Putin is playing a very dangerous game. But I think he has forgotten that in international politics you want to play the long game.
Perhaps he is playing the long game and our problem is that we don't know what that long game is. I certainly haven't seen it mentioned here yet.
The
Eurasian Economic Union is Russia's answer to the EU. It's still in the planning and formative stages, but it's considered Putin sees it as his legacy. It will be comprised of most of the republics of the USSR and is considered to be an attempt to re-establish the USSR -- from the Wikipedia article:
quote:
The United States has expressed its opposition to the Eurasian Union, claiming it is "an attempt" to re-establish a USSR-type union among the former Soviet republics. In December 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed "It’s not going to be called that {USSR}. It’s going to be called customs union, it will be called the Eurasian Union and all of that, but let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it".
I first heard of the EEU a week ago on NPR during an
All Things Considered interview with Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale and author of
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, about his recent article on fascism, Russia and Ukraine -- (
What It Means When The 'Wolf Cries Wolf': Fascism In Ukraine, with both audio and transcript). Much of his interview was about how the EEU is to be based on aspects of both fascism and communism, combined the parts of both systems that are seen to work and placing it in opposition to the West's liberal democracy. They are embracing conservative views and setting themselves up as holding the moral high ground over the EU:
quote:
SIEGEL: You cite a Russian who is obviously against the Ukrainian protests as claiming that if Ukraine joined the European Union, they would then have to recognize same-sex marriage, that's part of the package of being European. That's the kind of argument that's being used on the Russian side here, you say.
SNYDER: Yeah, and this is really interesting and really important, I think. What's happened is that Russian society has become a little more conservative over the years. President Putin has recognized an opportunity there and has geared his domestic policy towards what some might see a far right social conservative agenda, where the discrimination of gays is front and center.
He's using that now not just in domestic policy but in foreign policy. So he's defining - Russian propaganda strangely enough also defines the opposition in Ukraine as either gay or subordinate to a European Union that is gay. The idea is that Western Europe, is decadent, and decadence includes sexual freedoms, which of course can't be allowed in Russia because they would destroy Russia's Christian civilization.
This is a kind of interesting global turn in Russian policy. It draws directly on American anti-gay Christians, who in fact have gone to Moscow to consult with President Putin about these issues. It's an attempt to create a kind of new ideology whereby Russia can have some moral standing in the world.
And it reaches out to far right groups in the U.S., and in Europe as well, and in particular it gives Eurasianism a kind of ideological backbone. What they're trying to say is that you Europeans have betrayed civilization. We Eurasians are the real Europeans because we stand for religion, and we stand for the discrimination of people who behave in a way which we don't regard as conventional.
SIEGEL: You also write that while Ukrainian authorities say the protestors are led by, or they are Nazis, they tell their own police that the Jews are actually running the protests in Kiev.
SNYDER: Yeah, I mean, this reveals the extent to which propagandists in Kiev and Moscow assume that we don't really pay attention. They think that if they tell us the protestors are Nazis, we'll be all confused, we'll scuttle around, we won't be able to formulate policy. And I think in some measure they're right.
I think we are quite - because of our perfectly legitimate convictions about the second world war, it's easy to manipulate us by referring to these things. At the same time, one of the ways to motivate violence against the protestors is to claim that they are associated with some outside force, whether those outsiders are gays or whether they're Jews.
And so in internal propaganda, the riot police are being told that the leaders of the opposition are Jews. So the same people are being defined as Nazis or as Jews depending on the circumstances.
Ideology aside, the Ukraine's oil, gas, and agricultural resources would make it an important member of the EEU, one that Putin cannot afford to allow to join the West instead. And warm-water ports are so important to the Russian navy that Putin cannot allow anything to endanger the Black Sea Fleet's ports in Crimea. Several centuries of Russian history, wherein they were repeatedly bulldozed by invading armies, has raised national defense and the defense of its borders to a form of national paranoia.
Russia has a lot of experience playing the long game. The US does not play the long game very well.
Edited by dwise1, : Added "here" to " I certainly haven't seen it mentioned here yet."
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