International Affairs No. 5, 2017 – Table of Contents

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief, International Affairs: Sergey Alexeyevich, the anti-Russia legislation that was approved by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Donald Trump has been actively discussed recently. Does the fact that this act as such was signed mean the onset of a prolonged period of U.S. political and economic confrontation with our country or is this document, which limits President Trump’s powers, more of a factor in the domestic political struggle in the U.S.?

S. Ryabkov: Both. What President Trump said, as he signed the bill into law, with regard to his rejection of the attempts by both houses of Congress to encroach on the president’s constitutional powers speaks for itself. …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief, International Affairs: Yury Konstantinovich, in its short-term forecast for the energy market in May, the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy, comes to the conclusion that oil production will grow faster than demand and the oil market will be oversupplied in the foreseeable future. Is this forecast correct?

At present, the extraction of primary resources is well-developed but consumption has declined for various reasons. As a result, prices have fallen. In my opinion, during the decade, the maximum price will be $55. This is what is in store for us. At the same time, naturally, all global factors – politics, the economy and regional problems – will affect oil production levels and oil prices. …

THE MAY 25, 2017 MEETING of NATO heads of state and government was from the start seen as a key political event, being a venue of U.S. President Donald Trump’s first European visit. During this meeting, the new conditions for the transatlantic treaty, both within the alliance itself and in the broader context of American-European relations, had to be determined. The Trump-NATO topic was a hot issue even during the new president’s electoral campaign, once he had declared the alliance to be a useless and outdated organization. NATO members had wanted to meet with the new U.S. president earlier, but this turned out to be unrealistic in light of their uncoordinated positions and the need for preliminary political and diplomatic consensus. Trump’s stop-off in Saudi Arabia, where he signed a $110 billion arms deal, and his subsequent visits to Israel and the Vatican before engaging in direct dialogue with the United States’ main strategic partners, served only to increase the level of concern and areas of tension within NATO.

America First …

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, a fairly stable growth trend in trade between Russia and the European Union has come to an end. Since 2013, the volume of trade between Russia and the EU has undergone an unprecedented decline, although there has been some growth in 2017. For several reasons, the EU has not been very concerned about this decrease.

The Russian Factor in the EU’s External Trade Policy …

IN JUNE 2016, Eurosceptics won the referendum on the UK’s membership in the European Union. In March 2017, UK Prime Minister Theresa May notified Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, that Great Britain intended to leave the EU; this triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The British government needed nine months to formulate its vision of the future relations with the EU and outline the parameters of withdrawal. British proposals, however, multiplied questions rather than provided answers. The EU leaders, on the other hand, have their own ideas about the conditions, on which the UK will be allowed to quit. The sides’ initial positions differ to the extent that the road toward a compromise looks difficult, not to say tortuous.

The British Position …

ON THE EVE of the presidential election in the United States, Foreign Policy ran an extremely interesting article “Why Chinese Elites Endorse Hillary Clinton,”¹ in which the author argued that, despite the fairly harsh statements of Donald Trump as presidential candidate, as president he would demonstrate more lenience in his relations with China than President Hillary Clinton and that, on the other hand, as president he might contribute to global instability that, in the final analysis, would do no good to China.

No wonder “conversations over the past six months with roughly half-a-dozen mid-ranking and high-ranking Chinese officials … show that many in the Chinese political class grudgingly support Clinton – precisely because they believe a Trump presidency would be a disaster for the United States. …

BIOLOGICAL (bacteriological) weapons were the first category of weapons of mass destruction to come under a universal international legal ban. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) came into force back in 1975.*

However, the BWC contains so many moot points that no one would call it an effective and comprehensive accord. Some countries insist on keeping the BWC in its current form. They conduct numerous tests of biological weapons in seeking to create their own guarantees of protection from this category of arms (the scale of such tests is not completely clear).¹ The main problem is that these clumsy attempts pose a permanent threat to the life and health of people nearly all over the world. …

SOFT POWER has been a familiar phrase in Russian political science discourse for more than ten years. In this period, the soft power notion has become one of the most popular themes in Russian political science, firmly established itself in Russian scholarly literature, and has been recorded in two versions of the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation and in other fundamental statements on Russian foreign policy.^1,2,3 The term “soft power,” which has been borrowed from works by Joseph S. Nye,⁴ is not a phrase that is fashionable but meaningless. It is a concept that provides a new angle of looking at many aspects of international relations.^5,6,7 There also are studies on the use of soft power in international business, for instance on the efficient use of it by transnational corporations to strengthen their positions.⁸

