When Americans vote in the November general election, they will have to wait another two months before the new president takes office. It means two months of nongovernment, although many would argue that the Bush team is already a lame duck administration. Most other countries manage to change administrations after an election in a matter of days, if not hours.
It is a mystery why Russia would want to imitate this anachronistic practice. It seems ages since Dmitry Medvedev was elected as Russian president — the election was just over three months ago — but it was only just over a month ago that he took office and outgoing President Vladimir Putin became prime minister. Not that the intervening two months were the sort of lame-duck presidency that will occur at the end of the year in the White House. That is not thanks to the Russian system. It is simply because Medvedev is Putin’s apparatchik. The change of personnel at the top in the Kremlin has been seamless and it is still Putin in charge. But that is for now.
One day, in the not too distant future, Russian politics will be much more open and more combative; elections will result in governments with very different agendas succeeding one another. Lame-duck administrations will be the inevitable result and Russians will begin to question the usefulness of a three-month transfer.
That is for the future. For the moment, the delay appears increasingly as one of the few political planks that the US and Russia have left in common.
Putin’s presidency has been marked by an ever-widening gulf between the two — fueled in particular by the Kremlin’s opposition to the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the US nuclear shield program. It has raised, along with George Bush’s confrontationist polices, the specter of a resurgent Cold War.
It had been suggested that Dmitry Medvedev would be more acceptable to the West than his predecessor and that he might oversee a lessening of the growing tensions between Washington and Moscow. That view has to be re-examined in the light of what has actually happened since his installation. Two days after being sworn in, he presided over a military parade at which, for the first time since the demise of the Soviet Union, saw tanks, missiles and other weapons rolling through Red Square. To coincide with this, two US military attaches were expelled from Russia. Since then, the Russian Duma has ratified a mutual defense agreement with Tajikistan and announced it will expand its military presence in Kyrgyzstan — moves which show Moscow out to reassert its influence over Central Asia.
It is not quite a return to the Cold War, but it cannot be ruled out.
Here in the Middle East such a prospect may seem irrelevant. It is not. The Middle East, because of its strategic location, its resources and its conflicts, would be the first place to be drawn into any new Cold War. In only for that reason, we must hope that Russia and America can work out a more collaborative and less prickly relationship in future.
