Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shades who wrote (66984)	7/30/2007 9:27:27 PM
From: skinowski	Respond to of 116555

Things change fast. A couple of years of getting paid big bucks for oil - and Russia is once again a world player. The article below mentions some of their concerns. The proposed bases in Czech republic and in Poland - along with Western "incursions" in Georgia and Ukraine - seem to be among the big ones. ----------- U.S. Reaps Whirlwind of Resurgent Russiahttp://mnweekly.rian.ru/comment/20070726/55263952.html 26/07/2007 WASHINGTON - Barely three weeks have passed since the United States and Russia angled to patch up their differences at a ‘lobster summit' and already new strains have exploded into the open. Since the meeting between presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, Russia has suspended a treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe while it is now locked in a diplomatic standoff with staunch U.S. ally Britain. And Moscow has issued a veiled threat to deploy rockets on the European Union's border in response to U.S. missile defense plans, throwing oil on the fire of the biggest escalation in tensions since the Cold War. For all the bonhomie he likes to project into his encounters with Putin, Bush stands accused of missing serial opportunities for better relations by unnecessarily antagonizing Russia. "The Bush administration could have pursued quite similar policies yet not ended up with so much friction had its diplomacy been more tactful," Georgetown University professor of international relations Charles Kupchan said. "The Russians in many respects feel slighted, as if they have been ignored by the United States," said Kupchan, who headed national security affairs for Europe in Bill Clinton's White House. Putin was brushed aside when he rallied to the U.S. cause after the September 11 attacks of 2001, pundits say. Weeks after those strikes, Bush announced that the United States was abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The US withdrawal from the ABM pact, a cornerstone of attempts to prevent the Cold War from turning hot, allowed Bush to press ahead with his anti-missile defense scheme - a decision that is now coming home to roost. "It's been a propaganda windfall for Putin," commented F. Stephen Larrabee, a Russia expert at the RAND Corp. security consultancy. "The administration totally mishandled missile defense from the beginning and now they've backed themselves into a corner," he said. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in on an acrimonious dispute between Russia and Britain over the murder of an ex-KGB agent in London that has resulted in tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats. Rice asked Russia to honor Britain's request to extradite the chief suspect over the radioactive poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, but insisted that the West did not now face a new Cold War with Moscow. "Russia is not the Soviet Union," she told Britain's Sky News television. But there are also "some very, very deep troubles," Rice said, detailing setbacks to democracy in Russia and concerns that Putin's government is using its vast energy resources "somehow as a political tool." "Relations have been on a downward trajectory for at least a year and the summit simply didn't do anything about it," Larrabee said. Flushed with cash from booming oil prices, Putin's government is seen as reasserting a muscular foreign policy after the ignominies of Russia's economic collapse in the 1990s. Unable to put up much resistance to NATO's eastwards expansion, Russia is now full of sound and fury over what it sees as Western incursions into its own backyard in places such as Georgia and Ukraine. On hot-button issues like prospective independence for the Serbian province of Kosovo, Putin has stood firm against a US administration that looks enfeebled diplomatically as it battles to hold the line in Iraq. "The most delicate issues on the table now are Kosovo and Iran, where Russian intransigence could be quite consequential," Kupchan said. A potential successor to Putin in elections next March, first deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov, accuses the United States of building a "new Berlin wall" with its planned missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. "The Russian electoral calendar is playing a big role. Ivanov is a moderate nationalist very much in Putin's own mould. Both are appealing to Russian nationalism by standing tough against the West," Larrabee said. By Jitendra Joshi Agence France Presse RELATED ARTICLES 26/07/2007 Russia Stands Firm 26/07/2007 10 Reasons Why Russia Can’t Trust Uncle Sam 05/07/2007 The Maine Course 12/07/2007 Does the U.S. Have Its Priorities Right?