Russia Must End Suicidal Cooperation With NATO To Its South
RT
August 1, 2012
NATO’s business strategy: No need to attack, just buy them up (Op-Ed)
Veronika Krasheninnikova
Director General of the Institute for Foreign Policy Research and Initiatives in Moscow
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In plain language, the NDN and MSR are pursuing a number of important goals at once: providing access and building infrastructure for exporting Central Asia’s and Afghanistan’s tremendous natural recourses; privatizing natural resources for the benefit of US corporations and local comprador business; consolidating the pro-NATO lobby in the governments and business communities of transit countries; conducting “democratization” at will and establishing pro-NATO, anti-Russian regimes in the region; and creating a pretext to set up military bases “to protect the infrastructure.” On the strategic level, NDN and MSR redirect natural resources away from China to Pakistan and India, help create a regional entity alternative to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and effectively invalidate the Eurasian Union project initiated by Russia and Kazakhstan.
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On August 1, the first NATO military facility in Russia is launching its operations. The site, designed to assist NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, is the latest component in the alliance’s strategy of tightening its grip on Central Asia.
While the first military supplies to Afghanistan began traversing Russia in 2009, opening the “Transatlantic” alliance’s first military facility in the middle of the Eurasian continent, on the Volga river, is a tremendous achievement for NATO – and an even bigger defeat for Russia.
The Ulyanovsk facility represents a new stage for the US in building a military, political, social, and economic fabric of support inside Russia.
It brings into Russia itself the military network that the US and NATO have set up in Central Asian states. In this region, Washington’s approach differs from the one used in Libya and Syria: instead of conquering with tanks and fighter jets, the US and NATO are now buying their way into target countries, and it proves to be a much more efficient method of conquest.
NATO has offered economic arguments: it’s business for your companies, revenues for your budget, jobs for your people.
There are two major projects that affect US and NATO penetration into the Eurasian heartland: the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) and the Modern Silk Road (MSR).
The Northern Distribution Network – NATO’s Ulyanovsk “transit center” being a part of it – is a military supply route connecting venomously anti-Russian NATO member Latvia and aspirant Georgia with Afghanistan via Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus region. Designed by the US Transportation Command, US Central Command, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC, NDN, according to the authors, serves the military’s immediate needs, but also offers “a unique opportunity for Washington to further longer-term strategic goals.”
This “series of commercially-based logistical arrangements” will “increase in America’s presence,” help the United States “further its interests within transit states” and is “paired with renewed, long-term US engagement.”
The Modern Silk Road, as conceived by the same strategists, is a giant network of diverse communication lines, from transportation to electricity to telecommunications to pipelines that would run “from Hamburg to Hanoi, Mumbai to Morocco.”
This network will intentionally bypass Russia, to “prevent any other country from establishing a monopoly on energy resources or energy transport infrastructure in the countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus,” as stated by the Silk Road Strategy Act of 2006. In fact, both NDN and MSR are part of the counterinsurgency agenda, says a December 2009 CSIS planning document entitled “The Northern Distribution Network and the Modern Silk Road: Planning for Afghanistan’s Future.”
Local transportation companies are actively involved as contractors.
According to Director of the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program Andrew Kuchins, Russian companies became “deeply dependent” on this business – which brings them more than $1 billion in revenue a year. Additionally, the planners envisage increasing the local procurement of supplies for Afghanistan, “to generate goodwill among NDN participants” and give them “a greater stake in the NDN’s continued operation.” While for Russia these revenues are minor, for Central Asian states NATO bribes are a noticeable addition to government and private budgets, and are as addictive as narcotics.
In plain language, the NDN and MSR are pursuing a number of important goals at once: providing access and building infrastructure for exporting Central Asia’s and Afghanistan’s tremendous natural recourses; privatizing natural resources for the benefit of US corporations and local comprador business; consolidating the pro-NATO lobby in the governments and business communities of transit countries; conducting “democratization” at will and establishing pro-NATO, anti-Russian regimes in the region; and creating a pretext to set up military bases “to protect the infrastructure.” On the strategic level, NDN and MSR redirect natural resources away from China to Pakistan and India, help create a regional entity alternative to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and effectively invalidate the Eurasian Union project initiated by Russia and Kazakhstan.
