US-Russia race over nuke upgradation

Ibne Siraj :
A new opinion polls’ report published in the Washington Post shows that most Americans don’t think the United States has an obligation to intervene in Crimea’s recent joining with Russia. The OBS survey found that 61 percent of the respondents said the US does not have a responsibility to get involved in the spat between Russia and Ukraine. Crimea and the donbas will never return to Kiev as most people there have made it clear that they never want to return to Ukraine. With Kiev’s shelling of civilians and violence against them in the east, separatists have said the government has forever lost the trust of people in the region and will continue their push for independence and closer ties with Russia. Also, with proposals to limit the Russian in schools, toppling of Lenin statues and suppression of the pro-Russian Ukrainians within the government held areas in the east have caused even more tensions. Besides, with the rise of the far right (Right sector, ultra nationalists with neo-nazis tendencies unfortunately) will complicate the situation even more.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown a great deal of restraint in the face of provocations by the United States and the NATO directly at the Russian borders, but a conflict between the two greatest nuclear powers remains a very grim perspective. Dr. Helen Caldicott, an author and nuclear disarmament advocate, said, “Putin, I think he is being very restrained at the moment. US attempts to create an enemy image around Putin are totally inappropriate.” While many analysts have compared the current relations between Russia and the United States to the days of the Cold War, there has been little attention paid to the possible threat of a nuclear exchange, says Caldicott, a respected anti-nuclear weapons activist and lobbyist in the 1980s. “Of the world’s 16,300 nuclear weapons, Russia and America own 94 percent,” she said arguing that NATO expansion to Russia’s borders was “very, very dangerous.” Russian leaders see the protests in Ukraine as part of a Western plot. For them, color revolutions are not manifestations of popular will but a new form of warfare invented by Western governments seeking to remove the independently minded national governments.
They have argued that this is part of a global strategy to force foreign values on a range of nations in the world that refuse to accept the US hegemony, and that Russia was a particular target of this strategy. This perspective, discussed extensively by top Russian officials at the Moscow Conference on International Security in May, appears to be at the core of Russia’s new national security strategy. Although Western readers may find the lumping together of uprisings as disparate as those in Serbia in 2000, Syria in 2011 and Venezuela in 2014 hard to swallow. From the Russian point of view they all share the common thread of occurring in countries that had governments opposed to the United States. Although uprisings in countries whose governments were tied more closely to the United States, such as Kyrgyzstan in 2010 and Egypt and Bahrain in 2011, are harder to explain, such inconsistencies appear not to harm Russia. In this context, Russia’s current policy in Ukraine has little to do with geopolitical calculations about Ukraine’s ties with the EU versus the Eurasian Union or even with potential Ukrainian NATO membership. Instead, the main goal is to strengthen the Putin regime domestically.
This goal would explain the focus on building an anti-Ukrainian and anti-American domestic media narrative from an early stage in the Ukraine conflict. US policymaking toward Russia, however, has been driven by a perception that Russian actions, as guided by Putin, are empire-focused and therefore cannot be dealt with through strategies other than containment. There is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) undercurrent that the crisis in US-Russia relations will inevitably continue unless and until Putin is removed from his current position. This inability of many Western commentators and some policymakers to see the world from the Russian point of view damages the ability of the US government to adopt a Russia policy that allows for a reasonable response to Russian actions. Caldicott called for nuclear disarmament and a greater effort to educate the public and younger generations of the risks posed by nuclear weapons. “A nuclear war will be the end of everything and we have known that forever,” she stressed. Currently both Russia and the United States are engaged in upgrading their nuclear arsenals, which have been largely degraded since the end of the Cold War. According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, the United States is expected to spend about $355 billion over the next ten years to upgrade and modernize the nuclear triad. In Russia, defense officials and publications have announced the goal of upgrading and modernizing 98 percent of the strategic missile force by 2021.
The serious problems of the internal development which have poured out in the civil war, seen nowadays in Ukraine and serious complications of a situation round this country, will in fact inevitably lead to discussions of political problems within the frame of forum Asia-Europe at its summit in near future. Instead, the majority participants of the forum Asia-Europe will be really interested to have fruitful talks around trade and investment, integration and logistic subjects in their transcontinental measurement. It will be logical first to look at how in practice will work the agreement signed in June 2014 in association of Ukraine with the European Union and to wait for a formal joining of Ukraine with the EU, and thereafter solving all complex questions with the participation of this country in the upcoming ?S?? meet. The two-day Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) will be held in Milan, Italy on October 16-17. ASEM members are working with the objectives of strengthening the relationship between the two regions in a spirit of mutual respect and equal partnership on political, economic and cultural issues. The ASEM summit is being held every second year in Asia and Europe alternatively since its formation in 1996 in Bangkok. This year the summit will be held with the theme “Responsible Partnership for Sustainable Growth and Security.”
It is impossible to dismiss that circumstance that many international organisations, for example NATO, do not consider cooperation possibility with those states, which as Ukraine today, have internal conflicts and territorial disputes. Moreover, the economy of Ukraine is in deep crisis and is burdened by unreasonable military expenses. Presence of the similar participant in ?S?? will be inevitable to set an adverse turn in the opposite side from discussions of the economic block of questions, actual for the Asian participants of a forum. Acceptance of Ukraine with deep and sharp internal conflict having the international measurement, as a member of the forum Asia-Europe will inevitably introduce a powerful confrontational element in the activity of ?S?? and will render counterproductive impact on realisation of the basic purposes of the organisation. It is obvious that the reason of such extreme support of Ukraine from the Europeans is a result of unprecedented and politically motivated pressure in the anti-Russian way upon Europe from the US to which the European leaders cannot effectively resist.

(Ibne Siraj is a regular contributor to The New Nation)