Moscow plays its cards strategically

Part 1 from The Emerging Russian giant, a series by F. William Engdahl

The new Russia is gaining in influence through a series of strategic moves revolving around its geopolitical assets in energy – most notably its oil and natural gas. It’s doing so by shrewdly taking advantage of the strategic follies and major political blunders of Washington. The new Russia also realizes that if it does not act decisively, it soon will be encircled and trumped by a military rival, the US. The battle, largely unspoken, is the highest stakes battle in world politics today. Iran and Syria are seen by Washington strategists as mere steps to this great Russian End Game.
For obvious military and political reasons, Washington could not admit openly that its strategic focus, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, had been the dismemberment or deconstruction of Russia, and gaining effective control of its huge oil and gas resources, the “ultimate prize”. The Russian Bear still had formidable military means, however dilapidated, and she still had nuclear teeth.

The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown signaled a decisive turn by the Putin government toward rebuilding Russia and erecting strategic defenses from the foreign onslaught led by Cheney and friend Prime Minster Tony Blair in Britain. It took place in the context of a brazen US grab for Iraq in 2003 and of a unilateral Bush administration announcement that the US was abrogating its solemn treaty obligations with Russia under their earlier Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in order to go ahead with development of US missile defenses, an act which could only be viewed in Moscow as a hostile act aimed at her security.

By 2003, indeed, it took little strategic military acumen to realize that the Pentagon hawks and their allies in the military industry and Big Oil had a vision of a United States unfettered by international agreements and acting unilaterally in its own best interests, as defined, of course, by the hawks. Their recommendations were published by one of the many Washington hawk conservative think tanks.

Asia Times