This week the so-called Group of Seven, essentially the major capitalist countries, subsequently known between 1998 and 2014 as the Group of Eight when post-communist Russia joined, met again in Germany this week. But as is well known, the exclusion of Russia from the summit speaks to the continuing controversy over its intervention in Ukraine, following the removal of the last President of Ukraine, held to be pro-Russian in his orientation, and his replacement by current President Poroshenko, acceptable to the Western, or NATO powers.
The conference was originally scheduled to deal with a central issue now preoccupying the Western powers, this being the state of the global economy, including the economic situation in Greece, along with more long-term issues like climate change. In addition there has been concern over the American determination to establish two major trade pacts, a Trans-Atlantic Partnership with the European states, and a Trans-Pacific Partnership including Japan in particular.
But the atmosphere at the G7 summit almost gave the impression of a return to Cold War geopolitical patterns, as the NATO powers sought to pressure Russia, through indicating a preparedness to strengthen economic sanctions. These are intended to create substantial dissatisfaction with President Putin and his administration, and so induce the President to come to terms with Western objectives vis-à-vis Ukraine.
There can be little doubt that the current sanctions, introduced after Russia’s overt grant of support to anti-Western, and therefore potentially separatist, forces in the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Lukansk, have had an effect on the Russian economy. But they have clearly been insufficient to induce President Putin to change course in respect of his government’s objective which, it would appear, has a certain support in Russia itself. For that country has really not got over the speed and determination with which the Western Europeans sought to consolidate pro-Western sentiment and strength in Ukraine, as a prelude to its eventual entry into the EU.
It is a fact that the Russians have had a long temperamental and sentimental attachment to Ukraine, a part of Russia once governed by the subsequent head of the Soviet Russian state, Nikita Krushchev; and there would seem to be little doubt that Putin himself, an intelligence operative in East Germany during the existence of the Soviet system, has seemed to be temperamentally supportive of maintaining areas like the Ukraine as, at minimum, under the geopolitical sphere of influence of Russia.
What therefore really seems to be a Russian de facto intervention of its forces into the geographically proximate areas of Ukraine, would appear to have awakened a semblance of Cold War sentiment in the Western world, and has now given rise to a frigid atmosphere between the traditional so-called West and East, this time however, with the intermediate countries between the two spheres – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the smaller states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania − lined up, on this occasion, with the Western European cum North Atlantic powers.
Yet, as the situation has become increasingly frigid between the two camps, there seems little doubt that the sentiment of the Obama administration is one that wishes to be careful in not allowing the mutual hostility and diplomatic distancing between Russia and the North Atlantic powers to reach a stage where it cannot be easily reversed.
For one thing, both Russia and the US are at a stage of diplomatic engagement on other issues of importance to both of them. The United States is, undoubtedly, anxious to ensure the continuing engagement of Russia in the current nuclear arms negotiations with Iran. In that connection it is hardly fortuitous that just prior to the Group of Seven meeting, Vice President Biden found himself in Russia, in discussions on the situation relating to current negotiations on arriving at a solution to Western-Iranian disagreements over Iran’s ability to manufacture and possess nuclear capabilities.
In this, the US has had the continuing support of Russia which would appear to have a certain influence in Iran, a positioning which, no doubt, the Iranians feel diplomatically beneficial to themselves.
Secondly, the United States is clearly continuing its close diplomatic engagement with Russia over the situation in the Middle East, knowing full well its inability to contain the raging conflict in Syria; while in Iraq, its capacity to exert autonomous influence in that divided country is no longer what it was.
President Putin, on the other hand, will be well aware that the Soviet economy now requires continuing engagement with the Western European economies, Germany in particular; so that the pursuance of a prolonged anti-Western posture over the Ukraine cannot be in his country’s favour. And he will be aware that this is so even as Russia seeks to engage the major Asian countries, including working on a new set of economic arrangements with China in particular, as that country seeks to exert its economic and diplomatic range in the Asian and Pacific spheres.
So while there can be little doubt that even as the atmosphere of a new Cold War looms over the West and Russian spheres, both parties almost destined to be joined in a common G8 as the Asian and Pacific arenas reorganize their own economic geopolitical arenas, the inclination to negotiation over the changing environment of the once-dominated and voiceless Eastern Europe will survive.
With that in mind, our part of the world need not rush to a partisanship that seems like a longlasting confrontation, but instead recognize that this apparent new Cold War revival will not outlast the economic and geopolitical changes stretching from the old Eastern Europe way into the Russian boundaries with the increasingly dynamic economies of Asia.
