Russian communism lost its war against the rest of the world, not because of its moral bankruptcy but because of financial and economic insolvency. The superpower that was the Soviet Union collapsed because it simply could no longer afford to sustain the great lie that it rivaled and surpassed the productive, innovative and vastly richer United States.
After the inebriate farce of the Yelstin years, sterner minds in the Kremlin have made a new analysis. It was clear that Russia could no longer afford to try and strut alongside the Americans as a superpower. The only way that former position could ever be retrieved was by building up the same sort of economic powerhouse. On paper Russia has a similar range of natural resources as the United States. Infrastructure may be run down and investment sorely needed, but the rebuilding of the Russian economy is itself proving a source of economic vitality.
However the perceived wisdom, spewed out in dozens of patronizing reports by US and European experts, was that the new Russia lacked both the capital and the managerial skills to build a vibrant economic system. Reading between the lines, there were also frequent allusions to the fact that the Russians were a very different sort of people from the “can do”, go-getting Americans. If Russians ever had any entrepreneurial get up and go, the reports suggested, it had got up and gone in 1917 when the dead hand of state control gripped the economy.
What do such pundits think now, as Russian businessmen crisscross the Middle East doing deals for major construction and infrastructure projects? How does the notion of primitive Russian business practices square up to the fact that before Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, Russian oil companies had a direct interest in a third of Iraqi oil and gas production, a stake which is hardly likely to be relinquished now?
The Russians represent an alluring alternative. For the Middle East in particular, here is a country with a significant technological skills base and a hunger for business, which is not fatally compromised by slavish support for the Zionist cause and Israeli aggression. Some of the management in top companies may be suspect because of their links to organized crime and the old communist regime. Corruption may still be a major problem. However, such a situation obtained 100 years ago, when America was still building its own economic wealth. Indeed given the way in which Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, looks set to mop up much of the Iraqi rebuilding work, who is to say that America has changed much from the days of its free-wheeling robber barons?
Following the occupation of Iraq, Washington cannot afford to ignore President Putin’s Russia in the same way that it is clearly planning to ignore the French government of President Jacques Chirac. George W. Bush values his relationship with a “tamed” Russia and its president. In keeping that warm link, Bush will doubtless open the way for Russian as well as US business in Iraq and beyond. From little business acorns, great commercial oaks can grow, especially in a political climate where the rest of the world no longer wants to do deals with overmighty Americans. Washington may well therefore have a new war on its hands, but a war in which ink flows onto contracts rather than blood into sand.
