Its one of realism on the Kremlins part, faced with an array of tinpot democracies around it, ready to sell out to what they see as the highest bidder. The most glaring example of this is Kyrgyzstans President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who played Russia and the US off against each other over its Manas airbase, first telling the US to get lost when Russia promised $2.15 billion in aid, and then last month reversing the decision and allowing the US to stay, tripling the rent and extracting other goodies in the process. Even Russophile Lukashenko in Belarus plays the same game with Russia and Europe. And then theres Uzbekistans President Islam Karimov, who said yes and then no an agreement on the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces, not to mention Turkmenistan, Georiga, Armenia, Azerbaijan or Lithuania, and on and on. A game of chance has developed in the post-Soviet space: Who can swindle the Kremlin in the coolest way? wrote analyst Aleksandr Golts when news of the Manas decision broke.
Russia cannot compete with NATO, certainly not without strengthening the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and certainly not with Afghanistan a black hole threatening to suck in its Central Asian neighbours. The CSTO is important less as a counterbalance to NATO than as a viable guarantor of regional security and it's only a matter of time for Russia's neighbours to realise this.
It looks like Washington has won this stand-off with Moscow, getting its Afghanistan yellow-brick road and its Polish cake. The market value of allying with flashy but fair-weather Washington outshines the more reliable but less alluring Moscow for the present. But US support is for local elites willing to do its bidding. Local populations will gain nothing, and they are wiser than their leaders, with fond memories of their Russian bulwark. The US may have won the battle. Let the US and NATO play out their lethal games in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Progress must be shared, Obama said in his Moscow speech to university students. Lets see what fruits his policies bear that we can divvy up.
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Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ . You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/
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