The practical application of soft power has been growing in scale at a pace much faster than progress in theoretical studies of the concept. It is a case where theory is trying to catch up with practice, generalizing from and systematizing experience accumulated through various instances of use of soft power. Nye himself said that soft power is “a descriptive rather than a normative concept.”⁹ …

THE YEAR 2017 has brought an aggravation of the North Korean nuclear problem. Donald Trump’s assumption of office as U.S. president coincided in time with a new stage of the North Korean nuclear missile program. Kim Jong-il, the deceased father of current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, apparently had assumed that the hypothetical possibility of retaliatory nuclear strikes against the United States and its allies was a sufficient guarantee of North Korea’s security and so was quite satisfied with his country’s relatively small nuclear deterrence arsenal – just about a dozen warheads – and didn’t worry too much about means of their delivery. Kim Jong-un has gone further. He has ordered making more nuclear warheads and effective delivery means – intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). This essentially means that North Korea aspires to become a full-scale nuclear power with the potential to survive a nuclear attack and inflict unacceptable damage on its adversary, the United States.

It is unclear when these ambitions can materialize. However, in his 2017 New Year’s address, Kim announced that North Korea was soon going to test an ICBM that could reach the mainland United States. This suggests that serious progress might be made within the next few years, and that in the foreseeable future North Korea might become one of the United States’ main potential adversaries along after Russia and China, possessing weapons that would be able to wipe out Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, and possibly Washington and New York as well. Of course, Britain and France would be able to do the same, but they are allies of the United States. …

LAST SPRING, an event in the Arab world shocked everyone. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) withdrew their ambassadors from Doha, the capital of Qatar, their ally. One of the smallest members of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) was accused of supporting “anyone threatening the security and stability of the GCC whether as groups or individuals – via direct security work or through political influence … and hostile media.”

On June 5, 2017, the KSA, UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt officially discontinued diplomatic relations and all types of communication with Qatar. Later, they were joined by the Maldives, Mauritius and Mauretania. Jordan and Djibouti lowered the level of their diplomatic representations in Doha. Several African countries – Senegal, Niger and Chad – recalled their ambassadors. Kuwait and Oman, both GCC members, stayed away from the action. …

THERE IS A RANGE OF FACTORS behind the foreign policies of Islamic countries, which include their geopolitical status, their international political and economic relations, their ideologies, and the interests of their ruling classes. Islam is one of these factors. Remarkably, while we don’t use the phrase “European Christian civilization” to describe Europe, a relatively small continent, we do use the phrase “Arab-Muslim civilization” in reference to Muslim countries with the implication that Islam is a factor in their foreign as well as their home policies.

Many Islamic theologians advocate pan-Arabism or pan-Turkism, movements that are among factors behind Muslim countries’ foreign policies, although they have roller-coaster effects. …

NEARLY 32 YEARS AGO, the International Affairs journal carried my article under the same title. These were different times; the international situation and the political priorities of the local peoples were likewise different. Certain problems are still on the agenda; they have not lost their urgency yet the approaches to their settlement and the conditions, in which they should be settled, radically differ from what we had 30 or even 15 years ago.

The majority of problems the peoples of the Middle East have been coping with in the last few decades are rooted in the world problems created by the political principles of the West, globalization, domination of the United States and its allies in many countries of Western Europe, Africa and Latin America, and continued neo-colonialist policies of the West worldwide whenever it is possible. …

THE DEATH of Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor and an outstanding politician, reminded us of a role that can be played in history by an individual who is a strategic thinker and patient tactician, can listen to and hear partners and opponents alike, and is open to compromise if the latter is important for the survival of civilization. Alarming developments in Europe and other parts of the world show that some Western leaders’ presumption of ideological superiority, political arrogance, disdain for the interests of other countries, and neglect for human life may undermine the system of international law, and sow mistrust and estrangement between nations. Kohl is justly considered one of the most prominent figures of the German political elite of the 1970s to the 1990s. In the radically changing postwar Europe, he showed himself to be a world-scale politician, doing important work for the political stability of the continent and for bringing the Cold War to an end, and advocating various forms of cooperation with the former Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.