By providing Ulyanovsk facilities to NATO and running NATO supply routes, Russia and Central Asian countries are collaborating with the enemy to help it achieve all of the above against their own interests. As the Mackinder Heartland theory goes, he who controls the Heartland – the central part of the Eurasian continent – controls the world. Today, Central Asia, together with Afghanistan, is the key platform to project the threat against the three major competitors: in order of urgency – Iran, Russia, China.
Russia must end its suicidal cooperation with NATO’s buildup on its southern military front. Instead, Russia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, together with Iran, China and other countries in the region must launch alternative infrastructure development programs, building up on the Soviet legacy, updated with new projects.
Imo, RT has adopted an eerily inept (R.I.P. Gore Vidal) perspective on this story.
Ulyanovsk is a Russian base surrounded by … Russia (not US-NATO troops). Access was granted as a ‘diplomatic’ Russian gesture of good faith (and some useful pocket money) to help US-NATO withdraw from AfPak. The departure and arrival routes could be more accurately defined as “tunnels” than “corridors” and the agreement would allow immediate termination of the arrangement by Russia in the event of a breach or abuse of any of its undertakings by NATO.
It’s unnecessarily and superfluously alarmist.
Russia: Get NATO OUT, the SOONER, the BETTER!
Under the mask of friendship and “cooperation” NATO spies, excuse me, gathers intelligence for future expressions of “friendly intentions” towards Russia through sudden military attack, like Barbarossa!
Spying and eaves-dropping are two-way streets, in every country, all over the world.
As far as we can tell, Russia has resisted the temptation to arm the Afghan resistance with hi-tech weaponry such as MANPADS. The most likely explanation for this display of apparent self-control is that Russia knows just how costly it was for Russia to fight a losing battle (on its doorstep) in Afghanistan,
America is on the other side of the world and even more corrupt than Russia was, So the daily cost to the US economy would be at least 4 times the daily cost to Russia. The Americans have been in AfPak for 11 years and the US economy has been in urgent need of intensive care for more than two years. It’s safe to assume that Russia will offer the US as much support as necessary to encourage it to stay in AfPak as long as it wishes to do so.
NATO=New American Terrorist Organization.
This “multilateral” organization is a glorified American hand puppet that the USA uses to advance its imperial ambitions around the planet.
The American Empire is instrinsically aggressive and expansitionist–though the USA disguises its true nature behind nationalist deceptions about (lol) freedom and democracy.
Aggression is how the USA was spawned as a nation, after all, with its theft and continuing occupation of Native Indian and Mexican lands. This was America’s Manifest Destiny.
Today, America advances its Manifest Destiny to colonize the entire world and make it safe–not for freedom–but American capitalism and the obscene American way of life and standard of living.
American apologists simply refuse to admit what the USA really stands for, as they laughably attempt to pyschologically project the USA’s predatory instincts onto foreign targets of America’s unlimited hatred.
And make no mistake, America’s capitalist system is increasingly desperate as it implodes from Wall Street-led financial criminality, the magnitude of which has been predictably minimized or hidden by an equally criminal American “free press.”
Militarism is the ONLY way that the American Empire can sustain itself economically. Indeed, America’s primary export to the world is death, with Predator Drone attacks occuring on a routine basis. .
That is why the USA is on a war rampage, attacking nations like Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iran, and ultimately Eurasia.
America’s goal is world domination–which includes US seizure and control of energy resources, econoimc transport routes, and maintaining American Dollar Imperialism (or what is euphemistically the US Dollar as the world’s only “reserve currency”).
Russia (and China) must understand that there is no appeasing America.
The United States of America must be exposed for the global threat that it is–and then utterly defeated.