EDITORIAL
United States Vice-President Dick Cheney had been keeping a very low profile in this election season before he surfaced last week in a tour of eastern Europe.
This is no surprise really, since the vice-president has always been more interested in the "Great Game" than the flighty game of politics, especially since he's now considered a liability by much of his own Republican party.
Cheney's trip was designed to reaffirm Washington's support for former Soviet bloc nations that chose to realign themselves with the West after the fall of the old Iron Curtain, but are now on shaky ground with the rise of a reinvigorated Russia.
The latest edition of the New York Review of Books carries an article ("Georgia and the Balance of Power", by George Friedman) that makes the point that the Russian invasion of Georgia did not change the balance of power in Eurasia, but merely announced to a mostly unsuspecting world that the balance of power had already shifted. What is also clear is that the shifting process is still going on and probably will be for some time, as nations scramble to reach the most advantageous position in the newest world order.
The membership of the European Union - especially England and France - has been for the most part condemning of Russia's invasion of Georgia after Georgia mounted an attack to re-take the break-away region of South Ossetia. But some EU nations such as Germany have taken a more nuanced approach, with the view that there is plenty of blame to go around. Of course, much of Europe relies on Russian natural gas and oil, and the dependence on Russian energy will only grow in the coming years unless alternatives are aggressively developed.
The divisions within the EU were underscored by a failure to reach an agreement to call for sanctions against Russia in an emergency summit of the EU Council in Brussels on Monday. The Council did issue a statement that the crisis in Georgia had introduced a crossroads in relations between the EU and Russia, and the EU said it was prepared to send civilian monitors to Georgia to assure that Russia was abiding by the ceasefire it helped to negotiate.
Nowhere is the state of flux more apparent than in Ukraine, and nowhere are the tensions higher between the two former Cold War adversaries. Russia maintains a naval base in the Black Sea and pipelines carry Russian gas across the Ukraine to European consumers.
Small wonder this was the last stop on Cheney's mission to keep nations in the region with aspirations to join the North Atlantic treaty Organisation (Nato) in line.
Cheney met with both Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, but was given a somewhat different reception by each. Yushchenko has been a strong supporter of Georgia. However, Prime Minister Tymoshenko's party blocked a motion condemning Russia's actions in Georgia, after which Yushchenko's party walked out of the coalition government in protest.
The most important player in the years to come may well be China, which has forged a quasi-alliance with Russia on military cooperation and generally has supported Russia in the UN Security Council. Yet analysts say that if the issue comes to a vote in the Security Council China could not support Russia because its actions in Georgia violated Beijing's principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and would undermine China's claim to Taiwan.
It may be that China will seek to remain unaligned as much as possible in the new power struggle in Eurasia, in order to have both sides court its favour.
Whatever the eventual outcome, the sad truth is that all the manoeuvring is already taking a heavy toll. For one, it severely damages the chances for a new and much-needed nuclear disarmament treaty between the US and Russia, which might be extended to include China. And in perpetuating the game to control the world's remaining hydrocarbon reserves, it also undermines any hope for a broad-based international strategy on climate change.
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