Kohl’s rich experience as German chancellor, a position he held from 1982 to 1998, and as leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party he headed from 1973 to 1998, proves that the legacy of a country’s leader should be mainly evaluated by whether the nation has achieved decent living standards, holds leading positions in European and global politics, and enjoys reliable guarantees of peace and security. In other words, by whether this leader has served the nation well. …

THE SNAP GENERAL ELECTION of June 8, 2017, the third in the last two years, produced a “hung” parliament and can be described as a turning point in the country’s political history. The Tories with 318 seats came closest to parliamentary majority of 326 seats; Labour trailed behind with 262 seats, followed by the Scottish National Party (35), Liberal-Democrats (12), the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from Northern Ireland (10), Plaid Cymru (4), and the Green Party (1). The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) headed before the referendum by Nigel Farage was left in the cold. Prime Minister Theresa May, who preserved her post, announced that she would put together a minority government with the support of the Democratic Unionists, the only party that had agreed to side with the Tories on the legislation and budget issues.

The snap election, Mrs. May’s effort to consolidate the nation in the face of the “crucial Brexit talks,” ended in a failure. Her party did better than the Labour where the number of seats and the share of votes were concerned yet the victory looked more like a defeat. According to sociological polls, at the start of the election campaign, Conservatives outstripped Labour, their main rival, by 20 points. The results were much sadder: the Tories lost their absolute majority while Labour came dangerously close to Tories by the share of votes cast for them – 40:42.¹ …

IN JUNE 2017, it was 25 years since the tragedy in Bendery, a Moldovan city whose population had rejected the plans of Chisinau nationalists to prohibit them from using Russian at work and in everyday life and from teaching Russian to their children. Attempts to reach a compromise on the “right to use one’s own language” had failed. Moldova split apart and the conflict turned into an armed confrontation. On March 2, 1992, Moldovan troops, using armored vehicles and artillery fire and supported by Romanian volunteers, launched a full-scale military operation against Transnistria (Pridnestrovie). On June 19, 1992, almost 700 civilians lost their lives as a result of a massive artillery strike on the city of Bendery; more than 1300 people were wounded, and 100 thousand became refugees. The city was saved from destruction by the arrival of the Russian 14th Army. At a meeting in Moscow on July 21, 1992, the presidents of Russia and the Republic of Moldova, in the presence of the president of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR), signed an Agreement on the Principles of a Peaceful Settlement of the Armed Conflict in the Pridnestrovian Region of the Republic of Moldova.¹

As of today, the peacekeeping mission established under that agreement and composed of contingents from Russia, the PMR and the Republic of Moldova has fulfilled its main task: that of ensuring peace in the region. But the conflict remains unresolved even today. The two parts of a once united country – the Republic of Moldova and the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic – are living separately, having chosen their own paths of development. …

ALBANIA played a significant role in the Balkans hundreds of years ago, and is increasingly influential in Balkan politics today.

Back in the 15th century, the great Albanian warrior George Castriot, who is also known as Skanderbeg1 (a corruption of the name Iskender Bey given to him by the Turks as a respectful comparison to Alexander the Great), single-handedly fought Ottoman expansion in the Balkans for decades. The pope welcomed Skanderbeg in his residence, and Rembrandt considered it an honor to paint a portrait of him. The West, with its profuse espousal of Christian values, promised help to Albania, but, as usual, failed to keep its word. Incidentally, Skanderbeg was portrayed in the Soviet-Albanian film The Great Warrior Skanderbeg, which came out in 1953 and was directed by Sergey Yutkevich, a Soviet director and screenwriter. The movie was a remarkable event, and what made it so was not only the cinema debut of brilliant Soviet actor Yury Yakovlev but also the directing prize received from the Commission Supérieure Technique of the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. In 2012, the movie was restored to mark the centenary of Albania’s independence. It remains the world’s best-known film about Albania. …

AFTER the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) took power for a second time in 2007 and its leader, Daniel Ortega, again became president of Nicaragua, Russia’s relations with that country have become closer and, moreover, acquired a new quality, developing into full-scale strategic partnership. Today, Nicaragua is Russia’s main partner and ally in Central America. Russian presence in Nicaragua takes a diversity of forms – political contacts, economic relations, including trade and investment, cultural, scientific and technological cooperation. There are numerous reasons for this, primarily the two nations’ desire to build equal, mutually respectful, and mutually beneficial cooperation in bilateral and multilateral formats, their deep involvement in regional political and economic processes, and their active roles in the world arena, where they hold identical or similar views on practically all key issues.

