The new cold war, a brief history
Matt Gurney, National Post
Published: Friday, August 15, 2008
The Russian advance deep into Georgia, with tanks rolling into the city of Gori yesterday in flagrant violation of the EU sponsored ceasefire, seems to have caught many off-guard. Perhaps the most surprised of all is Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, whose attempt to crush South Ossetian separatists under the noses of Russian troops provoked the response that has seen his country heavily bombed and partially occupied. While Western diplomats bluster and offer stern but vague warnings to Moscow, the Russians continue their assault.
The invasion of Georgia marks only the latest in a series of escalating Russian provocations. In the past, when I would slip up and call them "Soviets," I'd always correct myself. These days, I no longer see the point. Our cunning Cold War enemies, repackaged now as Russian nationalists, are back. The ideology has changed, but the methodology is all too familiar.
While it has taken years for Russia's depleted military strength to match the ambitions of its leadership, the seeds of the current conflict can be seen clearly as far back as four years ago. Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western, pro-NATO Ukrainian presidential candidate, almost lost his life to a clumsy poisoning attempt that left him physically scarred but politically triumphant. Having failed to stop the popular "Orange Revolution" from sweeping Yushchenko into office, the Russians then sought to discredit him politically when, in a move grimly reminiscent of the Berlin blockade, they disrupted the natural gas supplies that provided one-third of the Ukraine's power and upon which its economy depended. The fact that this action also disrupted energy supplies in Western Europe seemed to be of little concern to Russia's then-president and now Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin.
Two years after the attempt on Yushchenko's life, Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of Putin and defector to the United Kingdom, was murdered on British soil, falling victim to a radioactive poison the same day he made allegations linking Putin to the murder of a Russian journalist, one among many such silencings. While neither of the poisonings can be explicitly linked back to Russia, given that both Putin and his inner circle are former KGB men, it can be said that in these cases the smoke almost certainly means there's fire.
In 2007, Putin ratcheted up the Cold War nostalgia a notch further when he announced that Russia would resume regular patrol flights by long-range bombers, capable of carrying nuclear weapons. While it cannot be proven one way or the other whether or not these planes are indeed carrying live nukes, they have certainly made a nuisance of themselves.
The bombers, mainly the venerable Tu-95 Bear, have flown provocatively close to North America's airspace, on more than one occasion prompting the North American Air Defence Command to scramble Canadian and American fighter jets to intercept the Russian planes and ensure they stayed outside of our territory. Russian bombers have also flown past the American military base on Guam, and in a brazen move in February of this year, flown over the USS Nimitz battle group, with one bomber passing within 2,000 feet of the carrier herself.
The Europeans have received similar visits. In an instance particularly revealing of Putin's desire to assert his strength, the British were forced to scramble Tornado fighter jets on three separate occasions in July, 2007, a low point in British-Russian relations brought about by Russia's refusal to extradite a suspect in Litvinenko's murder. Three months later, a pair of Bear bombers flew over the North Sea, alarmingly close to a meeting of NATO defence ministers in the Netherlands, once again compelling fighters to be sent aloft to intercept them.
Nor have the Russians hesitated to use maskirovka, or deception, to further intimidate. In April, 2006, a Russian air force general bragged to reporters that an advanced Tu-160 Blackjack bomber, modified to be stealthier than earlier models, had successfully penetrated NORAD's defences and overflown North American territory without being detected. For obvious reasons, this claim cannot be verified; one cannot prove or disprove the presence of an invisible aircraft.
Much more recently, Russian media reported only last month that the air force was considering basing nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba, a move that, though denied by Moscow, brought an immediate response from the U. S. military. General Norman Schwartz, on the eve of his promotion to Air Force chief of staff, told Congress that any such move, so reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, would be "crossing the line." How seriously either of these threats should be taken is unclear, but certainly, they were not meant to improve relations.
These overt provocations have been exacerbated by Russia's increasingly apparent diplomatic opposition to Western interests. Whether manifested by its refusal to back international action against the Sudanese government's ethnic cleansing in Darfur, or the proposed sale of fully modern anti-aircraft batteries to the Iranians over the strident objections of Israel, Russia has set itself against the West across a wide spectrum of issues.
Today, with Georgia getting the same kind of treatment the Soviet Union meted out to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan and the Baltic states, it might be time for the West to accept the fact that these are not unrelated incidents. The Russian bear, after almost 20 years of hibernation, has awoken. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can return to the same kind of hard-nosed, pragmatic diplomacy that allowed us to avoid disaster without sacrificing our vital interests during the first Cold War.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
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