Russia’s Venezuela gambit a test for US

Russia announced on Monday it was sending a nuclear cruiser and other warships and planes for joint exercises with Venezuela, the first such manoeuvres in the US vicinity since the Cold War.

While the move’s importance is seen as more symbolic than military, it does nothing to ease the growing tension between the two former Cold War foes, says Thomas Gomart of the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations.

That tension ratcheted up significantly when Russian troops poured into Georgia last month to repel an attack by the Georgian army aimed at retaking the breakaway region of South Ossetia. They have remained deep inside Georgian territory in what Moscow calls “security zones.” On Monday however, after talks with a European Union delegation led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed to pull troops back from Georgia apart from South Ossetia and another breakaway region, Abkhazia.

Moscow may have won the military battle, said Gomart. But he added: “The Russians emerged isolated from the Georgian crisis, having received the support of only a few countries such as Venezuela and Syria.”

Moscow could nevertheless convert these diplomatic links into closer military cooperation, he said. Syria, he noted, had offered Russia the use of the Soviet-era naval supply base in its port of Tartus. Up to now Russia had contented itself with selling arms, notably fighter-bombers, to Caracas, said Gomart.

But the announcement of the Caribbean manoeuvres seemed to be both an overt challenge to US power and a gesture of support to the radical policies of Latin American leaders such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Moscow has already denounced Washington for sending its Mediterranean naval flagship, the USS Mount Whitney, to bring aid to the key Georgian Black Sea port of Poti where Russian troops have been patrolling.

For British Colonel Christopher Langton, senior fellow for conflict at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, these latest developments did not herald the beginning of a second Cold War.

“The context of course is different, there isn’t per se an ideological struggle here, it’s more a struggle for influence which is fuelled by Russia’s desire to regain what it sees as lost pride,” he told AFP.

“It’s machoistic politics, its done to annoy the United States... cementing Russian influence in the back yard of the United States in the same way that it sees the United States cementing its own influence in the backyard of Russia, i.e. Georgia, Ukraine.”

Although both former Soviet republics have been seeking to join US-dominated Nato neither has yet been offered candidacy. But US Vice President Dick Cheney suggested Monday that it was a question of when, not if — largely because of the recent crisis in Georgia.

Also Monday, US President George W Bush froze a US-Russian civilian nuclear pact in protest at Moscow’s military moves in Georgia. For seasoned observers of the diplomatic scene however, increasing friction between the former Cold War antagonists, came as no surprise.

In early 2007 Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was Russian president at the time, decried the “unipolar world” where the United States “would themselves like to rule all of humanity.”

That speech was seen as a mission statement to regain the global influence that Russia lost with the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Ironically it was the overthrow of communism that helped it regain that influence, with the considerable help of its massive oil and gas reserves.

Russia has since felt increasingly threatened: by the EU’s eastwards expansion; by the US missile shield plans for eastern Europe; by Georgia and Ukraine’s Nato and EU aspirations; and by the West’s readiness to recognise the independence of the former Serbian region of Kosovo. For Joseph Henrotin, researcher at the French international risk analysis and prediction centre (CAPRI), this was as much about Russia’s relations with Nato as with the US.

But this new base in Latin America also allowed Russia to expand the “great game” with America, already very visible in central Asia and the Caucasus, he added.

This article originally published by The News International