Our countries have built up rich positive experience of mutual relations. The historic traditions of friendship between them and the fraternal assistance given by our country to the people of Nicaragua when the first FSLN government was in office between 1979 and 1990 are of special significance. It is not only to ties between their governments that the two nations owe their close relationship but also to diverse informal personal contacts between Russians and Nicaraguans. All of this forms a solid basis for soft power policies in Russian-Nicaraguan relations. …

ON MAY 6, 2017, the House of European History (HEH)¹ opened in the Belgian capital to much fanfare. It is nothing less than a landmark project of the European Union for promoting the history of Eurointegration ideas and EU European values. More than ten years were needed to bring the project to fruition under the leadership of Hans-Gert Pöttering (Germany), President of the European Parliament from 2007 to 2009.²

Due to a great many problems associated mainly with the project’s financing and the acquisition of museum showpieces,* the museum’s opening to the general public was delayed from 2014, the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. The planned 2014 opening was also prevented by the inevitable criticism leveled by opponents of this ambitious undertaking.³ Information surfaced in the mass media of countries neighboring the European Union that Eurointegrators wished to create an ideological placebo that would essentially give the visitor a facile artificial impression of European history, concocted with the help of state-of-the-art informational technologies – something on the order of a standard textbook on European history.⁴** An attempt was made to calm critics: It was said that the unprecedented cost of the project would be jus- …

The Russian system of trunk oil pipelines is connected to the national oil pipeline systems of our foreign partners, and the tasks before the sector are also common to all transporters. The International Association of Oil Transporters, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, was created to coordinate the efforts of market participants to ensure the effective development of their oil transport systems and strengthen the stability of international oil transportation. With purely voluntary membership, the geographic scope of the association’s activity is constantly expanding; at present, major Eurasian oil pipeline operators are among its members.

Mikhail Margelov, Vice President, PAO Transneft, transneft.transneft.ru …

NATIONAL INTERESTS as a subject that had gone out of fashion in the age of triumphant globalization suddenly reappeared in the center of public discourse stirred up by the prolonged crisis of the Western liberal megaproject. In turned out that the “end of history” that Francis Fukuyama naively presented as a triumph of the America-centrist world was nothing more than another set of worldwide contradictions and a painful transfer to a new, polycentric world order. Back in 2013, one of the authors of The National Interest, an influential American journal, put the meaning of the approaching epoch into a nutshell as “The Age of Nationalism.”¹

The Lion and the Fox …

THE MASS REPRISALS of 1937-1938 are among the most painful pages of the domestic history of the 20th century. Although 80 years have passed since the tragic events of the Great Terror, the memory of them is still alive. This fall, a monument to victims of political repression, the Wall of Grief, will be erected in Moscow. A memorial will also appear in the Kuropaty forest in Belarus. “There will be a memorial there. It will be a place to pay tribute to the people who were killed there,” Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said in March 2017, stressing that the memorial is a way of putting an end to the politicization of the tragic past.¹

It is impossible to disagree with this approach, especially considering that the graves of victims of Soviet executions in Kuropaty are shrouded in a veil of myths and speculation that the Belarussian “opposition” uses for unseemly political purposes. This concerns primarily the number of people buried in the forest on the northeastern outskirts of Minsk. The Belarussian “opposition” claims that as many as 250,000 people executed by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) were buried in Kuropaty. However, is that really so? Let us try to get to the bottom of this. …

WE ARE PLEASED to present to the readers of International Affairs the reviews of two analytical reports by the Institute of International Studies (IIS) of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations (MGIMO). The authors of the first report, “A Mid-Term Forecast for the Development of the Situation in the Middle East and North Africa,”* are A.V. Fedorchenko, director of the IIS Center for Middle East Studies, and A.V. Krylov, its leading research associate. The second report, “The Future Through the Eyes of U.S. Intelligence: An Analytical Review of the National Intelligence Council Report ‘Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress’,”** is written by N.P. Gribin, director of the IIS Center for Northern European and Baltic Studies.

THE AUTHORS of the report “A Mid-Term Forecast for the Development of the Situation in the Middle East and North Africa” note that, during the decades of the productive, substantive and multidimensional dialogue with the majority of countries in the Middle and Near …

TODAY, Latvia (officially Latvijas Republika or the Republic of Latvia¹) is at the second stage of its state independence that began in 1991* even if Latvian politicians prefer different dates. They rely, in particular, on the decision of the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian SSR of 1990. In fact, the Latvian statehood was internationally recognized after the Soviet Union had granted Latvia independence, following which the Republic of Latvia became member of the UN on September 17, 1991.²

Today, Latvian officials insist that in 1991 Latvia did not acquire independence: its independence was restored, which makes Latvia, as we know it today, the successor of the country that existed in 1918-1940. From the legal point of view, in both cases Latvia became independent thanks to Russia’s goodwill. …