IASPS - News Behind the News

Unfinished After 1991, Renewed After Sept. 11
By Vladimir Socor

September 11, 2001 may not have changed the world, as so many predicted, but its consequences are now beginning to change the face of Eurasia. One year ago, the perpetrators and masterminds of that atrocity could not have anticipated the dynamics that their assault on the West would unleash. The way is now open for the completion of two interrelated strategic processes that were left unfinished in 1991.

One of those processes is the suppression of terrorist and mass-destruction-weapons threats emanating from Iraq. The other is the conclusive dismantlement of the Soviet-Russian empire in Central-Eastern Europe and Central Asia. U.S. President George W. Bush inherited both parts of that unfinished business from his father's presidency, as well as from Bill Clinton's. We know from Mr. Bush's speech to the U.N. yesterday how determined he is to undertake the Iraq assignment. It also falls to the current American president to lead in carrying the other process to its logical conclusion.

The event of one year ago has powerfully accelerated the trend, already underway, of the West's enlargement eastward into Eurasia. The United States and NATO lead this process, with the European Union following slowly and hesitantly. When Mr. Bush issued in June 2001 his clarion call for NATO's enlargement from the Baltic to the Black Sea, he was way ahead of the alliance's consensus. A "big-bang" enlargement of the alliance, while strategically imperative even then, seemed politically utopian due to foot-dragging by some major European leaders -- by none more heavily than by the German chancellor who chanced into Bismarck's chair.

Only 15 months later, NATO is poised to issue membership invitations to seven European nations formerly ruled by Moscow, as well as to upgrade an already close partnership with Ukraine by offering that key country an alliance membership action plan. Three factors are powering this historic transformation. First is the choice of those nations themselves, manifestly willing to contribute to the anti-terrorist effort. Second, the requirements of the post-September 11 world in terms of extending the West's strategic reach. And third, America's capacity to demonstrate to a resentful Moscow that NATO's enlargement would go ahead, not merely ignoring the "red lines" of Yalta, but for the explicit purpose of erasing those lines for good.

In the Kremlin, the events of September 2001 inspired a two-track policy. On one track, President Vladimir Putin aligned Russia with the American-led antiterrorist coalition. He endorsed the U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan, also accepting temporarily the West's military entry into Central Asia as part of that operation.

Was that new Russian alignment merely tactical -- that is, a short-term move, not going beyond the Afghanistan operation, and in the expectation of only a short-lived Western presence in Central Asia ? Or was it strategic -- that is, a long-term alignment with the West to deal with terrorism and mass-destruction weapons at their sources, such as Iraq?

In recent weeks, Mr. Putin has demonstratively warmed up toward Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, countries with a record of spawning international terrorism and of seeking to acquire mass-destruction weapons. His moves are not necessarily signals that he would staunchly oppose possible U.S. and allied action against Iraq, for example. So far, Mr. Putin appears to be signaling that Russian "consent" to such action in the U.N. Security Council -- if the matter goes there -- would carry a very heavy economic, political, and strategic price tag.

This is where the other track of the Kremlin's policy comes into play. Mr. Putin has embarked on an effort to reconstitute a Russian-led political, military and economic bloc in large parts of the former Soviet domain. The Russian president clearly hopes that his alignment with the West against terrorism might earn him a tacit Western acceptance of his bloc-rebuilding agenda.

That agenda includes the following: forcing most of the post-Soviet countries back into a military alliance -- the so-called CIS Collective Security Organization -- complete with Russian bases or the right to introduce Russian troops on those countries' territories; and an exclusively Russian "peacekeeping" role there. It includes reimplanting a Russian military presence in Kyrgyzstan to offset the post-September presence of the West there; and, across Eurasia, setting up a Russian-led customs and economic union, so as to reverse the post-Soviet countries' economic gravitation toward the West.

The agenda further includes monopolizing the transit of Caspian oil and gas to Western consumer countries; supporting anti-Western and corrupt oligarchic groups in Ukraine against that country's Western-oriented reformers; and incorporating the Central European country of Belarus into the Russian Federation, as Mr. Putin publicly proposed last month. It includes establishing privileged access between Russia and the Kaliningrad region across Lithuania -- a NATO and EU candidate country; and setting up a Kaliningrad-type military exclave in Moldova's Transnistria region.

And nowhere is Mr. Putin' agenda more immediately apparent than in the case of Georgia, against which he has this year authorized several military incursions. This week, Mr. Putin chose the September 11 day of mourning to order his top brass, in a televised diatribe, to draw up plans for military operations inside Georgia. The pretext is anti-terrorism, though there is no evidence of any terrorist threat to Russia from Georgia.

Subduing Georgia and reversing its pro-Western policy has been a personal goal of Mr. Putin's from the moment he came to power. His success there would force Azerbaijan and Kazakstan to export all of their oil and gas via Russian routes. To underscore that point, Russian naval and air forces staged last month -- at Mr. Putin's personal orders -- the biggest demonstration of force ever in the oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea.

Such designs should remain illusory as long as the U.S. leads resolutely in the struggle against the twin threats of terrorism and mass-destruction weapons. In that effort, the American-led coalition of the willing includes most of the post-Soviet countries, most of which have cast their lot with the West. Even Russia's few genuine allies -- such as Belarus and Armenia -- seek to avoid reabsorption by Moscow. For their part, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have welcomed American forces on their territories. Azerbaijan has offered this as well, and together with Georgia it hopes to initiate the process of joining NATO. So far, at least, the Kremlin has tried in vain to stop these countries from exercising their Western choice.

September 11, 2001, as well as newly discovered energy reserves, have turned Central Asia's "stans" and the South Caucasus countries almost overnight from strategic backwaters into strategic prizes of the first magnitude. The U.S. and Western presence in these countries not only constitutes a geopolitical revolution, but answers to these countries' own needs of economic modernization and evolutionary political change. In this sense, the U.S.-led presence, with the guarantees it provides of security and development, is the best thing that could have happened to these post-Soviet countries. While anti-terrorism requirements precipitated this historic process, it must be seen as a long-haul effort in which the enlarging West has its own, vital political and economic stakes.


Mr. Socor is a Senior Fellow of the Washington-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal Europe on September 13th, 2002.