of cowboys and oil wells. At the end of it all one can only hope that Condi Rice is smarter than she has been so far and that Bush and his playmates get tired of these games and go back to their respective ranches.
First published by Oblogov -- 
at The American Liberalism Project and reproduced with permission.