Caught between the two

In recent months the relations between the USA and Russia, or rather between Bush and Putin, who are both firing their parting shots before leaving office next year, are not showing any signs of improvement. We have general accusations of lack of democracy on the one hand, and unilateralism or even of imperialism on the other. Then there are the tensions within the countries bordering on Russia, from Ukraine to Georgia, where two opposing camps, a pro-Western party on the one hand, and a pro-Russian party on the other, have been firmly entrenched, each ready to take to the streets at any moment on the slightest provocation. Without forgetting Kosovo and Serbia. But the most burning issue, which has even raised the spectre of a possible return of the Cold War, and even of the resumption of the arms race between East and West, is undoubtedly the Western decision to install ten anti-missile defence shields in Poland and a linked radar system in the Czech Republic. The Russians have always considered any anti-missile defensive system as an offensive system. Therefore Putin has declared that the anti-missile bases placed close to the Russian frontier are a direct threat against his country. In fact the anti-missile bases planned in Poland and the Czech Republic are presented as a defence against a potential threat coming from Iran. Hitherto only the cost of this programme, aimed at the in-flight intercepting of a hostile missile, is certain: nine billion dollars per year. And on the other hand many people doubt that Iran will be capable of building a long-range missile capable of reaching Europe before 2015. And in recent weeks Teheran seems more willing to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (AIEA) and have its nuclear development programmes subjected to international controls.Russia, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, has had to submit to the humiliation of seeing its former allies of the defunct Warsaw Pact become members of NATO, to impotently stand by and watch the building of American bases in Romania and Bulgaria and see NATO warplanes patrol the air space of the Baltic States that formed an integral part of the Soviet Union until fifteen years ago. The Russian President, as an alternative to the deployment of missiles in Poland and the radar in the Czech Republic, has proposed the use of Azerbajan or even Moscow as bases. This proposal tends to insert Russia too in the same network that ought to defend America. If it is not a propaganda-inspired diversion, the idea of such a cooperation between the two superpowers, even if it has passed virtually unobserved, could come close in originality and importance to the Baruch Plan that sixty years ago was the only real, albeit unfortunate, proposal that could have stopped the birth of the arms race and the Cold War. Russia today is perhaps not able economically to sustain a new arms race with the USA. Nonetheless the fact remains that the last thing we need today is a new arms race, also because unfortunately we already have it. Over the last ten years military expenditure in the world has grown by almost 40%. In 2006 the figure rose to 1,204 billion, of which almost a quarter covered by the USA. That’s a figure equivalent to 184 dollars for every inhabitants of the planet. For the two billion people who have to live on less than two dollars per day this statistic is equivalent to half of their annual income. Meanwhile, the overall total of aid to development amounts to just over 100 billion dollars per year, i.e. just over a tenth of the military expenditures of the planet. Will Europe say something to the two superpowers?