Edited by W. Joseph Stroupe with the mission of explaining world events correctly via strategic analysis & forecasting
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At the third annual meeting known as the Valdai Club, a meeting between the President of Russia and Russia-watchers made up largely of Western political scientists and academics and held this year on September 9, 2006, Russian President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged Russia's great and mounting global energy leverage, but he has also delivered an ostensibly reassuring promise that Russia won't use its rapidly intensifying and expanding global energy leverage to dominate others like "a superpower" would.
The Valdai Club has become a choice forum for Mr. Putin to attempt to allay Western fears over Russia's increasingly assertive and independent course and to polish Russia's image abroad. As such, one must realize that at a forum that is obviously slanted toward achievement of such political and public relations goals, the statements and claims made are specifically designed to accomplish the forum's purpose, and one must apply the appropriate objectivity filters when analyzing them.
The hard fact is that a series of powerful arguments and irrefutable evidence exist to render completely hollow Mr. Putin's promise to 'play nice' with mounting Russian global energy leverage. Even if Mr. Putin's promise is truly sincere and heartfelt, trends and forces not nearly under his control will soon dictate an outcome precisely opposite of his soothing promise, rendering it completely empty. How so? And what are the powerful arguments and irrefutable evidence that establish beyond any doubt the accuracy of such a conclusion?
Russian President Vladimir Putin heads a resurgent Russia that is racing ever faster toward the consolidation of its key global position as respects energy security, the unique global position where it, more than any other single energy exporter, can and in fact already is setting the global agenda and taking the unquestioned leadership role in defining and drawing the circle of international energy security. As evidenced at the recent SCO Summit in June of 2006, where Mr. Putin proposed the creation of an SCO-centered energy club, and the G-8 Summit the following month Russia has already expertly threaded the needle of international energy security policy, doing so with the thread of its own compelling energy security vision and strategy, powerfully bolstered by its mounting global energy leverage. It is now deftly wielding that needle and thread to sew together the circle made up of the globe's key energy producers and the powerful rising energy consuming economies of the East.
The profoundly deepening relations between Russia and the vast bulk of the globe's resource-rich regimes, along with the collective, increasing tilt of that entire producer grouping toward the rising markets in the East in accelerating diversification away from the traditional markets in the West, evidences the mounting potency of Russia's key global leadership role as respects energy. The circle of energy security is being drawn, is near to completion, and its center is in the East, not in the West. The current resources-based geopolitical rise of Russia and its partners bespeaks their impending, collective achievement of global ascendancy at the potentially gargantuan economic and political expense of the West.
The mounting global energy leverage that is increasingly coming to reside in the hands of circle-drawing Russia and its strategic partners is an irresistible power literally unequalled in all human history, for it is the power to throttle, or even to credibly threaten to strangle, the highly industrialized economies of the West. Such power makes the military potency of the US and/or of the old Soviet Union pale by comparison.
Why should anyone believe that Mr. Putin and rising Russia and its increasingly authoritarian resource-rich global partners are an exception to the maxim that says "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"?
What do Russian policies and actions to-date reveal as to the issue of whether or not Russia is "acting like an energy superpower"?
Part II of this series examines the answer to that question.
| Note: This Gold version of the analysis is significantly condensed as compared to the full text Platinum version available only to subscribers. The Platinum version addresses head-on the issue of the unfortunate abuse of global power on the part of the US since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and how Russian leaders are headed down the same ignoble path. |
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