#23 - JRL 2007-18 - JRL Home
From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com)
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007
Subject: Re: 2007-#17-JRL - re Liakhov, one more time [re: Oil, Gas, NIS, Iran]

As always, I appreciate Andrei Liakhov's response and have no problem with the facts he brings to the table. The problem is that his facts don't explain the other relevant facts about what transpired.

1. As Andrei says, the WTO has pressured Russia to let domestic gas/oil prices rise to world price levels. However, prices charged to NIS are secondary in this WTO matter, compared to domestic prices and domestic interests. Western advisers have been pressuring Russia on domestic petro prices ever since 1991. In the price changes, motivations other than Western pressure have been important -- usually more important in explaining some differentials in prices and price offers to the NIS. The political motivations have often been explicitly acknowledged with an "of course" (as in "of course we are not going to go on subsidizing them if they're not on our side any more"), after a polemical denial of them and blackening of anyone who would mention them from a critical standpoint.

2. Price hikes for NIS states have often, tho not always, been abrupt and connected to political disfavor, and/or to offers to keep prices lower (evidently forgetting about the alleged WTO determinant of all this) in exchange for Russian control of NIS pipelines.

The former factor - price leaps as punishment for political disfavor - has raised fears about potential future use of the gas weapon farther afield. The latter factor - pipeline control - also has obvious geopolitical implications: for putting NIS states more at Russia's mercy, with risks also for states farther west. No matter how often Russia repeats that its control over all the NIS pipelines would relieve states farther abroad from being at the mercy of Russia-NIS disputes over prices and transit, the Western states farther abroad are aware of larger considerations: that most of the NIS transit states bear the West no geopolitical animosity, much of the Russian elite does bear the West such animosity, waves of anti-Western hostility unfortunately keep passing through that elite; and the power of Russian elites would be increased, the role of NIS states in Russia-NIS-West gas triangle eliminated, by turning their pipelines over to Russia.

3. Some NIS states with pro-Russian leaderships have also recently been hit by price hikes, harming their relations with Russia. This seems only partly explicable by rational economic reasons or by WTO reasons. What can explain the rest of it? Occasionally it may be partly a matter of a tactical use of the gas weapon against even a friendly leadership. More often, however, it seems that it serves as a way of acting out and "proving" the Kremlin's polemical explanation of its other hikes as purely economic.

In other words, Russian pricing policy is sometimes getting whipped around on the tail end of a polemic against Western critics. "There, look, we raised prices against our friends, not just our enemies, so you can't accuse us anymore of political motives. Besides, we're destroying the last remnants of our own empire this way, so why are you always accusing us of imperialism?"

That is a most irrational way of making policy. And it, too, has a political motivation, even if a pitiful one -- to make a PR polemic (to be fair, this is rational in the logic of some circles, where the New World Order is conceived as a concrete entity in which Western power is led stomping around the world by Western Media PR). The polemic is usually unconvincing anyway: the price hike is often done in an irrationally brusque manner, and the Kremlin often cannot always resist the temptation of mixing it with other political/geopolitical demands, such as control over the country's pipelines. The result is that it only further fuels the accusations of use of gas for political pressure, and thence of "imperialism", overwrought and misplaced as that word generally is. Russia is going to be quasi-dominant in the NIS space no matter what; the test of its maturity is its willingness to liquidate gradually and constructively the distortions remaining from the old empire. The deviations from such maturity are going to be perceived -- accurately -- as brusque pressure, and branded -- inaccurately -- "imperialism", far more than would a policy based on a fairminded sense of post-imperial or neo-imperial responsibility.

I think this subordination of policy to polemic has something to do with resentment of Western critics and an almost obsessive focus on the polemic against them. Perhaps it could be traced further back to the inferiority complex so often attributed to the Russian elite vis-a-vis the West.

It isn't only in Russia that this sort of thing happens. The problem is that it happens particularly often there, and affects all kinds of major policies - not just gas wars, but also the diplomatic protection Russia gives to some of the worst tyrannies in the world. Sudan and Burma are recent examples. And its protection for and business deals with some of the most dangerous proliferators; Iran is a deadly case. I get the impression this produces a fleeting moral high, a sense of sticking it to the West and taking action in a triumphal march along the line of the latest polemic against the West (or action on an ephemeral "Russian national interest" that can be somehow attached to the polemic). But it is really worth the costs to major permanent Russian interests?

The same sort of thing -- whipping policy recommendations back and forth with the swings of the tail ends of polemics -- happens all around the world among disaffected elites suffering from an inferiority complex or resentment of those in power. It happens particularly often in the media. Many writers live in a world of their own polemics, at the expense of their ability to think about how best to address the larger range of public interests. This is particularly true of adversarial journalists who often seem to live by polemics against the powers that be. The problem is that the Russian elite as a whole acts as a disaffected elite on the world scale.

The main policy elites in most countries do a lot better than their disaffected sub-elites. And Russia, if it is ever to become a serious, reliable partner of other countries, will have to do better. I think it must be particularly obvious that it will have to do a lot better than let its policies get wrapped around the tails of anti-Western polemics, if it is the advanced Western countries that it wants and needs to have as a partner. Which need was the purpose of Dr. Ivanenko's comment, and the purpose of my response thereto, before we got into this pleasant diversion.