NATO or Shanghai?

It Appears That A New Cold War Is Brewing, Though It Will Not Be The Same As The Last.

By Gamil Mattar
30 August - 5 September 2007
Issue No. 860
Ahram

As if the Arab world did not have enough problems, it seems that Arabs now have to peer into a crystal ball over a question that conjures up the spectre of a tension-fraught political era, the causes and consequences of which remain contentious until today.

Now that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has become a political and military reality, and now that NATO has stretched to our regional borders and has exerted its influence in powerful ways within these borders, should not Arab governments begin to consider formulating a new foreign policy?

Should they not start thinking about which international camp to side with: the Russian-led Eastern one or the US-led Western one? Or, alternatively, should they plan on founding a third camp consisting of countries that do not wish to align with either the East or the West?

This is not as easy or straightforward a choice as some might imagine.

Just as occurred in the Cold War era, both camps have aligned themselves on an ideological basis. Unlike in those days, the ideological battle line for any impending confrontation will have nothing to do with communism versus capitalism. We're all capitalists now.

It is also clear that the two sides have passed that preparatory phase towards a new international confrontation, or the revival of an old confrontation beneath new ideological banners.

Recent developments, such as Russia's reversion to that familiar Cold War ploy of sending its nuclear missile carrying warplanes over NATO bases, leave little doubt that President Vladimir Putin intends to keep true to the pledges he has made over the past seven years. The Russian president has pledged to revive Moscow's global status in a way that would ensure that his country would never have to serve as the "shoeshine boy" to Western politicians again. He pledged not to allow the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders and other Western defence and intelligence projects to encroach on Russia's influence with its neighbours. And he vowed that in order to achieve these objectives he would not stop short of igniting a second cold war, using the same means and strategies to which the Soviet Union had resorted. In short, Russia will at all costs prevent the West from fencing it off behind rings of military and political barbed wire.

It was extremely interesting to watch Russia, over the past seven years, patiently and steadfastly recuperating what it lost under Boris Yeltsin. In the two years before the end of Yeltsin's era, we observed Putin's meteoric rise through the KGB, the sole nationalist foundation to emerge relatively unscathed from the Western engineered assault of anarchy that overthrew most of the country's institutions. It was Putin who rescued Russia's petrochemical industries just as they were about to be transferred into foreign hands. We were then awestruck by the historical alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, in accordance with which he pledged to protect it from waves of Western evangelism. And one could not help but be impressed with the superbly devised plans that he put into effect to slowly and carefully build his country up again.

Then we watched Putin suddenly throw down the gauntlet before the West in his famous speech before the security conference in Munich in February 2007. After this, Russia proceeded in bold and audacious steps towards the brink of inevitable confrontation. At one moment, it planted the Russian flag 4,000 metres beneath the surface of the polar icecap. At the next, Russian military aircraft breached Britain's airspace. Then it announced that it would stop abiding by existing conventional weapons agreements and that Kalingrad would become its largest existing antiballistic missile base. Before long, Russian long-range aircraft flew over America's Pacific military base in Guam and over British territorial waters. Soon afterwards, Russia asked Syria to consider giving the Russian fleet access to the Tartoos military base, signalling its determination to reassert the right of its navy to navigate the Mediterranean. Then it conducted joint military exercises with the other six SCO countries, officially inaugurating a new Russian-led military alliance that includes China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and that India, Iran and Pakistan appear to be interested in joining.

On the other side, all indications point to the resolve to prolong a unipolar order and to perpetuate the US control of the helm. It is obvious that Western nations have busily combined their efforts towards another policy of military, political and economic containment. They are stirring up trouble in all the countries that neighbour Russia and are building military bases in Eastern European countries that have recently joined NATO, most of which border on Russia. They had promised Moscow that NATO would not exceed certain bounds if Russia agreed to allow the Baltic nations to join the Western alliance, only to renege on this promise. Already, they have made overtures to Ukraine and Georgia to sign up with NATO and the US has procured military facilities or access to bases in these countries, just as it had in other Central Asian countries, perhaps precisely in anticipation of the ascendance of the SCO.

Commentators in Russia and China believe that the US is attempting to capitalise on the chaos it has sewn in Afghanistan and Iraq and that it is working at breakneck speed to precipitate something similar in Iran in order to secure for itself, and the West in general, direct or indirect military presence beginning from Lebanon and Palestine and extending to the borders of Russia and China. Russia and China, for their part, are clearly striving to keep this scheme in check, as difficult as this task is due to the general deterioration in political conditions in the Middle East and most countries of the Islamic world.

The world has returned to the kind of situation Henry Kissinger likes best: the scramble for a new balance of power. Nor do I have the slightest doubt that the former US secretary of state will use every bit of influence he has to persuade Washington to do all in its power to forestall a closer bond between China and Russia, which was the very reason that he pursued policies of rapprochement towards both of these countries during the final phases of the Vietnam War.

We've returned to the type of situation that everyone says the Arabs like best: the opportunity to play both ends against the middle. But there's a significant difference this time.

During the Cold War, the world was divided into three ideological/political spheres: the capitalist camp, the Marxist- socialist camp and the non-aligned camp. As reasonable as the non-aligned movement might appear to almost everyone today, the Americans at the time denounced it vehemently. To John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under Dwight D Eisenhower, the Marxist-socialist camp was such an evil that no one could remain neutral in the face of it. The Arabs were punished severely for having chosen not to take sides.

Today, given that the capitalist-socialist dichotomy no longer exists, the groundwork is being laid for a new political/ideological antithesis. According to British MP Mike Gapes, chairman of the House of Commons' Foreign Affairs Committee, the battle line is being drawn between "democracies" and "dictatorships", with the US championing the former and Russia and China championing the latter, plus all "anti-democratic" countries and those that are still straddling the fence.

It is difficult to imagine how this neat division will square with democratic India's membership in the "alliance of tyranny". It is even harder to imagine the Arabs joining the American-led "democratic alliance". But strangest of all would be when the Arabs contemplate forming an organisation of non-aligned nations, which is to say, nations opposed to both democracy and dictatorship.

* The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.

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